Browns Bar & Brasserie

Good place for drinks with friends and it seems like there is always happy hour there.

Great staff, great ambience and great afternoon tea.

Typical British fare
Its decent in that its fairly priced, generic and easy to get seated. The food is not original or exciting but sometimes you just want to go with «vanilla».
In regards to the bar downstairs. Staff can be a bit cold but are fairly efficient. It has a decent selection of beers for a chain. Snag a booth if you can. I wouldn’t recommend unless you are in the area and are too lazy to try one of the surrounding pubs.

Absolutely abysmal food and exorbitant prices for what you get. My Browns Burger was cooked to death and so as dry as a corpse with a cooled and hardened slab of cheddar on top. There was just no finesse to the build of the burger with everything just slapped together. If Hache is a 10 and McDonalds a 4 then this would have been a 2.
My wife’s sea bass was also overcooked and dry and was sitting on a risotto entirely lacking seasoning and flavour.
The bottled water and wine were lovely but at over £8 for a glass eye wateringly bad value.
Never again.

My mom was in town so wanted to take her to an afternoon tea outing. I won’t lie, I booked Browns because it had the best Afternoon Tea deal in central london — £16 for two, which included finger sandwiches, scones with clotted cream and jam, profiteroles, and pots of tea for each of us. The service was great and the ambiance was quite cozy. Definitely a lot of food for the money and my mom couldn’t even finish her profiteroles. I’d recommend it.

We walked in tired, hungry, and still in our travel clothes after 16 hours of traveling and we were seated with gracious smiles.
We didn’t order much as we didn’t plan on a drawn out dinner. I used this opportunity to order my first fish and chips dish and it did not disappoint. Simple yet full of flavor and exceeded my expectations.
My only advice is to be careful of the stairs. They were more slippery than glass stairs. Not very safe!

Ok for starters I can only rate the bar drinks and dessert. Went for an after dinner drink, had a great raspberry martini and coconut daquiri. Many of the specialty drinks are £5 Monday through Friday. For dessert the sticky pudding with toffee sauce and clotted cream. Cozy atmosphere and great service, would definitely return.

Ahh Brown’s. If I could describe you in one word, it would be ‘useful’. A birthday celebration for 8 people? Browns. A catch-​up dinner with a friend you are reasonably close with but make a once-​every-​three-​months cursory effort with? Browns. Graduation, post-​work cocktails, you get my drift.
It does what is says on the tin, and that’s to provide British classics dressed up a bit. I maybe seem too harsh, because I actually like it’s dependability and a chain which offers good food for a good price consistently. I’d actually give it four stars but for perhaps what was a bad location on a busy night (at least I hope). I will come back and give it a second round at some point because the venue is placed in a busy part which I frequent when I travel or am seeking a museum.
I came here with a good friend of mine from university who was in town for just a few days. It goes without saying that we had a bottle of wine. I was tempted by the various pies, the pork belly, the other standard British dishes. But when there is steak on the menu, I almost always can’t resist. The minute steak was good, tender and cooked to the medium rare I requested, with peppercorns on top. My friend’s fish were interesting, featuring capers, pomegranate, dill, and cucumber. We had a nice time though the lighting was a bit too dim, the place was a tad too loud, and the service was a little too slow. Maybe second time’s the charm?

We surprised my sister for a birthday with Wicked tickets, so for dinner before we went back to this place, tried and tested so we knew it was good. I mentioned birthday and got some really lovely extra touches — champagne on arrival and a little birthday cake for dessert, not requested at all!
Our server Magda was AMAZING, friendly and very quick on service without rushing us.
Also amazing value for pre-​theatre menu, 2 courses for £16 and some good choices. We had sea bass, ricotta tortellini, grilled chicken breast and salmon fish cakes, all well cooked and really flavoursome. Love the atmosphere of this brasserie too, little bit fancy but not too stifling.
Of course we had to enjoy pudding and liqueur coffee — we got served the wrong coffees but they were all so nice we didn’t even notice until we’d finished them! Sticky toffee pudding, chocolate marquise and a special lemon tart with pine nuts were amazing! 2 hours there flew by and we barely noticed. Great evening!

The only reason I went there was because it was one of the few options in Cardinal Place that accommodate large groups for business lunches. There is a reason they are not always booked out. They serve typical Brightish food and not very well prepared. I always found it hard to order anything off the menu, because nothing sounded interesting. Some servers are poorly trained. Once a waitress tried to serve my colleague sitting next to me from my side and in the process spilling melted butter over the table and on my dress. I would not go there if I have a choice.

