Restaurants

I had dinner at Pont de La Tour on Friday night with my wife. We were expecting great things but were left wanting more. The venue, location, views and service were great. It was the food that seriously let it down. We started with a couple of Kir Royals in the bar first. My wife pointed out that champagne cocktails were £13.50 each.. surely a Kir Royal isn't a champagne cocktail per se. We were later proven wrong. Oh well, we then had another drink and went through to the dining room. It's smart and comfortable but not exceptional. We ordered our wine, a glass of white to go with our starters. This wine wasn't cold enough for our liking. We should have mentioned it to the waiter really. Anyway, our starters arrived, Roasted scallops with cray fish cakes. We were pretty disappointed with this dish. The scallops were tough and chewy, and the fish cakes were overcooked and tasted like old cooking oil (I know what that tastes like, I used to work in a pub). Not exactly a great start. We then had a bottle of red wine brought out. No problems there, then our main course came out. We ordered the cotê de boeuf for 2 people. Out came a huge hulk of beef on the bone, it was sliced and then served to us. It wasn't cooked to our liking (even though we asked for it medium, it was more like medium rare). It was really tough and not all that pleasant to eat. Chewy and quite average. It was served with roasted vegetables... hardly.. it had one piece of carrot, sweed and some other vegetable. The mash potato that came with it was so salty, like very salty. We left quite a bit of our food. We then ordered desert. I ordered a pear and butterscotch cake with icecream and my wife went for chocolate mousse. When they came out we were both a bit disappointed by them, until we tried each others and decided to swap. I liked hers more than mine and vice versa. Not the fault of the restaurant though. I would say that the amount of ice cream on the plate was tiny! About the size of a 10p piece in diameter. Overall, I'd say this place is seriously overpriced. We ended up paying £200. We were gobsmacked. Those Kir Royals did that! It was made slightly easier to swallow knoing that my wife won a competition at work to win £120 at a restaurant of your choice. So we spent £40 each on the meal really so wasn't a complete disaster. We won't be going back there thats for sure. I'd say if you're minted and don't really care what the food is like then you'd like it, but if you are a real foodie and like to get value for money, I'd avoid. We had an exception meal at Sam's Brasserie in Chiswick a few weeks earlier for £40 each and it was far better than our food at Pont de la Tour. It just goes to show that reputation doesn't mean you'll have exception food.

took my parents there, we had the menu offer for 25 pounds. the mains and desserts were quite nice but the starter!! My mother had a ham something which tasted like spam only worse, I had minced Cornish crab, tasteless and the eggs on top tasted not quite fresh anymore. it was close to being inedible.
shame to serve something like this in an otherwise so nice and expensive (!) restaurant.