Frankie’s at Criterion

Went on a Wednesday evening pre-theatre as a group of 6 on a business outing. Lovely venue but weird and mostly unfriendly service and would recommend spending your money elsewhere.

We told several people we had a 730 theatre to go to, but they took ages to take our order. And the main courses arrived about 720 so we had to gobble up our food. The food wasn't bad when it did arrive, but portions were small - I had John Dory with samphire for a £5 supplement on the set menu, it was tasty but gone very quickly - perhaps fortunate given the time before the show started, but my colleague joked he'd have to stop off at KFC on the way home!

The service was a bit random, we were given nice bread and replenished. But the waitress who took our drinks order missed out two of us.

However what really got our goat was that we'd been sent a menu via a booking company (Encore) and when we got there the menu was completely different. Fair enough but there was no vegetarian option, and one of our party was on a strict diet and needed to eat chicken breast. She was made to pay £17.50 for the pleasure of this, gobbling it down in the 5 minutes before it arrived. The manageress was unfriendly and difficult and claimed it wasn't their fault we'd been told a different menu.

A lesson to us all that in recesssion times you should be good to your customers, I won't go back and don't recommend it to anyone - there are so many good and friendly restaurants - why bother with this one.
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3 Overall rating
Food 5 | Service 1 | Atmosphere 5 | Value for money 2
Wednesday, March 25, 2009

This place used to be good, but we went again last week and it was pretty dire. The venue is beautiful and the staff were delightful and helpful, but the food was very disappointing. Edible but uninspired and totally overpriced. The place was less than half full.
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OrangeTreeLover - View all reviews by this user
4 Overall rating
Food 3 | Service 6 | Atmosphere 6 | Value for money 0
Saturday, February 21, 2009