L'Etranger

A fantastic wine offering – but be prepared to pay for it (but if you do you're in for a treat). Good food albeit the menu can be confusing for some with its mixture of both asian/japaneese courses and modern european ones all part of the offering

Do you know the feeling to really “want to like a place”? Well that was my approach when first going to l'Étranger. The space is not all bad, but it is darker and smaller than it looks from the street. The much raved-about wine list really is quite long but prices are nothing short of astronomical. Then came the food. Over engineered, over hived severely over priced and an absolute and utter failure. It was so grotesquely bad that it was difficult to comprehend. Tiny portions come with the nouvelle cuisine (although this is actually rather “fusion cusine”), so no surprise here, but there were both technical shortcomings and poorly sourced ingredients topped of by a clear “we don't care” attitude. It is then, given the shockingly low quality of the food, even more difficult to remind oneself that this is a £200 for two restaurant.

I had dinner at L'etranger with a few friends last Saturday and we had a great time! Were were lucky enough to have a table in their beautiful wine cellar!

The menu was so tempting that we decided to share a selection of starters : roasted scallops with Parmesan puree, Beef Tartare, a selection of sashimis, but the best dish was probably the Tuna Tataki with foie gras shavings!

I then went for the fillet steak which was cooked to perfection and finished with an amazing passion fruit souffle!
The service was very attentive, and the sommelier recommended us great wines matching our food!
Will certainly return!!!

Woefully poor service, notably from the sommelier, who clearly didn't think we were ‘serious’ enough and not only ignored us but when he was at the table spilled wine with a Fawlty Towers level of incompetence. Hw was so spectacularly useless i can't remember what we ate but it was ok.

£24.50 for a tablespoon of Risotto with few small chunks of King crab claw??? Somebody call the police, because i've been robbed! Its not often that i leave a restaurant with the feeling that i have been ripped-off, but lunch was nothing short of daylight robbery. Having vetted the menu online in advance, it really did look superb. French-Oriental fusion, boasting everything from your classic French beef tartare, using the finest Charolais beef to the more fusion Eastern dish of tuna tartare with a lightly spiced soya dressing. The list of starters (or Entrees if you're feeling French) were packed with exciting sounding dishes, that i couldn't wait to try. The main courses all sounded great, especially with a special section listing their house specialities and signature dishes, which I was very much looking forward to sinking my teeth into.

Staff are curteous enough and the restaurant is plush and comfortable. We open the menu and to my great disappointment, the menu is just a fraction of its online listing and i fear we have fallen victim to the dreaded “Reduced A La Carte” menu, that literally gives you a few choices in each section. We chose the tuna tartare, crispy chilli squid and the oysters. All three dishes were as you'd expect… perfectly good, but not anything extraordinary. I was more than satisfied, but wished that we were able to choose from the full menu, to have perhaps had the chance to try something more exciting.

The main course is really where my disappointment came. My friend ordered ‘Pyrenees Confit Shoulder of Lamb with Grilled Aubergine & Onion Chutney’ and i chose the exotic sounding ‘Roast King Crab, Yozu Kosho Butter with Crab & Chive Risotto’. I balked at the plate when it was placed in front of me… I couldn't believe how tiny the portion was, especially as my dish cost a hefty £8 more than my friends, so to see literally a few mouthfuls on my plate, disturbed me. £24.50 for 4 mouthfuls and not a dollop of Beluga caviar or white truffle in sight? Well its just wrong isnt it??!!! What i found quite hilarious was that the dipping sauce container, despite being just 2 inches squared, almost dwarfed the actual food entirely! Ok, so the risotto was good, there is no doubting that, but the crab was fiddly and i had to keep spitting shell and other inedible bits out, which really put me off and could have also been quite dangerous had i been less careful. For £24.50, you'd think they pay extra special attention to ensuring you don't choke on your food!

My friend said that his lamb dish was somewhat unspecial and that he had eaten better lamb in Morocco for just a couple of quid. I tried it for myself and whilst certainly more generous than my own portion, it was disappointing. The lamb lacked lustre and definitely needed some type of seasoning or marinade to uplift it. The aubergines consisted of two tiny baby aubergine halves that were each the size of your little finger. The onion marmalade (which had a bizarrely plastic neon yellow look about it) seemed to be the only thing that my friend actually thought special.

Perhaps L'Etranger is best suited to the waif-like ‘Yummy-Mummies’ of the surrounding Kensington and Chelsea neighbourhood, but personally i'm not quite ready to be forced to diet just yet; especially not when i get a bill of £50 per head for the pleasure! Nouvelle Cuisine is sooooo 1980's and i don't see a revival on the cards in my lifetime. Not if i can help it!

