This almost became my first ever one-star review, and the only thing that saved it is the fact that I didn’t wake up with food poisoning in the night.

I have complained before about the lack of decent eating options in Richmond, especially for a reasonably priced, midweek meal, and there are only so many times in one year that you can go and have the set dinner at the Ivy. Yes, there are some casual dining chains like Cocotte, but that is more canteen and less restaurant, and it certainly doesn’t have the bistro charm you might be looking for in an intimate meal à deux.

About a Boycott

I had been boycotting Côte since the introduction of a new set menu, brought in when the chain was acquired in October last year by the Karali Group, who were best known for at one point running more Burger Kings than anybody else in Britain, all 74 of which they sold off in 2022. They promised a return to the classic bistro fare, but removed most of the old favourites, and added seafood linguine as a classic French bistro dish, as well as “unlimited fries”. That might work for the BK crowd, but if you’re appealing to a younger audience, best not to piss off the older one at the same time. I paraphrased all of this in an email exchange with their head office, and I like to think that somewhere in a spreadsheet there is a cell marked “angry man, Richmond, do not engage”.

Clearly I was not the only person horrified by what had happened, and in July, I got an email saying, in effect, guess what, we were wrong, it turns out people actually liked the food we used to serve.

So, as a man of my word, I went back. Mrs Nigel and I had a free evening, and fancied a reasonably priced meal, in a favourite location. We have been going to the restaurant since before it was Côte even, and when full and lively, serving good value, well-executed food, it is hard to beat: It is even where I discovered Negronis.

On this occasion, it failed on literally all of those criteria.

Double Fault

The Ivy Café, which is just over the road, with its more expensive set dinner and more expensive wine, was pretty much full. In the rather capacious Côte, you could have played a vigorous game of tennis and not troubled the few other patrons, or indeed either of the two waiters. Service was not unfriendly as such, but just completely indifferent. One of the great (pre-Brexit) joys of Côte was the incredible bustle of the mainly French waiting staff, balancing huge trays of food and drinks with not a single mishap, providing impeccable and (by French standards) friendly service. Sometimes you actually felt they might be pleased you were there. I’m pretty sure someone could have dropped dead face down in their soup last night, and it would have taken until the end of service for anyone to notice.

This may sound like an odd complaint, but the set menu is too cheap. Somewhere in head office there is a person whose entire job is to look at a revenue graph pointing in the wrong direction and think “what if it were cheaper?” and then send me another email about it. They will carry on doing that until either the graph fixes itself or they are made redundant, and I know which way I would bet. The actual answer is much simpler and much more annoying, which is that the food offering is not worth the money, even at £20 for two courses.

Ice, Ice, Maybe?

Let me walk you through the actual meal, starting with the wine. I am always very pleased to see wine by the carafe, as you don’t always want a full bottle. But warning bells should ring, and ring hard, when the glasses are put on the table with a big tumbler of ice cubes and a spoon. Regular readers will know that I have been waging a long and unsuccessful campaign on this front. At Ox and Finch I had to conduct a small physical intervention involving a wine bucket, and at Squisito I raised it again to no discernible effect, but this is the first time that anybody has simply handed me the ice and invited me to sort the problem out myself. Honest, at least.

Côte has some sort of exclusive wine that sits at the top of the wine list, not the cheapest, but as it seemed to have arrows pointing at it, we thought we’d try it. Honestly, it tasted alright but was at actual room temperature on a night when the thermometer had touched 30 degrees, and by the time you had piled in enough ice to make it drinkable, it was too dilute to taste anything. I know there seems to be some sort of weird Gen Z thing about ice in wine at the moment, but for all of the middle-aged people who actually eat in Côte, please just chill the wine. I did think about a Negroni, for old times’ sake, and I will come back to why I didn’t.

Nice Cube?

From there on to the food itself. We both had the pork rillettes to start. Absolutely tasteless. Even with the garnishes, it was just wet meat, with bread, supposed to be toast, but clearly it was the toaster’s night off. I went through the usual ridiculous peanut allergy charade where the only difference between my meal and Mrs Nigel’s was a small flag attached to a toothpick, although in fairness the toothpick did eventually prove useful in getting the stringy bit of pork out of my teeth. I appreciate the effort, and I appreciate the liability, but please don’t make me feel like a leper.

And that, incredibly, might have been the high point. For main, I had the poulet grillé, which is one of the dishes they made such a fuss about bringing back, so you would think that somebody might have been keeping an eye on it. In lockdown, when Côte started delivering to homes to stay afloat, we ate this a lot, and they managed to get it from a central kitchen, into an oven-proof container, across London to my kitchen and past my own cooking, and it still tasted excellent. Last night they only had to get it up the stairs, and it arrived flabby and almost devoid of flavour, having apparently spent a portion of its life in a warm pool somewhere on a spa break. Poor Mrs Nigel had the fish parmentier, and in it were industrially produced cubes of fish(?), of a sort I have not seen since they were being handed round on a cocktail stick next to a piece of pineapple. She turned one over with her fork a couple of times, put the fork down, and said that on balance she would rather have the “toast”. She was being generous about the toast.

Cheesed Off

There was, I saw, a cheese course available for £3 on top of the £24 three course menu. Normally that is the sort of value that has me reaching for my wallet before the waiter has finished the sentence, and on any other evening of my life I would have had it. By that point, though, I had reached peak sadness, and I was genuinely concerned that another twenty minutes in that room would see me join the other patron face down in his plate, both of us waiting patiently to be discovered at the end of service.

It was sad. The service was sad, the restaurant felt sad, the food was sad. It was a real triangle of sadness. And for us the worst part was sitting there reflecting on some of the great meals we have had there as a couple and with family, Sunday lunches, birthdays, pre-theatre, post-theatre, pretty much every combination, and realising that it has come to this. Yes, casual dining is struggling, but if the Ivy, which aims at a similar market with a similar menu at a higher price, can pack itself out every night, Côte should be able to do the same.

Nogroni

Which brings me back to the Negroni that I never ordered. Regular readers will remember that Cliveden did it to me twice in one year: a fabulous drink alongside food I sent back in April, and a stellar one alongside a Dover sole best not spoken of in August. So I had to formally concede that the Negroni test is not a report from the kitchen at all, but a barometer for the entire evening. Sitting in that room, in the place where I first discovered the drink, I did not need a cocktail to tell me what everything else had already made perfectly clear. And they’d only have brought the ice cube separately.

Verdict: Chill Out

I promised I would give Côte another try when the menu changed, and I’m sad that I did. A once great restaurant chain is now in its death throes, and someone needs to look at the whole thing backwards. Start with what people want, good-value French classics, then cook them properly, then price the menu from there so you make money: It won’t be £20 a head. But I’d pay it. Pay the people running the restaurants properly too, or at least hang around the smoking area at the Ivy and poach a few. Buy fridges that work.

But that won’t happen, which is a shame. Chain restaurants have become profit centres, not places people go to eat and enjoy themselves. I’m now sad in advance about The Real Greek, which has over the years offered a surprisingly good facsimile of an actual Greek meal, and which, I discovered while researching this review, has been “rescued” by Côte’s new owners. Robot-cut feta and frozen pork cubes seem almost inevitable.

Conclusion

Overall Rating: 1.5/5

• Food: 1.5/5
• Service: 1.5/5
• Drinks: 2/5
• Ambience: 1/5
• Value for Money: 1/5
• Price: £

Would we go back? Only when Côte clears out, and someone better takes the space.

Côte, Richmond: https://www.cote.co.uk/restaurant/richmond