Sweetings - (Near City of London, South East)

4 /5 Rittick Talukdar: One of those places where if you know, you know. The scallops wrapped in bacon was just perfectly cooked! Excellent fish pie. Oysters were fresh. The wine list is great. Perfect for a quick nice afternoon meal! Make sure you come early or you wont get a seat. And whatever you do, dont miss the sticky toffee pudding! One of the best Ive had recently.

4 /5 Bonsai Ninja: Such an institution and I was only able to visit this place as I had a day off on a weekday! The place is buzzing from the moment it’s opened and you must go there early to make sure that you get a table or wait for a while. We started off with the famous black velvet (champs and Guinness) and oysters. The service is very slow up until you finish your starter so don’t get there too hungry! The food quality is top notch especially loved the generous serving of salmon and eels. The mains were also cooked well. I definitely recommend a visit once in a life time!

1 /5 P B: I was excited, but also a tad apprehensive to try this historic joint. Some places can be historic and still deliver to an exceptionally high standard whilst others are delivering mediocre food trading on their history. Unfortunately, Sweetings falls into the latter category. The whitebait felt mushy and the scallops might well have been a monkfish pretending to be scallops. The worst, however, was the lobster mac and cheese. I mean, how can you get something so simple so wrong? There are only three ingredients. This version was seriously lacking the cheese, was watery and included some sort of weird barbecue sauce. I held my breath for two very traditional desserts, apple crumble and spotted dick. However, even these were disappointing. The spotted dick tasted like plasterboard with a micro portion of custard that might have helped it to redeem itself if they’ve been enough of it. If historic Sheekeys in Soho can continue to do great food and a historic location I don’t know why this place can’t.

3 /5 Ishan Issadeen: Sweetings has been a fixture in the city for decades. I visited for lunch on a Thursday. Knowing it’s a very popular place that doesn’t take reservations I arrived just after opening time at 11:30am, but in hindsight this was too cautious as it only started to fill up at around 12pm (and was totally full by around 12:15pm). The layout is a bit unusual with the majority of seating being along a series of counters, apart from one section of regular tables at the back. The counter seating is quite uncomfortable being on backless stools while there isn’t really any space for your legs under the counter, so you basically have to sit further back and then lean forward while eating your meal. I ordered a few of their headliner items, starting with the prawn cocktail, followed by the fish pie and then a sticky toffee for dessert. The prawn cocktail was fairly standard in flavour but nice enough, and was a strikingly large portion for a starter. I found the fish pie to be rather bland. The fish itself was fresh and well cooked but there was a lack of seasoning throughout and it was also a variant of pie with no pastry casing, but rather topped with a potato mash layer. The sticky toffee was pretty solid and my favourite item of the meal. Service was very friendly. The bill for my meal came to £57 including an £11 glass of white wine. Overall I came away underwhelmed given the reputation and popularity of the place. Service was good and prices seemed fair given the generous portions, however the food itself was average and seating arrangements not great. It does get some credit for the “experience”, being a rarity of an old school British establishment which probably hasn’t changed in decades. But definitely a tick the box one for me, and I don’t see myself returning.

1 /5 Christopher Brown: Haven’t been here in 25 years but was disappointed to remark that the quality of food hasn’t improved with the times. Starters were fine but nothing incredible and we ordered the lobster mac and cheese and it was awful. Over sized macaroni, watery, with a weird brown sauce that was sweet and savoury, which masked the lobster and the tell tale sprinkling of dried onion on top. Barely noticeable cheese. Just a weird recipe that hasn’t evolved and could easily be done better. The decor and vibe is great and I dearly want to support these historical establishments but think they need to modernise the recipes. Not change the menu, just make better versions of what they are currently offering.