We visited Marco Pierre White Steakhouse Bar & Grill Birmingham last night with my mother-in-law and step-father-in-law.
The restaurant is located on the 25th floor of The Cube which is located at Wharfside Street, Birmingham. You therefore get a 360 degree view of Birmingham from this restaurant.The view is pretty decent from the restaurant.
Service-wise MPW needs to work a little on their standards.
Once we’d been sat down with our a la carte menus, my step-father-in-law mentioned that he’d booked this booking on an offer – “Sparkle this Easter – Free bottle of prosecco when purchasing 2 courses” (more on this later). The waitress actually took our menus away later returning to give us the same menus back because she’d confused herself about the type of menus we had to have. Considering we’d been told that they wanted the table back at 7pm this delayed our ordering of food considerably. Aside from this I had no other issues with this particular waitress.
However, some of the other staff including the managers need to be trained on customer service better.
The offer my step-father-in-law booked was apparently only meant to be for Sunday to Thursday. However, after he’d booked the table, he received an email that confirmed the booking and the fact that he’d had the offer booked.
So our waitress told the manager about the situation and he came over to talk to us. However, a waiter came over shortly after with a bottle of Prosecco and opened it for us. Even when we told him there had been some confusion he just went ahead and opened up the bottle and poured it out. We then asked him to call the manager over which he didn’t do. We therefore assumed that the offer was being honoured. Imagine our surprise when we got to the end of the meal and the £44 bottle of Prosecco was added to our bill.
Granted the offer wasn’t meant to be for a Saturday but as the confirmation email stated the offer was booked for us, you’d expect it to be honoured. We therefore didn’t expect that we would have to spend around 30 minutes overall between 5pm and 7pm trying to clear things up with the managers and the staff. Eventually they agreed to just take the Prosecco off the bill but its safe to say the experience of having to deal with staff continuously over something like this ruined the experience of the meal.
We also had the waiter who brought our drinks trying to serve us our drinks while the waitress was trying to take our food orders. This is incredibly distracting and confusing when 2 people are talking to you at the same time.
Food-wise, the food was alright. The starters we ordered were prawn cocktail, Camembert (X2) and Beetroot and goat’s cheese salad. The mains we ordered were the Governor’s fried haddock, Grilled 8oz swordfish steak, Ribeye 10oz steak and coq and shrimp curry.
The prawn cocktail was delicious. I had absolutely no issues with it although it’d be really difficult to ruin prawn cocktail. The coq and shrimp curry was nice but the pilau rice that came with the dish was surprisingly oily! After I’d scooped out all the rice there was actually oil collected in the bottom of the little container.
The rest of our table also thought the food was ok. It was probably the only good thing about the evening aside from the excellent company of course.
At 6pm they also felt the need to turn up the music to such a high volume that you couldn’t actually have any proper conversation. Fair dues to the staff, when we complained about the volume they actually turned down the volume.
All in all I think the thing you’re really paying for at this restaurant is the view and I don’t think I’ll be coming back to this restaurant anytime soon.
Helpful links:
Marco Pierre White Steakhouse Bar & Grill Birmingham : http://mpwrestaurants.com/restaurants/steakhouse-birmingham/
Ratings:
Value – 2.0
Service – 2.0
Food – 3.0
Overall – 2.5
