The Wallace Collection - Food for thought?

I took a party from the Ashmolean to the Wallace Collection in London on Friday. It has a world-famous range of fine and decorative arts from the 15th to the 19th centuries with lots of French 18th-century paintings, furniture, arms & armour, Sevres porcelain and Old Master paintings. The stunning Great gallery reopened in September after re-furbishment.

Trying to do the 25 galleries in one day is exhausting.There is a particular kind of weariness which comes with mooching round galleries & museums. You glaze over into sensory over stimulation. If you have a guide your brain ceases to process the reams of information. Really the only sensible way to "do" a gallery or museum is to cherry pick a few things you are most interested in and concentrate on those. However, if you know you probably won't go back, the temptation is to see it all. Then you end up not really seeing a lot of it.

In 2000 the inner courtyard was given a glass roof &  a restaurant was started named "Cafe Bagatelle" after the Hertford's chateau Bagatelle. The Wallace Restaurant is now run by Peyton and Byrne as a French-style brasserie. It's a really nice space for a restaurant, which makes the fact that our experience there was appalling more than disappointing.

We arrived for pre booked & paid for coffee & biscuits which was fine. We were given menus & asked to make a selection for lunch in advance. When we arrived back exhausted after a  2 hour tour they weren't ready for us. There wasn't a designated area a for our group to sit together, so the waiters could concentrate on serving us as a group. There simply weren't enough waiters to cope.

No one seemed to know what people had ordered. The food simply didn't arrive - for a very long time. Over an hour in most cases. More than one person gave up & left because it was eating into our individual time to look round the gallery. You would have thought that with a couple of hours notice the cold food could have been plated up, covered & the customer identified. (They had taken our names).

People ordered wine to go with their food, several times. It didn't arrive until they had almost finished their meal. The waiter took one bottle away before the table had finished it. We had to ask for cutlery. One lady asked for some pepper & was told "you can see that it is s for salt" by a very harrassed waiter.

The portions were miniscule - Nouvelle Cuisine gone mad. Mains were more like starters. A "piggy terrine" was served in a small glass yogurt pot with no celery salad & a small slice of bread. The lady was told that they had run out of the salad when she complained. Nothing was offered in it's place. Presumabaly they hoped she wouldn't notice the absence. One lady had  a smoked salmon salad which was less than I would give for a starter. Others had the soup which was cold and watery & served with no bread. When I spoke to the catering manager about how poor we thought the restaurant was, she said "well it's a set menu for ladies who lunch"!

By this time there were justified rumblings among the group. Fortunately a senior manager came to speak to me to ask what the problem was. As you can see from the length of this, it was quite a long converstaion. However, he was brilliant. He agreed that it wasn't acceptable & said the people I had been trying to help didn't need to pay, which I thought was generous. (The prices for what we had were outrageously high). How refreshing to have someone who is decisive & doesn't try to come up with pathetic excuses.

Having now looked on line I realise that our experience is far from unique. Another Friend of the Ashmolean who wasn't with us also told me that his NADFAS group had had very similar problems. It's such a shame. To have such a prestigious international museum & lovely venue totally let down by the catering is unforgivable. Goodness know what foreign visitors think.

Are the Wallace trying to make up for not charging an entrance fee, or trying to pay for the gallery refurbishment? Whatever the reason they need to address this, sooner rather than later.