I’m not sure why the Hard Rock Cafe is linked with the Victoria Palace Theatre in Victoria because, unless you take the bus or tube, it is a decent 15+ minute walk from the theatre and therefore unless you get to Hard Rock quite early for a meal (say 5.30) chances are you will be rushing your meal and to your show that no doubt starts at 7.30. But anyway, I wanted to see Billy Elliot and this currently seems to be the best offer around. For £60 we got excellent seats in the Dress Circle and a 2 course meal plus softdrink (from a limited set menu) at Hard Rock.

We arrived at Hard Rock Cafe at around 5.45 and it was absolutely heaving. There was one guy handling the seating arrangements and my first, of two gripes, with the Hard Rock Cafe was that this guy was not great at handling pressure and totally unhelpful. The conditions of our deal was that we had to make a reservation, which we did. Obviously there were a lot of walk-ins to Hard Rock Cafe and not enough tables so fair enough the walk-in lot got sent to the bar to wait for a table (the wait at the time was given as between 45 mins to an hour!) When I informed this guy that we’d made a reservation his reply was to add us to the waiting list, to give us a buzzer and to assure us that we would get the first free table. My issue with this was that he didn’t even bother checking our reservation which, if he’d done his job properly, he should have seen that one of the few empty tables was allocated to us and seated us straight away. Normally I wouldn’t have minded but as we had to be out of there by 7.15 at the latest to make our show we were a bit concerned we would be late. Further, its not like this is a new offer so staff should have been aware of the time constraints for diners on this deal. When I asked for a menu so we could at least choose our meal and have it ready for when we were seated he couldn’t even do that and just ushered us to the bar. He quickly scooted away so I tracked down another more helpful member of staff. This is my second gripe – the person who had taken our reservation had failed to make note we were on the Billy Elliot offer so the staff didn’t know which menu to give us. Although the girl was very helpful and in fact arranged that we be seated straight away she had no clue which menu to give us and as a result there was confusion as to what we could order. Finally after about 15 mins we received the right menu and placed our orders.

From that point on the service was perfect though I did have difficulty understanding our Eastern European waitress. However, she was excellent, extremely efficient and super-friendly even allowing us to upgrade one of our desserts for nothing! She also gave us tickets to enter the museum (which unfortunately we didn’t really have time for.) Food was delivered quite promptly and it was very delicious.

I would like to give Hard Rock Cafe another go because the food (selection includes burgers, grills, barbecue, salads etc) we received was quite good and the meals that other diners around us received looked equally appetising. The restaurant itself also had a nice vibe (if a bit loud) and most staff, barring the first hopeless guy we encountered, were generally fantastic. But I really was a bit turned off by my two gripes above.