Le Café Anglais

Had a wonderful lunch

Great value set lunch menu. Food, service and atmosphere were fantastic.

Le Café Anglais is restaurant full of opposites. It a very elegant space with touches of 1930s Art Déco a very good view and a wonderfully airy atmosphere. Also the entrance from Porchester Gardens is very elegant (there is one from Whiteleys shopping centre too, best avoided.) That's one: effortless style in not the most stylish corner of W2. Furhter there is the name in French and the menu of heavily british influenced “modern European” fare, which however is very high quality and efficinetly served. While the restaurant might well work for a date – it looks a lot like the kind of restaurant people in Hollywood movies go for a date – it has two obvious (again opposite) reasons to be: it is a kind of canteen for the wealthy locals of W2. A few steps away from Bayswater you are deep in Notting Hill territiory and this type of customer seems attracted by the quality and especially the dependability. The other is probably just as lucrative but very imporant: Business dining. It is hard to think of a better price/value/wow-factor restaurant for business dining. A great effort and with an element of the “effortless” attitude done so well on the continent. Thumbs up.

There should probably be a snidey joke about eating in shopping centres somewhere here but Le Cafe Anglais is no food court cop out. Sure, it's occupied the top floor of handsome from the outside Whiteleys for five years now, but if the shopping centre trades on past glories Le Cafe Anglais resolutely doesn't.

If you'd been told that Capice Holdings or Corbin & King had a hand in the place you wouldn't be surprised (they haven't to the best of my knowledge) – it displays several hallmarks of a well designed, well run restaurant by their exacting rulebook. Attentive, individual staff; an eye for detail; simple tastes and flavours and great, great quality ingredients.

The food was simple and excellent. It breaks neither budget nor boundaries but delivers a solid performance for £30-£35 a head. From an expansive brasserie menu I went for plump, juicy if teeny tiny scallops followed by a simply grilled veal escalope. Good as it was to tuck into after a week of more challenging dining, i admit to slight food envy watching my guests tuck into a perfect piece of muscly firm hake, served under a snappy salsa verde atop dense sticky lentils. Competence can be used as an indicator of the ordinary or prosaic, here it was sublime.

The dining room is grand. High windows open up the light flooding over chandeliers and sassy banquettes. Beautiful floral displays set off the crisp white linens and serried tableware. If I had to find fault here it couldn't be with the front of house look or the intelligent wait staff, though I whoever chose such an awful, artless Jackson Pollock for public transport carpet for the space needs their head examining.

Other than that godawful floor covering; if there's a fault, it can only be in the location. It's a shame someone as talented as Head Chef Rowley Leigh was forced to spend his time leaning next to the pass checking his phone and chatting to regulars rather than locked in the kitchen. Maybe the ladies who lunch do so during the week, but you won't find much better cooking at this price level and style within the area and it's a shame that on this Saturday lunch at least, it didn't have a more appreciative audience.

A strange evening, food underwhelming, service impeccable, seemingly the opposite of many.

Stunning room, feels truly special, manages to be intimate and huge, buzzy and virtually full, impressive for a Tuesday night.

French waiter was superb from start to finish, attentive, good wine recommendations, truly faultless.

Food was hit and miss, rabbit rillettes were so chilled as to be tasteless, and contained several bones. Oysters good, partridge choucroute tepid and underwhelming. Perversely in a french restaurant the best dish of the night a thai green curry which was perfumed, hot , sweet, sour one of the best I've ever tasted.

I'd go back, lovely atmosphere and I think with different menu choices we could have had a wonderful night.

This was my 2nd visit to Café Anglais, I fist went a couple of years back and to be honest it didn’t really inspire me for a speedy repeat visit.

This time we found the lift entrance at the side of the shopping mall which makes for a more salubrious entrance than trekking through the mall itsself. We were promptly taken to our table and just managed to squeeze past the adjacent tables to sit down.

