Chez Bruce has long been on my to do list ever since I think it was Gary who recommended it to me all those years ago. Using my birthday next week as an excuse, ha ha, I got Nate, Caro and Pat out for a night out. Chez Bruce is in Wandsworth so an area where I don’t normally go, that is south of the river! It’s a fairly smallish location but was apparently just about to go under renovation. Pat and I were just hoping it wasn’t going to be like Viktor where they were just trying to run the ingredients down! Luckily it wasn’t like that at all.

Service, at the start, was quite good. Nate and Caro were running a little late and even though they were fully booked for the evening there was no pressure on us to turn the table around. Very nicely they even let me charge my iphone on the laptop they were using to manage bookings. They put us at the front of the room which was nice because we could enjoy the last light of summer that way. The drawback to this position was that our main waitress barely paid attention to us after our food started arriving though I noticed that didn’t affect the service the tables next to us were getting. Service also eventually started to get steadily worse – the lady who served our drinks kept getting our drinks wrong and to be honest she just didn’t seem like she could be bothered to get it right, food was very slow in coming out (taking almost 40 minutes between courses) and generally wait-staff just weren’t giving our table any attention at all. This was quite surprising as normally in a Michelin-starred restaurant service is their top priority.

Food-wise at least it was all very well put together. Surprisingly there was no amuse bouche, which I must admit I’ve come to expect now from these kinds of restaurants, or no other delights though we did get some nice fresh bread at the start.

Our meals consisted of quite high quality ingredients and mostly working together though my main, Sea bream with provencale vegetable relish, grilled baby squid, sauce nero, gnocchi and almonds, was more complicated than it needed to be with so many competing ingredients that it was hard to tell the flavour or theme. The nero squid sauce was divine however and the baby squid themselves very tender. Food portions were quite reasonable too.

In a sign that I’m starting to get used to rich food I voluntarily opted for the Roast calf sweetbreads with truffle veloute, mushrooms, spatzle and peas. This was gorgeous!

The delightful food was finished with a rather large crème brulee.

My experience at Chez Bruce tonight felt like quite a mixed bag – I was very disappointed in the service which started off so promisingly but I was very happy with the food. I’m hoping the blip in the service was just that and not a longer term sign that its going down hill.