The Michelin Club started with the Restaurant Benares in Mayfair, London – chosen by Ingrid. We turned up 10 minutes early – so the first low point was that we were seated at the table but no one was ready to serve us – so we waited 10 minutes before we even got offered a drink.
We all 4 picked 3 courses from the A la carte menu, where there was some interesting and different food to chose from, so some nice surprises there. The first sommelier was also really good – knew her stuff and she recommend some excellent wine to match the food. However unfortunately the wine was not being served by the same person and the 2nd sommelier actually introduced our wine as a German wine, even though we picked an Italian one. He even started arguing with us when we said this was not the wine we picked. Turned out that it was the wine we picked but he didn’t even know where it was from – so 2nd low point of the night.
The food was quite nice and one of the highlights together with the dessert wine that is still one of the best dessert wines we have tasted to date. However they didn’t do much to actually tell us what we had on the plates and we had to specifically ask for an explanation of the dessert, which the waiter nearly couldn’t be asked to give us.
Based on that this is a 2 Michelin Star restaurant – we think that they completely failed on service and can only say that we have been to many 1 Michelin Star restaurants that do a better job.
