Having established themselves in the UK over the past 15 years, Wagamama have now begun to spread their wings abroad venturing across Europe and into the United States.
The new outlet in Copenhagen has taken a prime site in Tivoli Gardens with entrances from the park and the street outside. I dread to think what the ground rent for such a site would be but Wagamama is a popular, high volume restaurant which is invariably very busy.
What is Wagamama? ~ Wagamama serves a mixture Japanese noodle and curry dishes. The menu is pretty much the same in any outlet and the one in Tivoli
looked very similar to the ones in Covent Garden and Bloomsbury I've been to in the past.
The template for each restaurant is the same and this one is no different. Seating is on long communal benches which you will share with other diners. To one side is a long serving bar backed by the cooking area where the chefs work in full view.
The main attraction of these restaurants is the Wagamama 'experience'. Things are done differently here and you are meant to buy into this ethos. The benched seating precludes intimate eating and is meant to promote a livelier atmosphere, this works as you need to speak a little louder so that your dining partners can hear you above your neighbour's conversation. Multiplied across the whole restaurant this means that at busy times it can be quite noisy.
The other aspect of the 'experience' is the pace at which the restaurant operates. The waiters bustle around, showing you promptly to available seats and are quick with menus and order taking. The food is then prepared and served as soon as it's ready regardless of the status of the rest of the order. This means that you may find yourself waiting for your main while others are finishing theirs, or you'll receive your side dish five minutes after your empty main course bowls have been taken away.
The menu ~ The Wagamama menu is split into three main areas. You have the Ramen dishes, big bowls of noodles in soup, there are Kare dishes with noodles in coconut soup and rice dishes. There is also a choice of salads, side dishes and noodle dishes without soup. Most of these dishes are variations on a theme so the Ramen menu offers choices of meat and vegetarian options.
Most dishes I have tried come in healthy sized portions and are invariably quite tasty. For the Ramen dishes the balance of the portion tends to be unsatisfactory, it being a large bowl of broth with lots of noodles but only a few miserly pieces of meat. You are also given a wooden ladle or chop sticks to eat with, not the easiest of utensils and can make it quite threatening to the shirt front. The rice dishes are easier to eat and offer a better supply of meat. The food is pretty straightforward and unobjectionable and the dishes we had in the Copenhagen were no different to the ones I've tried in Covent Garden.
Wagamama - Copenhagen ~ Once inside the restaurant it was indistinguishable from other branches I have been in. With lots of light and space it is a nice environment. This branch is quite new and everything looks clean and fresh.
We were shown promptly to our seats and given our menus. Service to this point had been good but it soon began to slow. It took an appreciable time for a waitress to return to take our order, a little time later our food arrived in the following order: my side dish, my main, our drinks and finally my wife's main. All spread over a fifteen minute time span this made the meal a disjointed, not to say thirsty, 'experience'. Looking for some dessert we spent another ten minutes trying to get a waitress to find us and then serve us, following that we had a ten minute wait for the bill (and had to ask for it twice).
Being in Copenhagen this is more expensive than the branches in London and our total bill came to 430DK (roughly £43) but that isn't bad value for this city.
I've eaten in various Wagamama's several times and I don't really know why I keep going back, except that it is very popular with some people in my office. The food is OK but the service is rarely anything to get excited about and I don't get the whole 'experience' thing. Slow service in a fast paced environment can't be acceptable and is it really so hard to get everyone's food to the table at the same time?
The address of the Tivoli Wagamama is: Tietgensgade 20 1704 Copenhagen v phone : +45 33 75 06 58
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So it's the same then! Exactly what I found in Antwerp
RICHADA 03.08.2008 15:42
Copenhgagen is a long way to go for one of these when there's one in Brighton anyway! Not actually our style of eating this - we like to make an occasion out of it and these places are rather "canteen" like. Richard.
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