Judging by the glossy metropolitan food supplements and awe-struck newspaper reviews, you might think London is a dining-out nirvana where every earthly cuisine is served up at its finest. Luckily for the schadenfreude-seeking, TripAdvisor and its diners’ reviews teach us that there are still pockets of resistance, where hygiene is unheard of, customer service is just a rumour, and twelve-and-a-half per cent is silently added to your bill however appalling an experience you suffered. What did I learn from scouring the dregs of London’s culinary disaster areas? Trafalgar Square, Covent Garden and Spitalfields are particularly happy hunting grounds for the gastronomic masochist. Avoid afternoon tea, all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets and anywhere you eat with a Groupon or Wowcher offer. You have been warned.
1. How not to greet customers – by the staff at an Ethiopian restaurant in Camberwell.
2. Gordon Ramsay gets both barrels from a proud parent who thought their six-year-old would prefer a seven course tasting menu to a bucket of Haribo.
3. Ok, so you don’t like foie gras, you don’t approve of foie gras, you would never eat foie gras. But the words themselves, on a restaurant menu, freak you out this much? Heck, I don’t like bananas, but I don’t have a stroke when I’m offered a banoffee pie for dessert.
4. A daughter supplies her own cake for her mother’s birthday at snooty guillotine-dodgers’ eatery Le Caprice.
5. Samuel Beckett in Gourmet Burger Kitchen.
6. This Brixton restaurant goer was looking forward to her grub – just not one that was alive.
7. After a disastrous meal served with sub-temperature wine, this “disgusted and humiliated” couple fled Mayfair’s Le Gavroche…
8. This South London chef has an unadmirably hands-on approach to his job…
9. A customer at Michelin-starred The Ledbury sprinkles his review with a soupcon of xenophobia.
10. A slice of Italy – stale, unappetising and curled up at the edges.
11. Service with a shrug in Clerkenwell.
12. This Camden restaurant has a dress-down policy.
13. This Covent Garden restaurant also offers crappuccino.
14. Perhaps Punk’d really has started targeting the capital’s Indian takeaways.
15. A novel way to avoid the interminable wait for the card machine at the end of the meal.
16. Afternoon tea joint pours on the insults.
17. UKIP members end the search for their Christmas party venue.
18. A bum deal at a Chinese all-you-can-eat buffet.
19. Flipping awful pancake place in Southwark.
20. Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.
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