Mowgli Street Food Sheffield — Restaurant in Sheffield

What an expensive disappointment. I'm fully expecting to get the standard response to bad reviews (see screenshot ) that the food is 'not always to everyone's personal preference' but this was just poor and not as described on the self-satisfied menu. Portions were tiny but we didn't finish them and went away hungry. The choice for vegetarians was poor.

Why was it so bad? Mowgli Paneer was about 5 cubes of unfried cheese drowned in a thick sour sauce (no sign of the peas, tomato or spinach the menu promised - 'maybe they're blended in', one of our party said hopefully). Temple Dahl was bearable but salty, slightly underdone and not made with red lentils as advertised. Holy chow was a dry mush of vegetables in a slightly stale loaf. The marinade on the Monkey Wrap chicken was all on the soggy skin. Bhel Puri was dry - where was the dressing? - with a couple of blobs of what might have been herbs. Rice was just plain with a couple of black cardamom. Roti were cold. Everything was under-spiced and very sweet. We didn't complain - we couldn't quite believe what we were being served and the staff looked too fed up already. Only the yoghurt chat bombs were good, although a bit sweet.

The atmosphere wasn't vastly better - we paid over £100 (with no alcohol) to be sat in a really noisy spot with people pushing past and the music was too loud to have a conversation easily. And yet we were told on booking that they wanted the table back after 90 minutes even though it wasn't busy. It's not exactly welcoming. You get the impression that this restaurant thinks very highly of itself.

TLDR: Food is overpriced, badly cooked and boring. There are loads of good places to eat Indian food, but this isn't one of them. I could have asked a group of first year students to cook us all a curry for a tenner and they'd have done...

I made a complaint about the Sheffield branch of Mowgli, received an apology but no sort of compensation or remedy to our experience.

I will leave my complaint down below -

Firstly, the service we received was awful, the staff were very rude and abrupt with us and told us there was no space for us when the restaurant was empty, we then booked a slot online for 10 minutes time and they told us they could not find our booking for 20 minutes until then finally stating they found it and hadn’t refreshed their page.

We asked for water for our table over ten times during the course of our dinner and was told they would bring it over right away in which they deliberately did not the entire 10 times until I went up and got it myself. We were given dishes we did not order and whilst only asking for one rice and one roti our server brought over and charged us for 2 each! Even though we only asked for one.

Our food when it came was placed on the table with no comments from the waiters and they did not even communicate with us.We were nothing but lovely to the staff but did not even receive a smile out of them once. We finally received our bill and was handed a bill of £200 when our bill was only £70 and after waiting 20 minutes for a waiter they finally realised did not apologise and just said ‘oh’. When we paid them we received no thank you all we received was ‘is this the money?’ And upon leaving not even a thank you we were completely not acknowledged. We even paid the service charge which I now regret doing so. Will not...

We has such a lovely experience, and it was a great place to celebrate my birthday. Firstly, I will be honest and say that we didn't love ALL the food, and we didn't finish everything. But, I think part of the charm of this place is that there are so many things to try that you may not be familiar with. While not all the food suited our rather 'vanilla' tastes, we were able to order a really nice, experimental table of food that gave us the opportunity to try some new flavours. It is a tapas style restaurant, which we didn't know going in, but because of this it's really easy to pick several new flavours/combinations to try.

The best part of the experience was the service. We didn't catch the name of our waitress (a bubbly blonde girl wearing a Tiffany necklace), but she was an angel. So friendly and welcoming, and when I happened to mention it was my birthday, she went out of her way to get one of our desserts comped as a special treat :) The desserts are amazing, by the way. We are actually tempted to come back just to get a table of all the desserts haha.

I think it's a really fun, experimental place to visit. I would not go in with the expectation that you're going to like everything as it is a different style of food, but there's so many dishes that you'll find something you love and get to try some new things. My boyfriend is one of the fussiest eaters around, and even he found some dishes he loved. It was a lovely experience, and hopefully we will...