This restaurant is tucked in an awkward location within the hotel and was kind of weird navigating through the hallways and stairs to get there. Once inside, the restaurant was bright and open spaced with the tables quite far apart from each other. As a such, it gave an awkward feeling of trying to be a fine dining restaurant in a hotel but coming across as a casual dining bistro.
Irene found this place after going through the list of restaurants on her Taste card. The reviews were pretty good and the Taste card discount even better - 50% off on food.
The occasion was a dinner catch up with Irene's cousin and her boyfriend from Hong Kong. I was the first to arrive and was given the option of a large round table for four or tables by the wall lounge where they would have to put two of the two people table together. I ended up going for the round table without thinking about the implications of it being next to the wine fridges and hence the constant distraction of the waiters getting wine for diners. Fortunately there weren't many other diners by the time Irene and her cousin and boyfriend arrived and so being next to the wine fridge did not turn out to be much of an issue.
We were initially given the set menu where you have the choice of two courses for just under £20 or three courses for just over £20 but then the waitress realised we were using the Taste card, which does not apply to the set menu, so she changed out menu to the a la carte menu instead. A quick calculation showed that ordering the most expensive items for each course would amount to double the set menu three course price so we figured using the Taste card gave us better value.
I ordered smoked duck for entree, beef and rabbit ballotine with pea mash for main and a lemon tart for dessert. The duck was really nice, well smoked and tasted much like smoked ham. The orange wedges balanced the dish out really well. For mains, I was the odd one out as everyone else ordered the Biilingsgate market mixed seafood grill, however, having shared my main with Irene, I was glad to have ordered the ballotine. The seafood grill mainly consisted of a few pieces of fish and a large prawn. Taste wise it didn't tickle my taste buds. The ballotine on the other hand was delicious! Everything from the ballotine, the sauce, fried quail eggs, to the pea mash were delicious. The pea mash was actually peas mixed with potato mash. The peas gave the mash a slightly different texture, which works well! The only grip I have with the dish is having only two small pieces of the ballotine; they were so nice that I was wishing for more!
The dessert, though nice, was nothing extraordinary. Reading lemon tart, I thought it was going to be a round lemon tart that you typically get at bakeries but I should have known that fancy restaurants like these never make things obvious and instead I got a slice of what was probably a lemon cake!
In addition to the food, we also ordered a bottle of a medium bodied merlot blend. The wine was nice but probably needed a bit of airing.
With the Taste card discount applied, the wine ended up costing almost half the price of the dinner for four! One good thing about Landseer is that they didn't include a service charge in the bill, making it genuinely "discretionary", which is the way it should be!
On the whole, it was a great night, with the food and wine above average. And given we were there to catch up, the lack of ambience was well forgotten shortly after the dinner started.
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