The Red Pepper restaurant (Ristorante & Pizzeria) — Restaurant in London

I live in the neighborhood and eat regularly at The Red Pepper. But not anymore. The fact that staff (which has churned) doesn’t recognize me is immaterial to this post. It’s the appalling service that has forced me to voice my disdain at a place that otherwise serves a mean vegetarian pizza (without cheese, I might add....).

But when the maitre’d requires that a party of two seated must order at least two dishes, even its a tasteless leaf-laden green salad (they might as well serve leaves from the communal garden....), something is fundamentally wrong and either the owners take notice or this place is going to fold.

We ordered two beers and a vegetarian pizza. Not because we wanted to save money (The silly waiter did not realize that I always overindulge in wine and we would have knocked back a bottle at the very minimum). But because my compadre had eaten. We walked out, and the maitre’d, who obviously has no clue about what hospitality means, whisked away the cutlery and napkins from the table, adding insult to injury.... or my hunger.

There is a part of me that feels terrible because we could easily have ordered that silly salad. But then again, there’s a part of me that this is bad business acumen and plainly abominable service. We probably would have spent £100 between the two of us, most of it on drinks, probably more.

What Red Pepper has is now an irate ex-patron posting a scathing review and unlikely to ever return. Now I only have to explain this to my 13-year old daughter, who genuinely believes that the Red Pepper pizza is the best on earth....

Avoid this place. Ordered a med-rare steak which came in slices, each slice was a different level ranging from rare to well-done. When we asked for a sauce to combat the dryness of the steak, we were, with a rather-rude attitude from the server!! offered only two choices “we have mustard” so it was basically “take-it-or-leave-it”. My wife couldn’t eat this £33 plate so we had to swap our plates and I had it instead whilst she had the pasta. We had asked for additional olives whilst waiting for our mains. They wanted £5 for half a dozen olives. No comment! As for the supposedly “home-made” tagliolini with prawns: what was delivered was a disgrace. It looked and tasted like nothing more than Tesco’s spaghetti with 4 prawns and a slither of tomato sauce which could have been tomato purée from a tube by its looks and taste. Half a bottle of bog standard Montepulciano cost us £29 and the waitress knew nothing. Nadia. Zilch ! About the wines on the list. Horribly disappointed as there is so much choice in Maida Vale & Bayswater and some fabulous nearby restaurants that we passed over to try this place. The bill arrived and it showed £99 for what I could have cooked at home for around £15 including a full bottle of Montepulciano. I insisted the £11 service charge was removed - and it was done without fuss thankfullly. This place is a racket and could very well be Nepalese posing as Italian....

This restaurant sure loves to shame its patrons! On more than one occasion we were berated for “not ordering enough”. (Latest: 2 pizzas for 3 people with drinks + more to come as we like to order more as we go on but were told to leave -it was also a quiet weekday- and Previously: ordered a pizza for two people as my partner wasn’t hungry, and when the restaurant was COMPLETELY empty, the waitress shamed us for sitting at a precious window side table when and how dare we do that. Again. The restaurant was completely empty. We were the only people there and I had asked if we could sit at that table beforehand.)

Please keep in mind that at neither of these times the restaurant was full - there were plenty of tables and no line of eager customers at the door either. This is not a 3 Michelin star restaurant with a long waitlist or anything- this is just a neighborhood pizzeria. It is really baffling how little these people understand hospitality and how the service industry works. I can’t blame their chef as they have decent pizzas but the way they treat their customers is simply APPALLING and I don’t think anyone will have any appetite left after being so egregiously...