Graeme Davidson speaks

I recently went to the 2 Michelin star restaurant, L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon, and had a pretty rubbish meal.   The food in itself was alright, but not worth the money I paid for it.  However, the things that concerned me the most were:

(i) The waiter left me with an empty glass of wine throughout my main course (they keep the bottle and are meant to top you up).  I had ordered duck which would have perfectly complemented some of the red wine I had purchased.  I even stopped eating and made various futile attempts at catching his eye to be refilled, but this did not happen. In the end, I ate my duck as a cold dish without wine.  I believe he may have been distracted by some regulars that were dining and he paid no attention to us whatsoever.

(ii) We first asked for our bill 7:50pm.  We did not receive it until 8:26pm, which I find to be utterly unacceptable. I actually asked 5 times before someone brought it over.  When I have to be somewhere else, I do not wish to be made to wait for this period of time.  Again, our waiter seemed to be more concerned about talking to the regulars.

(iii) On top of all this we had a service charge of 12.5% added to our bill!  For what service exactly?  I am confused by this paradox.

So, I made a complaint at the time which seemed to be shrugged at and I have now written a letter of complaint and sent it too.

It’s not like we were eating like this:

So, watch out for Joel Robuchon’s restaurant in Covent Garden as if you are not a regular and not eating the £165 set menu then you may be in for a rough time.  I’ll update to this post to let you know any outcome of the letter of complaint I sent.

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 19th, 2010 at 9:38 pm and is filed under Play. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.