Fans of this traditional Gallic fixture, in Covent Garden, accept it’s “nothing spectacular”, but say it’s a “solid performer” that’s “perfect” pre- or post-theatre; its ratings dipped this year, though, with numerous gripes about “disappointingly average” food and “uncaring” service.
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Take Covent Garden's Café du Jardin, for example, long known - to those in the know - as a handy stand-by lunch or pre- (or post-) theatre, but no real destination in its own right. When the same ...
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Press Reviews (1)
John Walsh (23rd July 2007)
Food 1/5 stars; Ambience 2/5 stars; Service 3/5 stars
The critic is not impressed by “deeply peculiar décor, menu and cooking” on offer at this “peculiar, faux-Gothic building”, in Covent Garden. The menu is “crammed with dishes apparently chucked in at random, and drawn from all corners of the world”, some of the type you’d find “in a third-rate trattoria in deepest Surrey”. It would be tedious to recite the dishes which went wrong, but a veal Holstein – “with all the presence of a dead sparrow on an old mattress” – was perhaps some sort of low-light. The critic left the restaurant “wondering how long they can dish up such hopeless chain-eaterie fare at such fancy prices and get away with it”.
John Walsh (23rd July 2007)
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