Le Café Anglais

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!

Although it has Cafe in its name, nothing about Le Cafe Anglaise is “cafe” – unfortunately. The prices are serious restaurant level (which to be fair is what we wanted from a serious restaurant), however the quality of the cooking and the food was miles off. We were paying over £20, for main course which was bland, unsourced and badly cooked. The menu is confusing and forces you to have extras (£3+ for a single serving of a vegetable) and the service was comically amateurish. My advice – go somewhere else.

Barman unfriendly and offhand. Food served lukewarm. We asked to wait a while before ordering dessert and when some of our group left the table to smoke outside were still pressed to order even though half our table were quite obviously missing. Menu interesting and restaurant attractive but needs some tightening up by the management in the Bar area and watching that hot food is actually served hot. Disappointing overall after reading so many critics' rave reviews.

Went prepared for the worst – why would you want to dine in a shopping centre? What they should do is offer a service where clients are led blindfolded from their cars to the restaurant: once you are in the room, your experience changes dramatically. I like the room, which at first sight feels a bit characterless – and I suspect suffers at anything less than half full – but when full it feels alive and vibrant. The food was kind of Ivy-ish, simple but done well enough. The wine list isn't terrific, not a great choice I recall, and the service wasn't great, with a couple of dishes taking a long time to arrive. Good enough if you live locally, but probably not worth my trip from North London.

Despite the best efforts of the designers and the option of arriving via a lift through a separate entrance, there’s no escaping the feeling that you’re eating in a shopping centre at Le Café Anglais (a fact not helped by the dining room’s vastness, which somehow recalls a very posh version of the food courts you find in American malls). The straight-up and simple food hits the spot and there are some interesting wines (there’s an ace Riesling Grand Cru from Alsace that’s a great match for the roast chicken), but sadly it’s amateur hour on the service front, with difficulties encountered at the reception desk and repeated requests for drinks going unheeded. If I lived in west London I’d be happy to have this on my doorstep, but it's not really worth the journey to Queensway otherwise.