This conveniently placed restaurant — in a business district and well-​lit by many upper-​floor windows — delivers mediocre fare. We were drawn in by its location and views, but won’t be back.
Service was attentive.
The food was simply plain and pub-​like, though presented as if it were finer dining. We were especially disappointed with the ‘filo parcel’ of stilton, sweet potato, squash & spinach, one of the pricier items on the lunch menu. It was a mushy mound of indistinguishable ingredients on a soggy base.
Sorry to have wasted one of our few London meals at Browns.

This review is biased because:
1. We sat outside on a beautiful evening into night
2. I just graduated
3. Great company
That being said it was amazing! My party of 8 came in proper African style (late, for all those who don’t know) and the staff was very patient and held the table for us even as it was getting busy. Great waiter as well. Knowledgeable, fun, patient and not too pushy.
I ordered the pork with apples. HELLLLLLLLLLO! *high five* all round. Best decision ever! And it was a massive portion. I was hungry having not eaten all day and it made me so happy to eat all of it. Everyone else seemed to enjoy their meals as well. I had picked the place because my mom’s a bit of a picky eater and she found it great as well.
Like everyone said, not the easiest to find, but worth it. The view was lovely. So much so, that there were many couples taking engagement pics near by. Tower Bridge was breathtaking by nightfall. Such a great place. Glad it was the choice for a graduation dinner.

A menu and venue that looks very promising sadly failed to deliver. Browns in one of a number of restaurants to be found Cardinal Walk, and should I ever return, Brown’s will not even make it on to the maybe list.
The restaurant looks nice, inching above most of high street chains, and the menu is peppered with interesting variations on the usual British menu. Buy sadly the expectation of a good meal is shortly lived.
We had 8 of us for a drinks before 4 left and 4 of us ate. It was Saturday night, but still only 7:00 and the place wasn’t full. Our order of coke’s and water (the night before a half marathon) took an age and we had to ask not once, not twice but thrice if they were coming at all. Rather than an apology we were told just that the bar was busy.
The food was also potentially being shipped in from Mongolia given the speed of its arrival. This did give us plenty of time however to listen into other complaints from our surrounding tables about cold food and slow service.
The food was, well, OK. My pasta dish of the day was desperately bland and uninteresting. My fellow dinners were equally under welcomed.
So my advice is to give Browns a miss

Not enough staff for a Friday night. Bar took forever and the staff looked and came across stressed.

My friend and I were looking for somewhere for a meal before watching Billy Elliiott at the Victoria Palace Theatre round the corner. A quick internet search threw up Browns, which seemed to have a promising looking menu, with dishes like crab and avocado stack and the use of ingredients like truffle oil raising my hopes that the restaurant could break free from its chain restaurant roots to deliver an exceptional plate of food.
I did book a table though there was probably no need to do so as there were a lot of tables available in the restaurant upstairs. The restaurant does have a lovely futuristic feel to it with a lot of glass admitting lots of lovely sunshine in. We were seated by the window, which was lovely.
Our waitress Karina did look after us well, never hurrying us despite some slow ordering on our part. There were some tempting cocktails and mocktails on offer but we stuck to nice mango & passionfuit and apple & lychee juices.
We started with a flatbread topped with prosciutto & chorizo as well as red and yellow peppers. This was a nice starter to share, which wasn’t too heavy. The rustic haphazard distribution of the toppings, though making it look homemade, did require some re-​arranging so as to ensure that we got some topping with each bite.
For main course, my friend got the crab & tiger prawn linguine, tossed in a lime, chilli and coriander pesto. This was OK but the pesto really needed a lot more pepping up with the lime and chilli to deliver on the flavour hit that it seemed to promise in the description.
I got the slow roasted belly of pork with an orange and cumin glaze, creamed Savoy cabbage, Aspalis balsamic caramelised apple and shards of crispy crackling. By the way, I’m copying this description from the restaurant menu and once again, it failed to deliver on the promise of the description. The pork was a bit dry and there was no real flavour of orange or cumin. The cabbage was overcooked and worst of all for me, the crackling was chewy rather than crispy.
I hope I’m not doing the kitchen a dis-​service in questioning whether these dishes were cooked from scratch on-​site but they gave the impression that the food had been pre-​cooked and re-​heated. Unfortunately, it lived up to the stereotype of a restaurant aimed at the less discerning tourist and City trade.
In summary, nice location, nice decoration, lovely service, fantastic menu writer but sadly, the food doesn’t live up to the rest of the package at the moment.
There were more eateries around the area than I realised and had I know this, we would probably have just wandered round looking at menus and I suspect we would have ended up at the tapas place opposite Browns