Great location, beautiful building, cool interior design. Lots of light, 2 glass walls, great hanging heaps of dried stuff along the bar. The staff were relatively friendly have definitely been treated worse.
I thought the place was a massive potential health hazard, food poisoning hovering at the edge of perception. As you come in the door all the salads are laid out, uncovered directly in the doorway. This means that every passing draught coats the salads as well as the coughs and splutters and general conversational comments of every individual who enters – YUK!
The meat looked great but I didn't have any and I didn't touch the salad they eventually brought having lied about the ingredients – more on that later.
The food is served on wooden platters - see first sentence previous paragraph – You can't put wood in the dish washer. Do they separate the meat boards from the salad boards? How do they clean them and what with? Where and how are they stored?
Service?
Well the waiters are all very pretty, great eye candy and on the surface very friendly, smiley, helpful. But I found the service all in all dire.
I asked if they had any salads that didn’t contain dairy, fruit or vinegar. I was told that the ‘Tabbouleh with cannelini beans’ fitted the criteria. She lied.
First we ordered drinks and then decided that we wanted something to eat. My companion had ordered tea and said she would like her tea after the food. It got to the point where we felt obligated to take the tea after they asked four times if we were ‘ready for it now?’. I did not like any of the food we ordered and the three people who asked my companion how she was finding the food studiously avoided asking me the same question.
They also made no enquiry when I asked (and had to ask twice) for them to take the (full bowl of) soup away. Just to rub in the shitty service when we asked for the bill the young woman ignored us and went to have a conversation for about 15 minutes with the spunky waiter who had just come on duty. When we reminded her she was more irritated (‘Oh yes, I forgot’) than apologetic.
Food
Actually the tabbouleh looked pretty good it had the right parsley to couscous ratio - very rare. However there were about three cannelini beans in my portion and to add insult to injury effing oodles of pomegranate in fact there was as much pink in the salad as green - YAK!
The soup on offer (the only other vegetarian dish with no dairy, fruit or vinegar) was carrot and coriander. The soup was way too salty in my opinion and there was no coriander in the soup itself only a garnish of fresh floating on top which pretty much disappeared in terms of flavour when stirred in.
The wine was OK and it looked like a cool place to hang.
