When we arrived we asked one of the passing staff, presuming her to be a waitress, if we could order a drink. She replied that “she does not take orders” and that would “need to find our waiter”. Service was haphazard, cutlery not arriving when the meals did — we were even offered olives and peanuts between our starter and main ! No one seemed particularly interested in proffering wine and the wine listed was not available. The service was casual bordering on contemptuous — when I came to pay the bill the machine asked me if I wanted to add a gratuity even though service was included. When I raised that with the waiter he responded that none of the service charge goes to the waiting staff, to which I replied that if the service had been any good then he might have got something. He then came back to say that they had forgotten to charge us for the wine. I said that the service had not been good, to which he replied that there are 7 receptionists (i.e. the ones who do nothing) and only 9 waiters, so I asked to see the manager who sidled up in due course and pointed out in a rather unpleasant passive-aggressive manner that no one else had complained (i.e. I must be imagining things or a difficult so-and-so). I pointed out to him that since it was the first we had seen him on the terrace and he clearly was not walking around asking people how their meal was then it was hardly surprising that he had heard no complaints. He decided not to charge for the wine.

Chez Gerard is sitting on a gold mine at Covent Garden — if the service were better we would have stayed longer and spent more.

On a more positive note, the Chez Gerard food is consistently good value, and I was very pleased with the entrecote today.