Forte Kitchen — Restaurant in Winchester

We hosted our wedding reception for 40 people at Forte Kitchen and every element of the experience was excellent. We were looking for a private event space to hire after spending a couple of months talking to hotels about the various packages they offered. Some comparisons of the Hotel package experience to the Forte Kitchen experience:

Price - comparing apples to apples as best we can, the hotel packages would have cost us on average £9-12k for the number of people we were hosting, feeding and drinking, which would have been the cheapest package options too. We spent about £4k at Forte for the food, drink and use of the White and Black rooms between 2pm to midnight. We brought our own arrival drinks (prosecco and Pimms) for about £80 corkage and put £1.5k behind the bar which didn't all get used. In total, Forte was about one third of the cost compared to the next best hotel option and for all of the following benefits. (N.b. the whole wedding experience cost us £8.5k with quite minimal skimping).

Quality - hotels were offering us a single food and drink package for everyone, which means everyone bar the vege's would have needed to enjoy the same starter, mains, dessert and beer or wine. Very restricted, no flexibility and cooked in bulk. What we got with Forte was a dedicated sit down with Ollie (owner and head chef) to go through the whole menu, priced to our needs, select three options for starters, mains and desserts each, and taste a few before deciding. The food was spectacular and it was obvious that Ollie is very passionate about his craft. The apple tart was so beautifully presented as a rose of apple shavings - amazing. The rooms are decorated in a contemporary modern style that looks great and needs no further additions except whatever you want to use for table decorations.

Communication - Agne in particular was excellent in talking to us during the planning and during the event itself. She really had a handle on how these events should run and helped us make decisions that saw the success of the event. We were also allowed to bring our dog to the event (as he was our ring bearer) and Forte was more than happy to accommodate this, though I would add that this only worked well because the dog was well behaved.

Forte Kitchen did such an excellent job that I've been compelled to encourage anyone looking to host a wedding reception on a budget to do what we've done and enjoy all of the benefits...

They serve food that's gone off! The service is lack luster and slow. The prices are obscene - your get charged crazy amounts for something as simple as a tiny bottle of diet Coke. Finally, when I ordered fish and chips, I was stunned by their meanness when I was served a small piece from a fillet of fish. The batter was also repulsively thin and grease soaked - that grease had been used an awfully long time before it was my turn to get some food cooked in it. More importantly, the fish was very obviously off. I naturally told them this, and they whisked the fish away for analysis in the kitchen. The word came back that the fish was 'over-cooked but not off'. That made it alright, did it? No, it didn't. They offered to give me another piece of fish - presumably also off, tiny and encased in a thin layer of rancid oil soaked and flavoured batter. However, my partner found the enthusiastically priced burger he was served so totally devoid of flavour that he found a few mouthfuls enough, the service was so slow we'd probably still be there at dinner and if they couldn't tell off fish from overcooked fish (and I hate both styles of ruined fish), we decided to accept their offer of taking it off our bill and got the hell out of their never to return.

Avoid...

Went to the Hatch over the weekend and as soon as my partner and I walked in we were told to just sit down somewhere, we did and the lady began to clean up the mess on the table but only took half of it away 🫤 we had plates and cups and a messy table still there which i had to move. then after about 10 minutes still waiting i asked for a menu as no one has come over.

Again no one came over so i went back up to the till to ask how we order and they said its table service, i ordered at the till as they haven’t came over yet. Our food arrived 20 mins later which was great! but we still haven’t got our drinks yet or even tap water. My partner had to go up twice to the bar to ask about my drinks after 30 minutes waiting, the staff obviously had forgotten about us which made the whole experience very stressful and made us feel bad to keep asking like we were in the way. As well having to grab our own utensils.

Eventually we got our drinks after the food was getting cold. We were told the drinks were taken off the tab but it didn’t change the fact we felt ignored and unwanted.

Usually I don’t write bad reviews but we’re paying for a nice weekend lunch to be ignored and...