Michael's Reviews

At £16.95 for two courses the pre theatre set munu looked to be good value and I guess it was. So how, in just over an hour, did the two of us manage to spend a hundred and twenty quid?

I left the bill on the table – to hot to move – so from memory it went something like: two gin and tonics at about £9 each. Two glasses of champagne (well, it was my birthday last week) at about a tenner each and a glass of white wine each with our meal at eight pounds a go. I incautiously ordered two portions of veg at four pounds each and we finished with a single espresso each. They finished by adding a 12.5% service charge.

One hundred and nineteen pounds.

This was the Brumus Bar and restaurant which is part of the Haymarket Hotel. All the reviews describe it as trendy. That should have been warning in itself. The food was OK, the staff were trying – no really, they were fine, only niggle was that the samphire which accompanied my mullet had too much wood in it – it was like eating tooth picks.

Good job my austerity conscious chum insisted on having tap water.

Not sure about this place. Its good French food meets retro 70's disco.

If at the end of my meal we are asked if we would like to take coffee in the bar I would invariably say yes. I know that from their perspective its an early opportunity to get the table back into play but its not a problem. This particular punter though is a chubby 65 and looks it! They would have known when making the suggestion that the lift to the said fourth floor bar was out of order.

So when I got there and recovered sufficiently to check the place out I saw that I was sitting almost in the corridor down which I had just puffed my way, the bar being full. We had some how become disconnected from our coffee and I briefly though of making a run for it – I couldn't decide whether it was height above sea level or the noise of the pop music that was making my ears bleed. The occasional waitress emerged from the blackness and seemed to sense that we were not rich pickings and dissolved back into the gloom. The coffee arrived, we drank, paid the £270 bill for the four of us on the pre theatre menu, (OK two bottles of wine) and made our way out into the night.

Going back – probably not.