Banana Tree Reigate — Restaurant in Reigate and Banstead

If I had to sum this restaurant up in one word, it would be ‘disappointing’ to be honest.

I visited with 3 friends on their opening Friday night. We were greeted by the front of house team member, who was supposedly rushed off his feet and was told by his boss to keep customers waiting outside to give out that popularity and oversubscribed feeling.

We were made to wait for about 15 minutes as we were informed that a table was almost ready, as customers were just paying their bill. Considering we hadn’t booked, we were understanding and happy to wait. We were right at the front of the queue and next to be seated.

We were given menus whilst waiting, which I still can’t figure out whether it was a nice gesture to keep us enlightened, or whether the managers wanted us to place our orders as soon as we sat down.

We were then seated right next to the door, at a table that had been empty since our arrival. During the entirety of our meal the restaurant was only at about 70% capacity at its busiest, so clearly not as popular as the bookings team may have initially thought!

Even though the waitress was lovely and welcoming, she clearly hadn’t tried any of the food/drinks as she couldn’t answer any of our enquiries or recommend any specific items. Not very inspiring or assuring for a newly opened restaurant, but hey ho at least she was honest!

Most of our party found the food to be incredibly rich, and possibly too flavoursome. I like a lot of flavour but the chicken dumplings, covered in a garlic and herb sauce, were saturated in dark soy, making them way too salty and almost inedible. My ramen arrived almost 10 minutes after my other guest’s food had arrived and we had to chase this as well as other drinks that we’d ordered.

I also felt bad for the couple sat next to us who had been seated long before us and ordered prior to us too, yet all of their food and drinks (bar a bottle of wine) arrived after all of our food & drink. A lot more communication needed between the kitchen and waiters/runners, I think.

After we’d finished our main course, a very rude member of staff (with star tattoos on his left bicep), who I can only assume to be the restaurant manager, due to his demeanour, told one of my friends, very abruptly, not to stretch his leg out as “it [was] going to cause an accident”. In that case, why would you sit someone who is close to 7 foot tall right next to the front door? More training needed there I think, in both professionalism and seating arrangements for customer benefits.

Finally, when we had received our bill, we were shocked that a very large (optional) 12.5% tip had automatically been added, amounting to more than £20. Our bill totalled to almost £200 because of this, and we really can’t see how we got our money’s worth for 2 courses each and a 241 cocktail each.

Overall, a highly disappointing experience and I wouldn’t be surprised if this chain eventually goes the same way as Cafe Rouge. If you want pan-Asian food in Reigate for a fraction of the price, with much better taste, service, and of course the cost, head down Bell Street to Wagamama. We definitely won’t be coming back...

We had high hopes for this restaurant as it had such a great choice for vegan food. We were pleasently surprised when we arrived and the resturant looked great. We sat outside and began choosing our food. This is when everything started to go wrong. It took the waitress far to long to come to our table to order drinks, by that point we were ready to choose drinks, starters and mains. from then it took 40 minutes for our starters to come (the restaurant was basically empty) so we asked for our mains to be brought straight away. Our mains came out less than 5 mnutes later so it was obvious our starters had not been put through on time. The food was ok, nothing really stuck out for us. What was dissapointing is that the massaman curry was very watery and the chicken used was skin on thigh meat. This was not mentioned in the menu and had this been known this dish would not have beeen ordered. The vegan noodles again were ok. Nothing special and very generic. We ordered pudding while still eating as we knew that the service was so slow and by this point we had already been there for 1.5 hours. 15-20 minutes has passed and plated had been cleared. Once again we had the chase where the food was. only then 2 minutes later for the waitress to come back and tell us there was no vanilla ice cream for the banana fritters. Surely this should have been mentioned at the time of ordering not after waiting too long for a dester and also chasing it up. All 4 of us had had enough and told the server to cancel the deserts and we wanted the bill to leave. All in all a very disappointing visit with extremely slow service and...

I found my visit quite disappointing, the expectations I had set for myself when looking at the menu; the food and drinks looked amazing, however my opinion was set back by poor customer communication, the waiters were rarely seen? Also I could not understand what could be happening, as I could not see any service given to other customers also. (I do understand that if during my visit something more important was happening- even so it took several attempts to even bring out water.) the starters I must say were satisfactory , and set my expectations for the main. One thing I must mention is that the mains did take abnormally long to come out. What made this wait longer was the lack of communication about this by the workers. I would estimate that my wait from after finishing starters to the main was about 30-40 minutes. Regarding the main (ramen) I was quite dissapointed to find that the food seemed abnormally colder than I thought, despite the fact that the broth was warm- the other parts of the food: edamame, eggs and gyoza (I mention these in particular because these stood out the most) where abnormally solid and quite cold- it made it all quite unpleasant. And the broth was incredibly salty- and became unpleasant rather quickly (bear in mind I usually demolish my broth at Wagamamas so this comes from a broth enthusiast 🤑) sorry for the long review- I just felt like the food could have been so much better if some extra considerations were taken. (And if service was faster!) I do recommend being more vocal...