Food average, atmosphere lacking, service abysmal - lost its touch? - Artusi London - Buy Reservations
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🤢 2/5 - Food average, atmosphere lacking, service abysmal - lost its touch?
By 👻 @henrytilley, 08/19/2021 3:00 am
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I came in a few weeks ago to this restaurant on the back of some great reviews from a few friends from a few years back. I knew of the restaurant and remembered it had had some good reviews when it first opened in 2014/15.
I am a local and eat out a lot around Peckham. It was my friends 25th birthday and I wanted to treat him to something special.
Unfortunately I was highly disappointed by this experience. Hospitality has been through a hard time recently with many staff shortages and staff changes. I rarely complain because most restaurants at least have a foundational basic of standards but this seemed lacking of any. Here I can walk you through my experience.
Firstly for a Friday night you would have expected a bit more atmosphere - instead the decor made it look like an office space within a restaurant. The lights also quite bright for a Friday evening. For a restaurant for a high price point you would expect a real napkin as opposed to a paper napkin. These are small things but everything adds to the experience.
If you are going to justify this price point the food has to be great and the service great. If it falls short of this you'd like to expect they were at least trying to rectify this. This time the restaurant delivered neither great food or great service. I am an assistant manager in a casual fine dining restaurant just for context.
The sit down experience started off well - we had two glasses of red wine. The house and another, although the house was subpar we decided to order a bottle of the other as it was delicious. Possibly third down the list around £35 - £40 (acceptable price point for what it was and delicious).
The issues started once we started to order. I asked the waiter for a recommendation and he pointed at menu but couldn't justify his selection as didn't know the dish. This didn't fill me with confidence. He didn't know much of the menu at all so couldn't justify anything. The manager seemed to be missing in action so I'm not sure he could rely on someone else to explain everything.
Once we had ordered our hot starter (some sort of cheese in a coned lightbulb shape with flakes around) arrived after just 2 minutes. Had they microwaved it? I'm not sure but that was very suspect and felt rushed. Here I must say it was nice - probably the best of the night - but still suspect.
Then the anti-pasta dishes arrived very shortly after - these were nice but didn't justify the price point. I've had cheaper and much better dishes in Bancone, Emilia's and Padella.
We were halfway through our antipasta before the mains arrived - this is a huge no. Instead of taking the plates back to the pass to keep them hot they pulled up another two person table and left them there. This meant I had to rush through my antipasta before moving onto my mains. I get it was 9:30 at night and the staff probably want to go home - but you can't treat guests like this.
The mains was Steak and Girolle Mushrooms. Which can usually be a great combo if it's jazzed up. Here it turned into an uninspiring combo, that was cold by the time I reached it and quite frankly bland. The meat had been cooked well but the rest of the dish was uninspiring.
I voiced my concerns to the manager - who seemed like a waitress - and she played my concerns down and just offered us a free limoncello each.
The last disappointing moment was I had called up in advance to arrange a candle in the dessert for my friend when I made the booking. A few days before going to the restaurant I then called again to remind them of this and they said there was already a note of this.
We ordered desserts and sadly there was no candle. The desserts were okay but at this point the damage had been done.
On the whole the experience felt rushed and not at all special. To get so many things wrong it could nowhere near justify the price point - let alone half of the bill. Maybe it has lost its shine from the good reviews it had all those years ago. I hope maybe this was a blip but there seemed to be bigger issues at play here. What was meant to be a special night was quite the opposite.
I am assistant manager in a casual fine dining restaurant and this whole experience for any of my guests would be unacceptable. I would be open to trying this restaurant again to see if it was the same experience - but I quite frankly will not be rushing back anytime soon.
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