Last night me and a friend decided that enough was enough and we would meet and go out for dinner. This shouldn't have been as hard as it was but our schedules are both pretty messy and we tend to go for a couple of weeks at a time without seeing each other. Of course then the obvious question was 'where shall we eat?'
I'm a big fan of toptable.com and I've been wanting to try out the majority of their restaurant offers for quite some time. To those who are new to toptable, a bit of history about how their reward scheme works.
It's really very simple: you book a restaurant with their special offers (50% off, 2 courses for £15 etc) through their website by choosing the time, date and number of people. You then add on the offer, put in a name and contact number and it reserves the table for you. After you've dined at the restaurant, you get points for reviewing it - 200 per restaurant. After you've accrued 1,400 points you can eat for free in certain restaurants and as it's a free service to begin with, this is a very good deal!
Anyway, back to the review. We decided last night to go to Mango Tree, a restaurant in Belgravia, as there was a 50% off food offer on toptable.com. I know it's a bit of a celebrity haunt (as shown by the OK! magazine pictures on the way to the loo) and we thought it would be fun so we met up at Victoria and wandered our way over.
The Place
We weren't disappointed. The decor is chic and the room is large and open-plan, making dinner conversation a bit noisy but the atmosphere was buzzy and great. There was an abundance of waiters (always a plus) and the food that was coming past smelled delicious.
The Food
We decided to play it relatively safe and order well-known favourites of ours:
- Gaeng Kiew Wan Gai (Green curry with corn fed chicken)
- Nuer Pad Nam Man Hoi (Stir Fried Sirloin Beef with ginger, garlic and spicy soy sauce)
- Pad Thai Jay (Stir fried Thai rice noodles in house spicy sauce served with Chinese chives, peanuts and bean sprouts)
- Sticky Rice
- Sorbet (Coconut Lime / Lavender Rose / Exotic Fruit)
- Ice-cream (Vanilla Pandan, Chocolate Lemongrass, Very Berry)
(All descriptions taken from the menu)
The food was wonderful. The portions were large and definitely enough for two. It was tasty, spicy and hot: everything I look for in a Thai meal in short. They were more than willing to give us jugs of tap water (not such a guaranteed thing in some London restaurants where getting tap water feels like drawing blood from a stone) and to accommodate our every need.
The Decision
I'd, without a doubt, recommend going back and I'm planning on dragging another friend there asap! The only downside for me was that the 50% off deal only applied to food and therefore the cheapest bottle of wine at around £40 seemed very expensive. However the cocktails were at a much more reasonable price at around £7-8 and were yummy to boot!
Definitely head there soon and experience a bargain meal at one of London's best Thai restaurants!
The vitals:
Mango Tree
46 Grosvenor Place, London, SW1X 7EQ
Tel: 020 7823 1888
Website: http://www.mangotree.org.uk/index.php
Toptable listing: http://www.toptable.com/en-gb/venue/?id=1313
Nearest tube station: Victoria (3 mins walk)
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