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Koba

Koba

11 Rathbone Street Soho London, W1T 1NA, W1T 1NR, United Kingdom

Bbq • Asian • Korean • Barbecue


"It 's reassuring to read other reviews and see that many other people found the service awful. I never write restaurant reviews, but it 's such a waste of money when you are spending so much money for a nice occasion but you have **** service and you are felt like you are just holding up the staff from going home. My friend and I arrived for our 2pm booking and the indifferent man who greeted us informed me that we had 30 minutes to order before the kitchen closed. It was then that I realised that our booking was their last lunchtime booking. We were not warned about it when we made a reservation. From then on, everything was extremely rushed. All the staff were rude and unpleasant (apart from one waitress who gave us the BBQ sauces and the barman). We took our order and we had a few questions about the menu, e.g. whether 2 side dishes of rice would be too much with all the food, but the man just wrote down the dishes without answering our questions and said we had to order all our food because the kitchen was closing and just said 'it 's up to you ' whilst not even looking at us, just looking around at the rest of the restaurant. The food came and it was average (not as good as Olle restaurant). No one came to us and asked if everything was ok during the meal. The waitress came with the bill and didn 't ask how everything was, she just put the bill on the table and simply said 'We are closing '. I asked her if the last lunchtime booking gets to have dessert and she said 'No because we are closed and the staff need to finish ' and walked off. It 's bad when you are paying just as much as everyone else for your meal (close to £100 for 2 people, by the way) but you don 't have the same service. If you are going to have a last booking don 't close the kitchen 30 minutes after I don 't know any restaurants that do that. Or at least warn people before that they won 't be able to have any dessert. They didn 't even say the booking was 1 hour 30 minutes in the confirmation email. There are plenty of other nice restaurants in London where they don 't rush you and actually treat you as a valued customer I would never return here."

Kalbi Korean

Kalbi Korean

36 Rosebery Ave, London, EC1R5HP, EC1R 5HP, United Kingdom

Bbq • Meat • Sushi • Korean


"Such a disappointing evening at Kalbi Korean BBQ restaurant dining on inferior food with slow and inattentive service. Our group of eight gathered at Kalbi expecting to enjoy a Korean BBQ buffet meal as advertised on the website. To our surprise the BBQ buffet menus at the restaurant were completely different to those on the restaurant website. The prices are higher and the choices are much more restricted. Fortunately for the restaurant manager they decided to offer our table the menu as advertised on their website without much objection but this wasted over 20 minutes of our time! NOTE that the wrong misleading menu is still on the restaurant 's website even a week after our meal? Is this their marketing ploy to lure unsuspecting diners? 1) Menu Of the 3 available buffet menus we planned to choose menu A £26.90 (mon wed), this is the most expensive menu supposedly offering the most meat appetiser selections (see photo for details). For menu A we expected to be able to choose 8 types of BBQ meat and 5 out of 13 appetisers. The actual menu A at the restaurant only allowed 4 BBQ meats, that is half the advertised quantity! Only 3 dishes out of a considerably fewer number of appetisers are allowed on the actual menu A. The side dishes are optional extras, the price of these were higher in the restaurant than on the website. 2) Food Appetisers yang yum prawn, royal tobokki, yang yum chicken, pork rib, seafood pancake. Most notable was the seafood pancake for the distinct lack of seafood. The texture was thick rubbery tasting of what I would imagine reheated cheap frozen microwaved pancake consisting of flour and spring onion without seasoning to taste like! I normally try hard not to waste food but the pancake tasted so awful I could not eat more than 2 small bites. Meat the rib eye and sirloin steaks were frozen tough and lacked flavour. 3) Service Service was slow to the point that the grills were burning empty of any meat for long periods of time. Note that there is only 90 minutes of ordering for the BBQ buffet. Unlike other Korean restaurants, the servers did not operate the barbecues for us, we had to BBQ the meat ourselves. When I observed that the fried chicken starter was sprinkled with nuts, I asked a waiter whether any of the other dishes contained nuts. He left presumably to consult the chef but never returned to answer my question!!! 4) Extortionate Credit Card Surcharge There is an unadvertised 10% surcharge for card payments, such a rip of for customers and HMRC! Forcing diners to waste time to leave the restaurant to get cash from the ATM to avoid the surcharge, this caused some people to miss their train home. 5) Overcharging Finally once everyone had sufficient cash to pay, upon checking the bill it turned out that they charged us for 10 pints of beer instead of 6. At a hefty £5.90 per pint that 's an overcharge of almost £24!! The staff did not acknowledge their mistake until the manager said 'if the customer say that they only had 6 beers then they are right. ' They eventually admitted to charging another tables drinks order onto our bill. Again this wasted time to resolve. At this point I could not even be bothered to mention that they charged the wrong higher prices for the side dishes. Needless to say I shall not be returning to Kalbi, the quality of the meat and food is just too unpleasant to eat. The drinks prices are very high. The BBQ buffet menus both those on the website and at the restaurant are very restrictive in terms of quantity and choice."