All reader reviews by mattsay

1 Lombard Street (Brasserie)

I had lunch here this week and it was superb.

A working lunch without much time, and just had a main course - the friccasee of seafood with a risotto. Absolutely delicious pieces of fish - tuna, swordfish, seabass, red mullet and monkfish. Risotto was very good too, though could have been wetter.

Service was good, they need to improve on the bread portion, even though it was tasty. All in all, no complaints.

Friday, November 27, 2009
Overall rating
Food 8 | Service 7 | Atmosphere 7 | Value for money 7

Viva Verdi

An extremely disappointing evening here this week.

While the staff were generally very friendly, they were very hit and miss. It took ages to get our drinks - a bottle of wine, nothing complicated. We had to ask three times, and the first waitress spent 10 minutes cleaning cutlery instead of bringing it.

The menu was really short and unimaginative - pasta with pesto, lasagne and ravioli in tomato sauce. Nothing you couldn't find in Tesco's chiller cabinet. I was hungry and wanted 3 of the boards of meat and cheese. Tiny. £9 for three slices of spianata, a couple of slices of prosciutto crudo, and three little pieces of pecorino. And they didn't have any real bread, so I had to have the flatbread. I would have been hungry within 30 minutes but my friends gave me some of their dinner.

My companion's lasagne looked like it had been mashed up for a baby. Another friend had the cotoletta milanese, which tasted of nothing like veal, more like tasteless chicken. It came with aubergines which were extremely vinegary.

The wine list was ok and reasonably priced.

Very very disappointing and I won't be going back.

Friday, October 30, 2009
Overall rating
Food 2 | Service 2 | Atmosphere 5 | Value for money 3