The Avenue

Friendly and efficient staff, very competent cooking

For lunch we booked a £17.50 Spring Special at £17.50 including a glass of wine. Our food was very good, the service charming, friendly and prompt. A good experience. I've eaten the full menu there before. This is better value and still great.

A safe and pleasant option

The light, airy and contemporary decor lightens the mood and provides a nice backdrop to a business meal or social with friends. The menu is varied and interesting and the execution of the food is good with everything being well cooked, seasoned and presented. The service is polite and friendly without being overly intrusive although I have found a number of the waiting staff who's English is not strong enough to really engage fully or describe menu items satisfactorily. Defintely somewhere I'll return but not a stand-out choice from the many options available in the price bracket.

As I walked back from lunch at the Avenue (my second visit there), I really struggled to think of what I could write that may be witty or insightful about this dining venue. It was hard to fault any aspect of the experience, but my overall conclusion is that one eats at the Avenue primarily as a means-to-an-end: in other words, it does the job, and quite well too, effective and efficient, but there is no ‘special ingredient’ or ‘wow factor’ that makes me want to pen a review full of superlatives, recommend it to all my friends and rush back immediately. The venue itself is a light and airy antidote to some of the more formal dining options on St James', but the one drawback is the high ceiling and hence relatively poor acoustics, at times requiring my dining comrade and I to raise our voices. In terms of the food, my starter of smoked salmon was well-presented and tasty to eat, moist fish and a tangy contrast provided by the marinated onions. My comrade's crab cocktail also met with approval. For the mains, we both opted for the roast red-legged partridge. Although ostensibly presented as being “off the bone,” it required more work than perhaps anticipated. Nonetheless, the meat was very tasty and the white cabbage accompaniment well-matched. Our glass of Cote du Rhone was a good pairning too. At £18.50 for two courses, the food was undoubtedly fair priced. We were in-and-out in not much more than an hour, so the restaurant was effective at its job – good for business, but I would imagine much less for pleasure.

Service was correct but not upbeat or motivated at all. Food was about where I would expect for the price there was a pretty diverse range of options on the set menu. The big let down of the evening was they forgot to present a candle with the dessert which I had requested in advance when making the reservation. I did bring this to the managers and waitress's attention, who apologised but also did nothing!