Great Queen Street

Nice venue, good menu, reasonably priced BUT poor service, cold sides, undercooked partridge.

On a sunny friday lunch we took a table outside- great- inside it looked rather dark- fine in the evening or if the weather is gloomy. Choice beer was good , the waiter was very competent in talking us through the menu.
Interesting menu: it took some understanding. Frankly i'd say a bit over fussy, but, 7 out of the 9 dishes were really good. the other 2 trying too hard.
for a Covent Garden restaurant the food and service were really good, and not over priced.
i recommend it.

Very impressed on our first visit to Great Queen Street.

We arrived late, post theatre, without a booking. The place was very full and busy, so we sat at the bar to order / eat. We were transferred to a table as soon as one became available. Some of the earlier / older reviews are very negative on service, so maybe things have changed – we thought the service was very professional, helpful and friendly, especially given how incredibly busy they are.

The place had a really good buzzy / busy atmosphere. I liked the mish mash furnishing, which can work well in a pub / bistro. Makes it more informal.

Food was simple, gutsy, very tasty and of very good quality. The in season asparagus was good but not fab (I'm very fussy about my asparagus), but the star of the show was our rib-eye, which was really excellent – Beautifully cooked, and very tasty and tender.

Good value at £75 for 2, inc service, ex drinks.

Not surprisingly, a very similar setup to Anchor & Hope, but with the big advantage of taking bookings (why we stopped going to Anchor & Hope).

A gastro pub version of Hix in Clerkenwell, or perhaps an English version of Terroir ? Both are compliments. Overall, strongly recommended.

I thought this place was absolutely fantastic- the service was incredibly knowledgable whilst lacking any pompositity or condecension. The food was an absolute treat- we had wood pigeon with snails and lamb's breast, and this was coupled with a very palatable Corbieres.
Along with a great cheese board, dessert wine, aperetifs and coffees the bill still only came to just over £50 a head. If you haven't been there yet, and you like English cuisine, you've really been missing out.

I don't usually bother reviewing restaurants, but Great Queen Street (like Anchor & Hope) is one of my favourites, and it seems to be getting a lot of stick lately, so I thought I'd redress the balance a bit… Yes, the service is more intently expert than overtly welcoming (there's one lumpy young waitress who really ought to be taken to one side and given lessons…); yes the chairs aren't super-ergonomic. But other than that, and in the most important areas — food, drink, atmosphere, pricing — it's bloody marvellous. My wife and I had a fairly hurried post-theatre meal last night, and everything was terrific, with memorably distinct flavours — a walnut and radish salad, sharply dressed; a sumptously buttery pumpkin and porcini bake; a fine white Rioja; a nutty almond and orange tart; and a divine white chocolate ‘pudding’ which was more of a heavenly dollop of cream whipped into sultry stardom. I've never come out with anything other than wonderful flavours and a very full feeling of total contentment from either restaurant. The best winter's sustenance in the centre of London, by my reckoning.

This place used to be great, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone anymore. The food is very mixed, but by far the worst thing about it is the service. The Aussie manager seems to think that treating diners like he's doing them a favour is the best way to keep customers coming back. I've never written a bad review of a place in my life, but then I've never experienced service as bad as I have at Great Queen Street before. Unfortunately, the manager (I went on a Sunday) seemed to set the tone for the rest of the staff – too cool to be bothered to serve customers and then incredibly indignant if asked to do anything. Not sure if the manager is new, but this place used to be worth a visit – avoid at all costs.

It was a disappointing evening. I don't like it when restaurants tell you how long you have, but they were upfront about this when I booked, so that was fair enough. And we found the service efficient and our waitress was very clued up about how things were cooked. They don't stock slimline drinks which I thought was odd, but the real disappointments were the limited menu and the quality of the food. It's not an extensive menu and 3 or 4 of the items were only available for 2 or more people. I ordered ‘lamb with prunes and ratatouille’. Amazingly, the lamb arrived covered with some kind of batter or breadcrumbs which masked fatty, almost inedible meat, the ratatouille was swimming in oil and the prunes were cold. My friend's cold pork with tuna was uninspiring and she left half of it. The desserts were great though. In short – overpriced, uninspiring food in a restaurant that thinks its much better than it actually is. But when we were there it was packed – maybe with lots of people that only eat there once? I will certainly be amongst them.

The food was extremely uneven. The starters were a mix of quite good and very very average (the pomegranite and fennel salad). One of us had steak which was inedible and was taken back and off the bill. The mince pie was fine. Deserts had nice concepts that were, in the case of the Queen of Puddings, badly executed. It had been made in advance and lacked the crisp meringue finish it should have had.

What really disappointed, though, was the staff and the way we were handled. When we arrived no-one told us, nor did they when we booked, that the table was needed back in two hours. Certainly the pace of our service did not suggest urgency. The first person we dealt with was quite remote and hard to interact with. The waiter was extremely knowledgeable but what was weird was that the restaurant was unable to offer any flexibility. We asked for some additional chips or some mash on the side, and were told chips were only served with the steak and mash was not available. I asked for ketchup, because the chips were as dry as dust on the inside, I was told “we don't do ketchup”. When the waiter cleared, he noted we hadn't eaten the chips and suggested the restaurant was right in not allowing us to order a separate portion with our pie, instead of asking why we didn't eat more than a few of them (particularly as one of us had a main course that had been returned to the kitchen because it was inedible).

We were then told they wanted the table back while we were waiting for desert. When we went downstairs I asked to see the manager. He first claimed we had been told of the need to have the table at 930 when we booked, which was not the case. Had we been aware of a deadline we would have asked for our food to come more quickly. He then said we should have protested when we were asked to move (we were trying to be polite and my son works in the industry, understood the waiter was not happy about being asked to move us along). The bright spot of the evening was the bartender downstairs, a really charming and genial guy who did much to rescue the experience.

The steak pie is a must. Amazing pastry, and the knowledgethe waiting staff had about all the dishes was refreshingly passionate…You must go to this place.

Oh dear. Visited on a Saturday lunchtime and everyone looked very depressed, the customers (many eating alone for some reason) and the staff. Dissapointed to find that in what looked like a gastropub there was no draft lager and the drinks (including Wine) were served in childrens tumblers. Next was a bowl of unshelled raw peas ? and some rather good bread. The food was average but overpriced, menu wasa bit limited and service a bit dreary. Perhaps everyone had hangovers and it was just a bad day.. Time will tell..

Great local restaurant – the menu changes regularly, the food is imaginative, seasonal and tasty and 32 Great Queen Street makes a pleasant change from the many chain restaus around Holborn Station. The wine selection is good, and reasonably priced.

I only have 3 gripes; it's not open on Mondays, it gets booked up very quickly and the wine is served in tumblers.

Great Queen Street is very cool right now, especially with all of us opening our SquareMeal Restaurants & Bars 2008 guide and seeing the great review. It's also great that it isn't a usual chain. The chocolate dessert was special.

However, the staff were a major let down. One of the waiting staff makes absolutely no eye contact with customers. A "thank you" or a smile from a customer is unreturned. Another stood by when we were leaving after the meal and didn't even give us an acknowledgement, a 'thank you' or a 'goodbye.' A very cold experience combined with good, strong dishes.