Bellini

Went with my wife and visiting mother in the run up to Christmas - the wife having been before and had an excellent experience.

Their greeting was friendly enough and coats were taken in the lobby. You have a choice of ordering whilst having a drink in the small but cosy bar to your left, or entering the dining room to your right - being rather hungry we went straight into dine.

Service was reasonably attentive but was slightly let down by the drinks order taking a quite a while to arrive whilst we had to ask for the breads before they appeared. Given the prices and rather pretencious surroundings we expected better frankly. The wine list however, whilst pretty extensive, was well organised and had some good reasonably priced bottles nor was the bottled waters the ususual rip off.

Starters included a soup (fair) and a mixed antipasta (always a good measure of an Italian and excellent quality here) whilst the mains were a sea bass, breast of chicken and silcilian pasta dish with tomatoes and chilli. The pasta was reportedly not quite al dente but the chicken was excellent. The fish was very nicely cooked however and the accompaniments were delicious. Puddings were impossible as we were too full but the coffee were very good indeed.

The room was pleasent enough but that night at least had a curious mix of couples, old men with trophy girlfriends and a table that had drinks, looked at the menu for a long while whilst downing a bottle of wine and then left. Weird.

Overall a reasonable experience but not up to the standard of my wife's first visit . Some very good cooking although not uniformly good enough to be outstanding. Service was also generally good but again just lacked that relaxed efficient charm to take it to the next level. Somehow though the total experience added up to less than the sum of the parts - it has the feel of a place that needs to be taken in hand and shaken up by a really professional front-of-house manager.
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Nick W
Friday, February 01, 2008