"Two visits in a week during our London visit to this well-known and reputed fish restaurant. The first visit was on the Sunday, and when we walked in and saw the place completely empty I remarked as a joke that we hadn’t needed to book!...This met with a fairly snarky remark from the lady who worked there, but she was to become borderline hostile later. My son, aged when ordering, asked her politely and civilly how big the cod was (not wanting to order more than he could eat); the lady responded by asking him, in an unfriendly and unhelpful manner, how she was supposed to answer that and that the sizes all differed; she then said “It’s the same size as the haddock” (which I had ordered) which was pretty unhelpful, given that we hadn’t seen the haddock either! It was an unnecessarily hostile response to a polite something like “It’s quite big” or “I’m sure you’ll be able to manage it” would have been far more appropriate and helpful. As it happens, the portions were huge, and the food was excellent great haddock (in matzomeal) and cod, and fabulous chips. The chocolate cake dessert went down well too. The only negative in terms of the actual meal was that the tea I ordered got forgotten about until some way into the meal, but the waitress did remember of their own volition and did apologise. When we returned on the Friday, the same lady was her same unfriendly self. Impressively, she had remembered us from a few days earlier (even though there were now of us rather than just the of us,as they had been on the first visit), and, again, the food was terrific. Whether this place takes the view that its food is so good that it doesn’t need to be especially pleasant to the diners I don’t know. Whether something gets ‘lost in translation’ with this waitress (who speaks with a foreign accent) I don’t know. But I know that when we talk now about this restaurant all we talk about is the unfriendly waitress as opposed to the top-notch food."
