Never, EVER again..
Posted: 17 March '10 by Kelly
The Chelsea Wine Bar, Belfast
As it was Mother’s Day on Sunday all the girls in my family decided to go out for a meal and a few drinks. With nowhere booked we decided to give the Chelsea Wine Bar a go.
The Chelsea is in a great area, on the Lisburn Road and right next to some lovely boutiques, art galleries and coffee shops.
According to their website their “chefs have combined the freshest of local ingredients to create a taste-bud appetising menu” and you can “round off your meal with a decadent dessert”, so we thought we were in for a treat.
We were shown to our table by a very friendly and polite waitress who took our drinks order and handed us the menu. Although it was quite large there wasn’t anything on the menu that I wanted to eat, nothing stood out. After much deliberating I ordered:
| Starter: | |
|---|---|
| Thai Crab cakes with pickled cucumber and wasabi dressing | £6.95 |
| Main: | |
| Rib-eye steak with celeriac mash, root vegetables and red wine jus | £18.95 |
| Dessert: | |
| Chocolate and toffee sponge | £4.95 |
| Total: | £30.85 |
The details:
The Thai crab cakes came down to the table and the smell of fish was so overpowering I didn’t even want to taste them. There was a dark brown sauce over the (overcooked) crab cakes that was, according to the manager, a mixture of soy sauce, balsamic vinegar and wasabi(!?!). Now, for the life of me I couldn’t taste any wasabi and there was no heat at all from it – why anyone would mix Balsamic vinegar with soy sauce and wasabi remains a mystery to me!! The only thing I could taste from the dressing was Nam Pla (fish sauce), which as you can imagine was horrible!!! When I sent the crab cakes back the manager was lovely and couldn’t apologise enough, but I wasn’t looking forward to my main course.
My rib-eye steak was huge, which was good as I was hungry from not being able to stomach my starter!! It was also cooked just as I asked ‘medium, rare’. However, the ‘celeriac mash’ tasted nothing like celeriac and actually more like a mixture of Smash and potatoes. The ’red wine jus’ was more like a watered-down gravy – my plate was swimming in it – with not a drop of red wine anywhere to be seen. The root vegetables were dripping with oil which then sat on top of the watery gravy.
You’d think I would have just given up by now, but I thought I’d order a dessert. When it arrived the chocolate and toffee sponge cake was actually just a chocolate sponge with toffee sauce around the edge of the plate. The sponge itself was dry and could of been any flavour and the ice-cream had obviously been in the freezer far too long as it had ice crystals in it. My cousin ordered the ice-cream and the chocolate ice cream actually tasted like food!! All I can think of is the ice-cream had been stored with savoury food and it had flavoured it..
As I was leaving I noticed that I had been charged for the starter which was totally inedible so I went and spoke to a very impatient and impolite barman and he reluctantly gave me the money back – well, he eventually placed the money on the bar counter and walked away, but by this stage I just didn’t care.
Our verdict
The food was really unpleasant and very expensive. I thought that the £18.95 price tag for the main course was way too high, especially when the food was truly awful.
The attitude of the barman didn’t do anything to lessen the sour taste in my mouth.
I certainly won’t be back. The only saving grace for this establishment is that the wine-list was good – I consoled myself with a few glasses of the Villa Maria Sauvignon Blanc.
We might have done away with our scoring system, but The Chelsea still gets a big:
Yes, you read it correctly.. ZERO!
Chelsea Wine Bar
346 Lisburn Road,
Belfast
T: 028 9068 7177
E: info@chelseawinebar.com
W: www.chelseawinebar.com
You can also find The Chelsea Wine Bar on Google Maps.
Tags: belfast, belfast restaurant guide, belfast restaurants, eating out in belfast, restaurant, restaurant review
Categories: Restaurant Reviews
What a waste of money and time!
Completely in keeping with my experiences there.
Their attitude to food and customer service, which is sadly not unique to The Chelsea, is what kept me from bothering to eat out in Belfast for a long time.
I completely agree Steve, what a waste of money! There are PLENTY of nice places out there with far better food and much more sensibly priced. I won’t be back to the Chelsea. It wasn’t just me that thought the food was horrible either, I just didn’t have time to write ALL the complaints that the rest of my family had…
I was with Kelly that day and I had several issues with my meal too. My olives had some sort of white slime over them… God knows what that was!! And the tapenade was not nice either. My salmon main course was overcooked and ended up being dry! I didn’t complain, I should have, but I didn’t!
I won’t be back for food.
I took my family there a few years ago. We ordered food but after 45 minutes it hadn’t come and no explanation from anyone. We ended up leaving and haven’t been back since, probably never will be either!