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The worst restaurant reviews of 2013

The worst reviews of restaurants of 2013God save the poor restaurant that fails to please a London restaurant critic. Here's a selection of some of the most damning reviews, in no particular order, that were published this year. 

 

Red Pocket

"Xiao Rong Bao were said to be the chef’s speciality. They were seven very doughy dumplings of raggy pork in seven pastel colours, like the seven poos of the seven pastel-coloured lapdogs of seven insane princesses in some ancient fairytale that is told back home in Vom, in the province of Yuk. They were served with a vinegar I would hesitate to use as paint stripper, out of sympathy for the painted thing.

Giles Coren - The Times

 

Jamie's Diner

"The food here is terrible, but Jamie's Diner is enraging - apocalyptically, biblically enraging - because it has no ambition greater than to make some easy money off the back of the hard work of others, by scraping every barrel of London's current American comfort food fashions, and to exploit passing tourists and Jamie fans and get them out of the door before they realise they've been scammed." 

Chris Pople - Cheese and Biscuits

 

STK

"As the DJ cranks the Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams up to 11 and lights dim in the heaving, clubby room so we can no longer see what's on our plates, the penny drops: it's a theme restaurant. And the theme is Sex And The City circa 1999. Everyone here is loving it, so what do I know? STK is a couple of vowels short of doing it for this lil' laydee." Marina O'Loughlin - Metro

"At the bottom of this hotel-slash-roundabout is a restaurant, STK, the weirdest, sluttiest, muckiest, silliest, shiniest, stupidest, tackiest, gruntiest restaurant in all of Londons, as an oligarch’s wife might say...The worst dish was some truffle-soaked chips, stiff little tampons of death swimming in cheese and truffle oil." Camilla Long - Sunday Times

 

The 10 Room at the Cafe Royal

"The most depressing and uncongenial meal, in an anaemic, echoey building, made even more wrist-slashingly ghastly by the sad and silent ghosts of a century of culture and élan and bibulous brilliance."  AA Gill - Sunday Times

"Guys, no one could deny that your restaurant, Ten Room, has its trifling flaws – which of us doesn’t? But please be reassured that there is nothing wrong with it that would not be corrected by the application of a medium-sized demolition ball." Matthew Norman - Telegraph

 

Bo London

"All efforts to chat with your dining companion will consistently be scuppered by a waiter bearing two more spoons of Bushtucker-trial gloop representing the chef’s nervous breakdown. This is not dinner. It’s edible immersive art catering to a no-repeat clientele of affluent tourists and bloggers on freebies."  Grace Dent - ES Magazine

"I love dim sum. But I had come for fireworks. And the fireworks don’t go off at lunchtime, apparently." Giles Coren, Times

 

Beard to Tail

"The nadir of the meal is a main-course offal salad with bubble and squeak. It is a "salad" in the sense of an assemblage, but not in the sense of containing a leaf or frond. It is full of overcooked, black, massacred and unidentifiable things, save for grim kidneys. We can identify them. I like a bit of uric tang as much as the next offal freak, but this was pure essence of NCP car park stairwell." Jay Rayner - Observer

 

Paesan

"And those woeful arancini – lemon and courgette, they say. All we get is salt, dried-tasting herbs and a footy whiff suggestive of that parmesan that comes in cardboard drums and looks like what's left in the bottom of your Ped Egg callus remover. The consistency is soggy pap." Marina O'Loughlin - The Guardian

 

Raw 42

"I smiled beatifically, channelling peace and love. I did not say, which I wanted to, ‘Look, Moonflower, I’ve just paid 17 pissing pounds for a small bowl of Magimixed raw carrot in cold curry sauce, a bog-standard unsweetened smoothie of banana and strawberry, a tiny coffee and a lump of coconut cake, which, let’s be honest, closely resembles when Blue Peter made emergency winter bird food from Trill and lard in the 1970s. The least you can do is let me use your Wi-Fi. Or change the Wi-Fi ISP address from something other than RAW 42 so we don’t know you’re being awkward." Grace Dent - ES Magazine

 

Balthazar

"You’ve got to assume the burger at an American place is going to be good, haven’t you? Especially at £16. And it was. If by “good” you mean cooked through to black (when asked how I wanted it I had said, “However the chef thinks it’s best”) so that it fell apart in the mouth like a clod of topsoil, served on sugary brioche with fries that in striving for the house standard lukewarmness managed only to get just above cold." Giles Coren - The Times

 

Lima

"The problem, and I freely admit that this is my problem, is that I don’t understand the menu. Since I’m not a gay old Peruvian hand, the ingredients remain opaquely mysterious." AA Gill - Sunday Times

 

Brasserie Chavot

"It’s all a terrible shame. Chavot has cooked so much better than this, and at a time when French bourgeois food is the style du jour, he should be playing to all his strengths. Instead, he’s half-heartedly overseeing dishes that are way below his skill set and passion, in a room that echoes with boredom and lost appetite." AA Gill - Sunday Times

 

Oblix

"A new fun thing at this place was that the table wobbled and the food was terrible. No, but inedible. Here, for the first time, Becker has moved away from the oriental stuff at which he is so accomplished to something they are calling “New York Grill” – which is a made-up genre that totally doesn’t exist, and Becker soon shows us why not." Giles Coren - Times

"Disappointing is too tall a word for the food at Oblix. The menu is international lost and found: undemanding dishes that use luxury ingredients instead of skill. They say it’s all supposed to be shared, but that’s just a thing restaurant menus say these days." AA Gill - Sunday Times

 

Union Street Cafe

"The whole place is a slurp of nothing, from the fake Beckhams to the fake chairs, plastic tables and snooty, hating, ego-mad staff and grim pop art that looks as if it has only just survived a porn baron’s meth-related house fire. It’s a place of no care and maximum profit, created for and by the internet and people on Facebook." Camilla Long - Sunday Times

 

Bird of Smithfield

"The service was, by no slender meaning of the word, atrocious. It was a masterclass in things that should never happen during a £140 dinner." Grace Dent - Evening Standard 

 

Kaspar's at the Savoy

"Wiener schnitzel, which I assume will be in seasoned crumbs, is coated in batter and lies on the plate like a carpet tile after a flood. The chosen side dish of Savoy cabbage with double-smoked bacon is a grace but not finally a saving grace." Camilla Long - Sunday Times

 

Tanner & Co

"It seems a curious food offer, so close to the baroque extravaganza of the market and the might of the Shard — but then not all restaurants depend for success on their food. So Tanner & Co must hope, anyway. It springs eternal, I understand, hope." David Sexton - Evening Standard

 

Whyte and Brown

"We don’t want to risk wasting two puddings so poke at the dense, pasty chocolate sponge and runny custard of a single ‘tipsy’ trifle. As lunch goes, it’s clucking dreadful." Emma Sturgess - Metro

 

 

Back to the 2013 review of the year index

Also see the Best reviewed restaurants of 2013

 

To see how more restaurants are rated, view all our restaurant reviews.

 

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