Great restaurant for ambiance and the food is fantastic. Sadly despite the efforts of all staff and management the Somelier was (again) awful. This is the 4th time we dined there and on each occasion he has proved to be rude and sloppy whilst pouring wine with splashed all over the table cloth. I guess ordering any wine under £100/bottle upsets the guy. We complained to the manager at his attidude again on this occassion and were advised that an alternative Solmelier had been recruited to assit this one. We were subsequently served by the new one who was great. As if to add insult to injury our wine bill included 4 glasses fo Champagne at £58 which we did not order or receive – check your bill.

This was our second time dining at L' Etranger and it wont be our last !
We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves from every detail of the food to the wine and the service.
From our first visit , the sommelier chose a wine from a very extensive wine menu that was 100% to both our tastes and which suited the different array of foods that we ordered ,very well . We loved it so much , we ordered it again !
The Black Cod , Wagyu beef and scallops are highly recommended , as is everything else we ordered . You wont be disappointed !

Love this place, have been many many times and only disappointed once when I went to a special event that they didn't get right.

We popped in to L'etranger prior to a concert at the RAH, it was on an earlybird 3 course special with a glass of champagne.
The service and food were great as was the decor of the restaurant although I think it could get pretty cosy on a busy night.
I personally thought a couple of simple things let the place down, the first being the outside appearance of the entrance and signage for the restaurant looked a bit grubby and didn't fit in with what was a nice interior. The other thing was the gents toilet which came with nice soap and hand towels but no bin to place your used hand towel which is a bit poor really.
I would go back again and would have no problem in recommending this place to other people, it certainly represents good value if your want a nice meal prior to a concert, or you can push the boat out if you really want to, given the quality of the food we had I would assume the rest of menu would be just as appetising.

Four of us went to L'Etranger last night before going of to a show at the Royal Albert Hall. As we arrived my first impression was good, the decor was light and crisp; modern. Expect the a subtle feeling of opulence, be sure to look down to the beautiful tile mosaic on the floor in the front hall.

The greeting we received from staff was warm and freindly. We quickly felt relaxed and at eased us in and seemed genuinely happy to have us there.

Be fore warned about the wine list, at first glance, it can be overwelming at 40 pages long, with with hundreds, if not thousands of items most priced over £100 a bottle (some as much as £10,000) you may be frightened that you've perhaps sat down at a table that's outside your budget. Don't hesitate to ask the staff for help finding something in your price range, there are a number of reasonably priced bottles starting at around £20.

We had arrived early enough to order from the ‘early bird’ menu. When the first course arrived, a misscommunication at some point between the kitchen and service staff meant they brought out the wrong order. I had to watch the rest of my party merrily munching away as the kitchen scrambled to prepare another rocket & daikon salad.

When it did arrive, it was very good, but left me feeling it was lacking something. My partner discussed whether it was missing toasted walnuts, pine nuts or pecans. Just a hint of nut would have placed this very tasty salad on the verge of perfection.

On the second course we ordered the shoulder of lamb and the chicken with shitake mushrooms. The lamb was well prepared and presented, very soft, but the chicken was most definitely missing something: MUSHROOMS! We enquired about it, perhaps they've been pured and infused in the sauce in some modern cooking technique that we didn't know of. As it turns out “the kitchen had forgotten to put them in” we were further told that it was probably ok because you can't taste them anyways.

On the third course we ordered banoffee pies, ice cream and warm brownies. The pies were prepared as individual portions and came out well presented. I found the base of the banoffee pie to be a bit too dense, I prefer something a little lighter and more crumbly. Conversely, the brownie was reportedly a little too crumbly… there was however no remaining trace of the ice cream.

Perhaps an odd complaint about the desserts is that they were served with a “presentation spoon”. When it arrives on the table it does manage to make you look twice because it is such an odd shape compared to other spoons you're used to seeing. The problem with this spoon only becomes apparent when you try to use it. You're suddenly made keenly aware of the reasons that spoons are not made in the ‘very long and very deep’ style. As a person who's had a number of years experience eating, it only took me one very loud ‘potentially rude’ sound to learn how to use this new form of utensil without embarassment. I do have some concern for those who are less skilled at putting food in their mouth.

Total bill for four people eating on the “early bird” came in at roughly £140 with their 12.5% service charge added in. I'm not sure if “no mushrooms” or “got your order wrong” is the kind of thing you withhold the tip over, but it is an embarassing argument to to have when you're in a group. Best just to pay it and get gone. At £35 a head for a meal in London we did very well last night, I suppose there is a philosophical question of if being on the value menu allow for a certain number of mistakes?

Overall, there were a number of things I did like about the evening, front house staff were welcoming. The majority of the food was good to in some cases better than average… but unfortunately a few key mistakes on the evening ended up reducing what should have been exceptional to frustratingly average.

Would we return? If there weren't so many restaurants around to choose from, most definitely. However, in that price range, and in that area, there were a lot of other options to look at. I would go again, and on that second chance I'd be hoping that they managed to pull it off (front house are so friendly that you really are rooting for them). With that said, I'd only go on that second time if I'd first phoned a few other places to see if there was a table somewhere else.