Aubaine Mayfair

Great food great service good value more for lunch then dinner.

Greeted by very friendly and efficient staff. But was disappointed by lukewarm main. No time to complain and send back as only had an hour lunch break from my own work. Probably wont visit again.

From the moment I entered the curved glass front door of this eatery, the warm, energetic and aromatic atmosphere hit me in abundance. I was greeted by a professionally friendly member of staff, quickly went through the necessary formalities of confirming my booking and was led to my table for two. My coat was taken (well, borrowed for safe keeping) and I was offered a drink while I waited for my lunch companion. We ordered from the £15.50 two course lunch menu which had a small but very well spread choice of meat, poultry, fish and vegetarian. The waitress was spot on. She knew about the dishes and took our order without fuss. The starter and main course was served well, and with the right delay. The meal was plated attractively and was of a good, if not generous proportion. In summary, a really good experience for a comparable price to a pizzeria but within a smart restaurant/bistro setting.

This was our first visit to Aubaine upon recommendation from a very good client who frequents this venue several times on a weekly basis. Our waiter was unhelpful and not very friendly. Two out of three diners ordered the set menu, upon serving the food the "salmon" salad had one piece of salmon and the "beetroot" salad had none. We sent the dishes back and it took almost 30 minutes to be re-served a "cold" dish. We complained for the substandard service and the time delay and had expected it to be an efficient service given our recommendation. When our main courses arrived, two fish dishes and one steak were barely warm. As we were hungry and had time constraints we ate the food. Upon ordering one of the fish dishes the diner stated she did not want rice could she have something else we were told no by the waiter, we suggested serving the meal without rice and he changed his mind and offered to serve with spinach. Overall our client was embarrassed at suggesting this restaurant as we are new in the area and although we were given a 20% discount did not excuse the overall service and quality of the food served. To recommend this to senior management in our company or colleagues we are reluctant because of this poor service.

French food in London can often be a culinary minefield, with the experience ranging from the old-fashioned and high-end (think Gavroche) to the touristy and tacky (Café Rouge). Aubaine manages to sit comfortably between these two extremes and constitutes an enjoyable and fairly priced – if not exceptional – dining option. First impressions certainly do count in restaurant terms and the furnishing of Aubaine’s Dover Street branch was certainly superb, not just a vast improvement on the clinically metallic edges of the predecessor on this site (Chez Gerrard), but lovely in its own right. The mellow grey of the walls complemented the white of the furniture; there were plants on every table, there were good quantities of natural light and well-balanced acoustics resulting from the appropriate spacing of tables. The menu offers a choice of around a dozen different starter and main dishes, and the three of us who dined here on this occasion found little cause for complaint regarding either the presentation or the pricing of the food. The service, however, left a little more to be desired. My starter was definitely better than the main: to begin, a luxuriously rich duck egg was placed upon wonderfully fresh and crunchy asparagus, itself seated upon an inventive and well-matched broad bean pesto. The main of scallops was more pedestrian and the pea purée unpleasantly salty. Our bottle of Picpoul was also a good food pairing and competitively priced at less than £25 (the wines range from £18 to £60+). However, I counted at least four failings with the service, all of which could easily have been avoided (notwithstanding those my comrades may have observed): first, one of our party was originally not given a plate on which to put his discarded mussel shells; second, and most egregiously, we had to ask for refills of our wines glasses – since the bottle was being kept cool elsewhere – and indeed when we did ask, the waiter sought initially to sell us another bottle rather than refill our glasses from the existing one; next, one our coffees was delivered incorrectly (a double rather than a single espresso), for which there was but a token apology; and, finally, the waiter spilled a bottle of discarded tonic water on our table when clearing it. None of these alone would constitute a failing, but (at least) four faults combined might be considered sufficient reason not to make a return visit an immediate priority.

I suppose I should start with a confession – I was lucky enough to have won £120 towards my dinner in Square Meal’s ‘Be the Critic’ competition, so I didn’t pay the full bill, but also I’d like to think that didn’t influence my views either. Aubaine is a small chain of restaurants. I went to the Mayfair branch in Dover Street for my prize; the staff, in particular Laura, were really helpful sorting out the arrangements and didn’t have any difficulty with my usual attempts to move the goalposts by turning a meal for 2 into a meal for 3 and also accommodating our late arrival thanks to traffic problems. That good experience with the team continued on arrival with everyone really polite, helpful and friendly – the service doesn’t have that ultimate polish that you get in the top London restaurants, but also it’s not burdened with the occasional snobbish distain that accompanies that. The restaurant itself is long and narrow, with lots of pale, warm tones and jars full of highly coloured meringues and macaroons, which looked lovely, but strangely didn’t seem to feature on the menu. Table are quite close together, but we went on a cold Thursday night and it wasn’t packed out so that wasn’t a problem. Food is surprisingly good – I must confess to having had relatively low expectations, mainly as it’s not somewhere that I’d normally think of going, but starters and desserts were as good as anywhere I’ve been recently – in fact both better than Koffmans, which is far more celebrated. I started with artichoke soup with truffle, it arrived properly hot, which is always a pleasant surprise, was really thick and creamy with loads of warm flavours. I followed this with supreme of chicken with side dishes of spinach and French fries, the chicken was a little bit drier than I’d have ideally liked, but other than that everything was fine. Desserts were from a selection of cakes and pastries – one of those moments when you really want to have one of everything on offer, since they all looked fantastic and I love cake, but I settled on a raspberry tartlet, which was excellent, great pastry and really fresh flavours. The bill, if I had been paying it in full, was £185 for 3 – which for 3 courses, water, service, a bottle of wine and 2 glasses of champagne in somewhere based in the heart of Mayfair seems pretty decent value. I enjoyed it and will be going again, though I think that perhaps it would make a better lunch venue than an evening venue. Thanks both Square Meal and Aubaine.