The Grapevine Turkish Restaurant — Restaurant in North Hertfordshire

Small, friendly and consistently delicious: The grapevine remains the best restaurant in Letchworth overall. Best visited during the week when starter and main can be had for a fixed price. The chicken shish and lamb shish are top tier. Owner cannot do enough for you and service is excellent. Starter portion size has reduced recently but desert options have expanded and I've never left hungry. Wine is predominately Turkish and Italian coming in around £20 a bottle and often very good. Beer is the easy drinking Turkish efes that should appeal to everyone, if that's your bag.

My old review for reference submitted when first opened: Friendly Turkish restaurant with good deals when eating during the week. Many very good and interesting dishes. Shish is fantastic, the kofte not so but still OK. The fajita is the best I've tasted. I have had to scrape an insanely minty sauce off that overpowered one of the specials but the kitchen hits the mark often enough for me to forgive the colgate sauce on that occasion. Only baklava is served for desert but it's so nice it...

I'd been wanting to go here for a while and unfortunately I am slightly disappointed in my experience. For me, Turkish Foo should take you on a flavourful journey, unfortunately I found the good quite ordinary. I had a selection of starters - the vine leaves (cold dish), a garlic sausage in a bell pepper and tomato sauce (hot dish), an aubergine dish and lambs liver. I enjoyed the sausage, the wrapped vine leaves were rather uneventful, the aubergine dish was a soggy salsa (best way to describe it), decent flavour, but not what I was expecting and the lambs liver was incredibly dry and quite bland. For mains I had the mixed grill (lamb cutlet, chicken shish, lamb shish and a kofta) with bulgar. The lamb cutlet was dry and bland, the chicken pieces dry, but a decent flavour, honestly the best part was the koftas, good flavour. For me personally, I would not go back as a first instinct, which is a pity, as I had such high expectations from hearing...

Just went out for a mid-week meal, been meaning to try the Grapevine for a while. Glad I did. Superb food, well cooked, well presented, packed with flavour. Fair wine list. Good, prompt, friendly service. Fair prices (two-course with one glass of wine £20-£25) per head.

Environment is clean, nicely decorated, well lit, warm. Large windows look onto Leys Avenue. Some seating outside. Letchworth keeps its town quite tidy and well lit, a pleasant location for this restaurant (especially on a warm early autumn evening).

Sep2018.

Re-visited Jul2022: the above review is still the case, with a mild increase in prices.

Re-visited Apr2025: still superb, excellent quality food,...