GAZETTE BALHAM, 100 Balham High Road, London SW12 9AA

Visited this branch of the Gazette chain on 7 December 2013 for an early Christmas celebration with 4 friends. Once seated, we ordered fairly swiftly but then realised that no-one had taken our wine order. Finally we managed to give a waitress our wine order but as it had taken quite a long time for this to happen, our starters arrived well before the wine! Cue a flurry of waiter and waitress both trying hurriedly to get the bottles (one red, one rose) on the table. A plethora of glasses appeared, way too many, and in a bid to get the table cleared of excess glassware and get the meal underway, I opted not to taste the rose to save time. BIG mistake as when I did taste it, it was warm and not properly chilled at all. It was a real shame as it was quite an expensive bottle of wine. The whole process had taken so long that it wasn’t worth sending back.  We then had to practically fight off the waitress refilling our glasses as we were hoping it to chill it a little in the ice bucket.

I had the duck rillette as a starter and it was completely tasteless. I asked one of my friends to taste it to see if it was just me but she agreed that it was bland. Another point about this particular branch of Gazette is that they have the most ridiculously small bread baskets, which hold about 4-5 slices at best so with 3 out of 5 of us having a pate/rillettes based starter, we had to constantly try and grab waiting staff to refill the bread basket. Such a waste of their time and ours – buy BIGGER bread baskets for goodness sake!

My main course was steak and frites and if you bill yourselves as a French restaurant, you should be able to get this right and they truly did. Best part of the evening in fact. My steak was perfectly cooked and their frites are gorgeous, not too fat and just crispy enough.

Half our party opted for the cheeseboard as a last course. Really odd system whereby to order your cheese, you go to a trolley and select it by the weight. This was odd enough but then our waitress had absolutely no idea what any of the cheeses were! Not very helpful at all. And of course this being a French restaurant, where they eat bread with cheese rather than crackers, the whole small bread basket saga began once again.

£65 per head with wine. Not bad but a few things certainly need to improve before I would visit again.