Cote Brasserie – Westbourne Grove

Just a normal Wednesday evening: a pre-curling, French restaurant, work night out…

I’m lucky that I work for a company that understands the benefits of team-bonding exercises as a boost to team morale. Not to the extent of ‘all expenses paid’ benders at ‘conferences’ in far flung corners of the world but occasional evenings out with an event and a meal. The latest, on the suggestion of my very greatest friend, my boss and a vegan; was a session of curling. One of those examples of an off the cuff idea gathering momentum and quickly getting out of hand (also a fairly good analogy of our curling skills!)

Such is the lack of abundance of curling options in central London on a Wednesday night that we were forced to take a slightly late booking and eat beforehand. Driven, I suspect, by proximity as much as anything we landed in Cote Brasserie in Westbourne Grove. Both my vegan friend and I joked on finding out about the place that a French-style restaurant was unlikely to suit either of our requirements particularly well and we planned lunch accordingly on the anticipation of a largely chip-based dinner. In fact, he even found a few fairly scathing reviews that suggested that potatoes were very much likely to be a feature of the evening.

Three of us, having got the same train in from Slough, made up the last 3 places in our table for 9 in the corner of the red velvet curtained restaurant. To my surprise and delight, the manager shortly came up to our table and checked that she was right in understanding that there was a vegan and dairy-free requirement in the booking (kudos to the organiser for mentioning this when booking!). The manager explained that vegan options were limited in the main menu but there were a few options that could be created to meet my friend’s requirement. He settled on a dressed salad starter and vegetable risotto for main course. For me, there were more options and she said she would go away and annotate a menu for what I could and couldn’t have. Full marks so far!

When she came back she had a menu with some scribbles on but had clearly memorised quite a lot of the detail. She proceeded to talk me through the menu in quite some detail, describing the dish and pointing out potential issues. In principle this was excellent customer service but in practice it was an overload of information and despite her written notes and memorised ingredients she seemed to be guessing some of the ingredients and focusing on irrelevant details. (Much like a child taking a test that has panicked in answering a question about how Henry VIII had shaped the current religious framework of the UK and just decided to write down everything they know about the monarchy in the hope of hitting some relevant points in the crossfire). I fancied the crab mayonnaise and in an effort to move her along asked whether this was suitable; she seemed to think that mayonnaise itself would be unsuitable and I hope it wasn’t just me that convinced her that it would be. By the time we’d finished I was clinging to a few mental notes of things that I think she’d said would be suitable and that seemed appealing. Effectively I’d have been just as good scanning the menu myself and then asking them to check that the things that seemed likely to be OK would be.

Another impact of this type of service was that mine and my friend’s orders were taken by the manager and the rest of the table by another waitress. Not a problem in itself but it meant when the food arrived nobody was really sure who had ordered what. As a result, my friends vegan starter was given to another colleague who was halfway through his second mouthful before being told it wasn’t his. My friend was offered a new serving but was happy to just give the guilty colleague an appropriate level of grief and play the martyr. My starter was very tasty; delicate tarragon cutting through the flavour of the seafood. Main courses brought a similar level of confusion with me handed a chicken dish with a (milk containing) sauce before quickly having it swapped with the appropriate alternative. Both my friend and I agreed that the main courses were nice but failed to live up to the promise of the starters.

Due to the quick nature of our turnaround before Curling we left pretty quickly after finishing our main courses. A slightly mixed experience in terms of allergy management. On one hand a clear desire to cater for dietary requirements with our booking clearly raising a red flag to the management in advance. However, a lack of system for processing such requests, no customer facing allergen menu and a scatter-gun approach to highlighting allergens on the main menu let them down. I wanted to thank the manager for her effort as we left, I just wish she’d been given a better platform to help from in the first place.

There are two further points to make: My wife has eaten in Cote Brasserie in Windsor and said that she was quite impressed with their service. A similar approach but left with a menu with notes/items crossed out and generally quite happy with the service. The second is that it occurred to me after we’d eaten that my crab mayonnaise was served on sourdough toast. Not in itself noteworthy but when my friend asked about getting sourdough bread as a starter he’d been told it contained a small concentration of milk. I don’t know whether they changed the bread, the concentration was too small or I’m yet to detect a reaction but that would be very disappointing if that slipped through.

We weren’t really sure what to expect for curling and the uncertainly was only magnified by being walked down aisle 13 of the 12 bowling lanes to get to the ice rink. After having spiked over-shoe frames attached to our feet and stepping out (surprisingly confidently) onto the ice, we were shown to our lane and split into two teams of four. A brief introduction into the scoring (we subsequently changed to using the correct scoring, such was our expert knowledge of the sport) and a pair of brushes later and we were winging massive hunks of granite down the ice. Not marble, as one colleague incorrectly suggested! On the first throw most stones barely made it half way down the rink but by the end of it we could scarcely tame the strength to stop it bouncing off the back wall. I’m still not sure to this point whether my ferocious brushing made any difference – the fact that most of my colleagues had given up, I suspect not. It was great fun though and our time was up before we knew it. Everyone had a laugh and I’d thoroughly recommend it as a team event. What’s more – no one fell over! A pale ale shandy over a heated conversation about the police state worries of unregulated DNA testing in comparison to Cyprus in the pub and then it was time to get the train home and call it a night. Definitely not the worst work night out.