Graze, Derby Review

Overall Rating

Excellent Interior Design, friendly and attentive staff

Food!

I booked a 'Festive Dinner' with some friends and was really looking forward to the meal. I chose the restaurant on the basis of the reviews and also the fact that it still had availability quite close to the date I wanted. We all chose the fishcakes to start which were quite nice but nothing special and I think the presentation was quite poor (a few lettuce leaves with the chilli jam drizzled across the plate). The main meals ordered were mostly turkey with stuffing. A better description would have been stuffing rolled with turkey breast as there was about 2 inch diameter of stuffing wrapped with about 1 cm thickness of turkey. I had the mushroom tartlet for my main meal and envisaged a melt in the mouth shortcrust pastry base with a creamy mushroom filling. The reality was a thin rectangle of overcooked flaky pastry with mushrooms on top. The rest of my friends were looking on with horror but to be fair it was edible but nowhere near worth the money paid. We also got small portions of carrot and swede mash, roast potatoes, red cabbage and potatoes in cream sauce. The veg was nice but there wouldn't have been enough if we had taken our male partners with us who have bigger appetites. Our other gripe was that we had finished our meal 50 minutes after walking through the door-so it wasn't the relaxed experience promised (felt a bit like a production line). We would ordinarily have stayed chatting with a bottle of wine but we all just wanted to get out of there. We tried originally to reserve a table at Restaurant Pierre (further up the road) but that was fully booked and I can honestly say that Graze doesn't come close to offering the level of ambience and especially quality of food which Pierre offers. I don't think this is Derby's premier dining experience and won't be returning in a hurry.

Members' Comments onjayelle's Review

• francescaw on 19th Dec 2008

  We are very surprised by the comments of this particular guest, Graze has served numerous festive dinners this season and we feel the service and food have offered exceptional value for money, the guest mentions speed of service this is what our customers always put as their top priority, we would also inform that we operate a one sitting policy and would never rush anyone, when a table is booked at Graze it is for the duration of the evening if required, unlike some of our competitors who operate on as much as a three sitting evening, we also would take this opportunity to add that although the food may not have been to the customers taste this could have been mentioned on the evening, more vegetables can be requested, more complimentary bread, we are here to help and offer a service, our chefs are also first class our head chef from a 2 michelin star background and our sous chef 1 michelin star, their knowledge of food is vast, however these sites are designed for customers to add their comments fair or not and on the whole we feel it is a positive thing, but obviously we have to take all reviews very seriously as they are in cyber space forever!!!
  The team at Graze