Just when we thought that things were getting much better on the London restaurant scene, two reports have slammed London's restaurants for their poor service. In the annual Zagat Survey with over 2500 respondents, 38% of them cited poor quality of service as their top irritant, as against 33% in last year's guide. Second gripe (30%) is the perennial moan about high prices. But service, "from initial reservation to bill handling, is the area that most restaurateurs most need to address and improve" says Sholto Douglas-Home, Zagat's UK editor.

Naughty practices continue, such as leaving a space on credit card bills for a tip, when 12.5% has already been added to your bill. Look out, you have been warned.

Subj: Dinner at the Criterion Date: 13/10/98 17:38:31 GMT From: Larry Bain To: dine@dine-online.co.uk My wife, a cooking teacher and former restaurant chef and I, a former restaurateur recently returned from a trip to London. We were interested in dining in a MPW restaurant and a restaurant consultant friend thought Criterion would interest us most. From the outset the service was rocky, we made reservations 3 weeks in advance and when I phoned two days ahead to confirm, they had lost the reservation. They were able to remake it for the same time, and when we arrived on a Sunday night at 9pm to a virtually empty dining room, we understood why it was easy to re-book our table. The dining room is truly stunning, one of the most beautiful rooms I have eaten in. We approached the host stand where the hostess and Maitre d' were deeply engrossed in conversation. We needed to make an effort to get their attention, and felt we had interrupted some profoundly important and extremely personal interaction. We were taken to our table, and had to wait 10 minutes for anyone to arrive to offer us drinks or a menu. Meanwhile the staff were huddled in cheery groups in the empty parts of the dining room, as far away as possible from the guests, and all were extremely adept at avoiding eye contact with any patron who might be seeking service. When our sommelier arrived we ordered a bottle of Champagne, and twenty minutes after we were seated we finally had something to drink and a menu to peruse. The menu read well, we ordered our food, and a bottle of red wine, a $100.00 Spanish wine from 1992. The wine was presented and the sommelier took it off to be decanted. He returned with the wine in a decanter and the bottle which had about an inch of "dregs" left in it. He poured a hefty taste into my glass. I sniffed the wine, pronounced it sound and asked that it not be poured till we had finished our Champagne. So there on our table was the decanter, the wine bottle and my glass with 2oz of wine. All well and good until a busboy came by, looked at our table, picked up the bottle of red and dumped the "dregs" into my glass with the 2oz of decanted wine. He then wandered off with the bottle. It took several minutes and serious hand waving, oh by the way did I mention that we had to pour our own champagne throughout the evening?, before the second sommelier came to our table. I explained what had taken place and received a look that said "and the problem is what?". I asked for a fresh glass, he took my glass returned with a clean glass and walked away. Not a word was said about this dreadful miscue. The meal went on. Each dish was flawed, ranging from an over salty bressaola to a rib eye steak cut too thin to be properly cooked rare, to skate that had flavorless winkles in the sauce. It came time to leave, as we walked out we passed several staff who made no effort to bid us farewell, and when we passed the host stand, the hostess and Maitre d' were still absorbed in their conversation and we departed with the same feeling we arrived with. Here is a restaurant where, it seems, nobody cares. Since publishing this letter, we've received more in the same vein. We offered MPW the chance to reply, but so far he has ignored us... Read on...