We only had one bad experience in London, at the Grand Indian 2 in Villiers Street. Here’s a Google map. Right about where the arrow points is an Indian restaurant that should be avoided at all costs. Here’s a street view (click to embiggen, as always):
My daughter and her boyfriend met up with us in London after dark. Being traveling students, they were of course starving. So off we went to find them a place to eat.
Earlier my wife and I had found some interesting restaurants on the back side of Charing Cross Station, so we wandered that way again. We weren’t looking for anything fancy; a simple pub or even a fast-food place would have sufficed.
If you enter Charing Cross from the front, and angle towards the back left corner of the building, just past the ridiculous chain-style tourist dive that styles itself an “Authentic English Pub!” in blaring neon, you’ll reach a flight of stairs that descends about twenty-five feet to Villiers Street.
Daughter and boyfriend are going through an extended hippie stage, so of course they rejected English pub fare in favor of more spiritually fulfilling Asian cuisine. But hey, if you’re going to eat Indian food, London’s the best place for it outside of the subcontinent itself.
Into this restaurant we went. It had a cozy atmosphere, with one wall lined with mirrors to make it feel less claustrophobic. The layout was interesting: the kitchen appeared to be well below street level, with food arriving via dumbwaiter. There was one other family there, chowing down on what looked like an excellent meal. We seated ourselves, and daughter and boyfriend made their selections from the menu. Wife and I just ordered drinks.
At this point, the proprietor got angry. You order a meal too, he insisted. We explained that the wife & I had already dined, and that we weren’t going to be eating off the kids’ plates. There was no English barrier; the guy understood perfectly what we were saying. Didn’t matter. He was willing to risk a sale to get as much money out of these tourists as possible.
Now I’m familiar with “minimum order” requirements at certain types of restaurants — it’s actually fairly common in San Francisco Chinese places. But it’s always clearly spelled out in signage, on the menus, etc. There was nothing like that in this restaurant. This guy was just determined to take advantage of the late hour and our hunger to force us to buy more food than we wanted.
Well, we weren’t having any of that. So we left and ate somewhere else. It was only the second time in my life I’ve walked out of a restaurant after ordering.
From the review linked above, looks as though at least one other patron had a bad experience. If you’re ever in London, don’t patronize that restaurant. That’ll show ’em how Americans deal with assholes!
What a jerk.
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