Once we managed to get the attention of one of the few scurrying ‘avoid eye contact’ waiters we ordered. The food itself was all fairly good and arrived promptly, although no one ever enquired during the meal if everything was good. If you take it as more a posh café than a restaurant then it delivers, simple food done well, NY strip steak and half chicken mains both cooked well and tasty.

I’ll have to score it high on value for money as we ate on a friend for a fiver deal, which they were running on the Friday we booked. Which I think if they need to do on a Friday, is pretty telling of the restaurant in terms of food and quality. The bill came to £200, which included a £70 discount, for 3 people including a couple of aperitifs and a bottle of Barolo so was good value.

On the whole the place is OK, the food isn’t bad but the tables are far too cramped together and the service is a bit of a shocker when it comes to ordering, paying etc. It could well be another couple of year before I go back.

I've been going to Le Cafe Anglais since it opened it. I've always loved the food, the atmosfere and the great service. And for all of those reasons I've chose Le Cafe Anglais to celebrate by husband's 40th birthday.
Unfortunately this time, the service and the atmosfere were great but the food not so much.
The Menu served at the dinner was completely different from the one I had chosen the food from.
The one that was served at the dinner, was full of HAM… and I'm jewish… So, I have to say, not good. The canapes were not what I expected, they looked cheap and not tasty at all. The hors d'oeuvers were not enough. Tiny portions…
My guests were saying :"do you mind if I have the artichokes, you can have the chicken liver"… When I throw a dinner party, I expected that my guests would be able to eat without feeling guilty.
There were only 4 choices instead of 5. There was the saumon, the artichokes, rabbit and chicken liver… But no sign of the oysters!!!
The main course was OK, but nothing special…
The dessert was OK as well.
The chocolate cake was the only thing wonderful.
Overall, if that was my first time at Le Cafe Anglais, I wouldn't be coming back. For sure, I'll never be hosting a party there again, because it was extremely disappointing…
And the last thing, on the web site it is written that the host would have a complementary parking; each I was informed that “you do not do that anymore”. So, it would be a great idea to remove it from your website.
I'm at the restaurant business as well, so I know a lot about food cost, and I feel that 38.50 (chef's choice) + 4.50 (canapes) = £43 a head for what I got was soooooooooooo over the top !!! I wrote an email to the manager, and she didn't even bothered to get back to me.

The worst service I have ever experienced in London. Some of the food was excellent and indded it may all have been excellent had it been produced while it was hot. Hors D'Oeuvres arrived after mains, one starter cam 15 minutes after the rest of the table, one main course was cold and had to be sent back, we had to get up to find a waiter to ask for more drinks, our bill had to go back 3 times as we had several drinks (including an expensive bottle of wine) that weren't ours, particularly galling since we had been unabe to get refills of anyhting for most of the evening. It was 2 hours after ordering before we got our mains and at mno point did any member of staff offer a hint of an apology and seemed to be more intent on helping themselves to drinks (perhaps the ones on our bill?) at the bar. If there was a Head Waiter he or she was nowhere in site. Dreadful

fantastic see and be seen atmosphere, helpfutl but not always organised staff, great food esp the vegetable

Over-rated! Staff are rude. Food's good, but the atmosphere ruins the place.

Le Cafe Anglais is possibly the worst restaurant I have been to in London. The following are the reasons for this:

• The food comes served lukewarm, and is far from interesting or exciting (e.g., the fois gras appears to be identical to that which you find in Sainsbury's)
• The table service is extraordinarily slow, and unknowledgable (e.g., when trying to order wine)
• The meal is by no means cheap, and probably one of the more expensive restaurants in Bayswater
• Finally, and I find this incredible for a restaurant, the staff at Le Cafe Anglais decided to hand my umbrella (for which I had the ticket) to a gentleman with the wrong ticket based on the explanation that a) the gentleman had claimed that his umbrella had a wooden handle, and that b) the gentleman was quite drunk! Efforts to recover the umbrella have been in vain.
  

In short, the restaurant takes no care of people's property, and seems to take similarly little care of the food or service. DO NOT GO!