Vegetarian Hall of Shame: Matsuri St. James's, London

Posted on 2008/07/27 14:49:33 (July 2008).

The next entry in my vegetarian hall of shame series is Matsuri St. James's - a Japanese restaurant in London.

I had been to their other branch - Matsuri High Holborn - a couple of times before, and whilst I wasn't bowled over by the vegetarian options (not nearly as interesting as vegetarian sushi could be, and very pricey for what it was) it had proved a useful place to entertain non-vegetarian colleagues visiting London from other offices, who generally seemed quite impressed by it. I imagine these sorts of business customers probably account for the bulk of their clientèle.

However, until yesterday I had never been to Matsuri St. James's. Chie had noticed that there was a special offer for Saturday lunchtime on their website, and as our friends Leon and Yukari were also coming into London for the day, we thought this would be a good opportunity to give it a try.

Chie had made a point of checking that they had vegetarian options available for the lunchtime special, and this really is the core of my complaint.

This page on their website advertising their "Natsu Matsuri" offer very clearly states that vegetarian options are available.

I'll quote the main text here as if they have any sense I imagine they'll update it following our criticisms yesterday:

Natsu Matsuri

To celebrate the summer St James's would like to offer you a special menu available only on Saturday and Sunday lunchtimes throughout July and August 2008.

For £12.5 you can enjoy a buffet style, eat as much as you want, Hiroshima-style Okonomi-yaki and California Roll, followed by a Rib-eye Steak or Seafood Teppan-yaki main course.

Vegetarian options are also available

Special discount offers cannot be used with this menu.
A discretionary service charge of 12.5% will be added to your bill.

So, on arrival at the restaurant, we were seated and they took our drinks orders. We then told them we were all going for the lunch buffet and mentioned that one of us (me) was vegetarian. So they then brought me a menu, and left again, with which I was a bit confused.

We then mentioned that we were under the impression (from the website) that there was a vegetarian option for the buffet itself, and were a bit unclear as to why I had a menu.

The waitress, who seemed also quite confused by this, told me I could go and help myself to the Okonomiyaki and Californian rolls. "Oh?", I enquired, "But don't the Okonomiyaki contain bonito (fish flakes) and the California rolls contain crab?". So I explained to her that those things were not vegetarian and that the website had said there were vegetarian options available. So the waitress went off to the head chef. When she came back, she informed us no, the chef wouldn't do that.

We seemed to be having communication difficulties with the waitress, so Chie asked to see the manager. They had a conversation in Japanese, Chie explaining about the website, and the manageress said she had checked the website just now, and didn't see any mention of the vegetarian options, and that they would contact their web designer.

Please take a look at the block of quoted text from their website again. The page was just made up of four short paragraphs, one whole paragraph of which says quite plainly "Vegetarian options are also available". This page is linked from the main matsuri-restaurant.com page. I really can't fathom how you could look at that page and not see the "Vegetarian options are available". It sounds fairly unambiguous to me, and the website was still bearing this text even 24 hours after we left. Besides, the fact that she even went and checked in the first place is a little confrontational - whatever happened to "the customer is always right", which in Japanese is put even stronger - they say "the customer is god".

The manageress also made what I considered to a slightly offensive remark about our original waitress, which didn't really seem appropriate.

The manageress then said my only option was to order a la carte, at the regular menu prices, but did "helpfully" suggest I could share any of the buffet dishes with the other three people. At this point I wondered if she was drunk or something, and tried to point out that none of the things in the buffet were vegetarian, which was the whole point. I had that horribly sinking feeling you get when you realise you're just going round and round in circles. So all our protestation was in vain. All in all she was thoroughly unprofessional, and both Chie and I wondered how someone like that could get a job at a restaurant like this.

Given that the menu is basically the same as the one at High Holborn I wasn't particularly enthused at paying significantly more than the buffet price for significantly less food, and by this point there was a bit of a bad atmosphere in the place. So we decided to just finish our drinks and leave, without ordering any food.

You'd think they might offer to give us our drinks on the house or something, but no, when we asked to pay for them they brought us a bill, and with the service charge already added on, no less! Chie was having none of that, and very quickly crossed the service charge out and asked for the rest of our change. We left distinctly unimpressed.

I suppose I can't justifiably be angry at them for making a mistake - which presumably is what led them to have this misleading information on their website. However, the fact that we had come to the place specifically because of that piece of information, and that they then handled it so poorly once we were there, was just awful.

How hard would it have been for them to have picked a couple of similar things and offered it at the buffet price - say an assortment of vegetarian sushi while the others were having their California rolls and Okonomiyaki, and then a vegetable teppan-yaki while the others had their main course?

And it just made no business sense - they were completely shooting themselves in the foot. Had they just made a tiny bit of effort on my behalf, they would have had four paying customers, and it wasn't as if the place was particularly busy - less than a quarter of the tables were occupied.

Plus on top of that the staff were just incompetent or downright rude, not what you expect in an upmarket Japanese restaurant like this.

So Matsuri St. James's takes a place in the Vegetarian Hall of Shame, and I won't be going back there again.

Update 13th August 2008: We wrote a letter to Matsuri, and after a few days got a reply with an apology, including a voucher for 25% off our next meal.