Cafe Rouge

Good venue for a fairly informal family meal. Food was good and the service friendly.

Food as good as the cook’d be french, stunning friendly waitresses and a lovely ambience!

The staff is quite friendly and the place is good enough to take a cup of tea or coffee.

The staff were friendly enough but not very attentive — we were given a cracked wine glass for example.
The food was extremely poor value for money. No bread to start. Steak/​frites for £12 — £13 for a very small steak that was average in quality and over-​salted frites — and the cheek to charge £2 extra for a tiny jug of not great Bearnaise sauce. Portion control gone mad.
I suggest you could go to the Felin Fach Griffin or Walnut Tree restaurants and pay a similar price for far far better food than this.
Maybe OK for a prix fixe lunch or voucher meal, but definitely not for a night out treat.

Coming for food in Café Rouge is one of my guilty pleasures. I’ve eaten here quite a few times but always celebrating something as it’s a bit on the expensive side.
I went to my first one in London and was absolutely amazed at how authentic the experience seemed. They had French speaking waiting staff and the menu was in French etc. I have to say it’s probably the closest I’ve come to tasting food that replicates the experience of eating in France. Particularly, the seafood.
I tend to have either a starter or a main and a dessert to save money. Chicken Liver pâté is divine. They’re not keen on this of course but will generally give way after a while.
I’ve eaten in this café, and my experience was generally OK but my experience in the St Davids Centre wasn’t good. The food was patchy and paying for it was painful. It would be great if Café Rouge had a rival but unfortunately at the moment it doesn’t.

I was always curious about Café Rouge and never knowing what they actually served or what the café/​restaurant was actually like. I went there for a quick coffee with family whilst there was some kind of food and craft fair down Cardiff Bay. First off I thought that we would have to purchase food if we wanted to just have a coffee but that was not the case at all and the waiter was very happy to take us to our table and take our orders of coffee’s.
My first impression of the whole place was it was loud and it echoed a lot! I did find myself struggling to hear what people were saying to because all I could hear was the noise of every body else in the background plus the clanging of cutlery on plates and glasses being knocked together. If it were a little quieter I would have given it another star. However, the coffee I had was excellent and tasted fantastic so it made up for the whole experience I was having. It wasn’t the cheapest price but I do believe you get what you pay for.
Café Rouge is a delightful place with good service and fine quality coffee’s. However, If you are sensitive to sound as I am, bring you ear plugs!

There’s a special place in my heart for continental style bistro’s especially when they serve some really pleasurable food, in this case pistachio ice cream, I had some when I was in Italy last and it seems quite difficult to find any restaurants that serve it, que café Rouge.
A lovely location just away from the main crowd of restaurants, so slightly less noisy. The outdoor seating area is a must in summer, looking out onto the bay, there’s so much more outdoor seating here and it covers a large area so you don’t feel so exposed from passers by.
The French feel to the Bistro is charming enough, with an excellent selection of cuisine. You could do a lot worse than here, but it doesn’t really cut the mustard, no one likes waiting for service too long.
Café Rouge doesn’t quite measure up to Garçon the other main competing French bistro in the bay.

I wrote this review because I was quite surprised to see so many negative experiences and thought I’d add my own 2 cents.
I’ve been here about 4 times now and everytime the food has been consistently great. In fact, I’d say the Entrecot Rouge (Medium rare) is one of the nicest steaks I’ve had anywhere in Cardiff. The service does leave a little to be desired sometimes, and it can feel a bit hectic when it’s busy. Confusingly, there are also a couple of waiters/​waitresses who bring over food and drinks but can not take orders for anything. I think it’s because their English might not be quite up to scratch which is fair enough, but it can get confusing and embarrasing for the customer and the staff.
The dessert menu is always nice aswell and I tend to go for either the Pave de Chocolat or the White chocolate and pistachio ice cream, which is amazing.
All in all, I’d say Café Rouge retains a level of individual charm in each restaurant far better than 99% of other chain restaurants. It’s affordable too, and if you take advantage of the Tesco Clubcard vouchers scheme, you can get some quality food here for next to nothing.

Any person can have off day but can a restaurant? Well I decided to give Mermaid Quay Café Rouge a second chance.
The 1^st time we went there the service was warm unlike my dish which is more than i can say for my partners as she received the wrong dish. I wouldn’t have minded if the food was superb but it wasn’t. it was little better than bland.
The second time we went there again the service was welcoming and with a smile but sadly the food was still not up to scratch. I’m not an over achiever in the kitchen department and I’m afraid neither is their chef but he does it for a living and I do not charge for my cuisine. it is simply not good enough. I had £30 worth of Tesco vouchers so we didn’t have to pay for most of it — had I not had these vouchers I’d have felt ripped off.
If we’d gone there and not eaten anything I’m sure it would have been a pleasant experience, because it’s location is lovely, unfortunately a restaurant cannot survive off its smiling waiters and locality alone.
We will not be giving it a 3^rd chance and it has put me off going into any other Café Rouge because surely the whole point of a chain is to guarantee a certain level of quality. If I were the owners this chain this level of quality would not be a level I’d be proud of guaranteeing.
If you want a good time go for the coffee but not for the cuisine.

I’ve only eaten at this Café Rouge once, and I was sorely disappointed. The service was hopeless, from start to finish. After they brought two wrong orders, and then one dish failed to arrive, we still didn’t get a proper apology from the waiter — and they even tried to charge us for the one dish we had never received!
Not only that, but the restaurant itself completely lacks charm or atmosphere. Just as I found at one of the Bristol branches of Café Rouge, this Cardiff establishment doesn’t live up to my expectations of the chain. I was hoping for a cosy place with a French bistro feel to it, but it’s too cavernous to achieve that, and the staff are too indifferent. Perhaps I should just lower my expectatons, or go elsewhere?

Some Café Rouges are a little disappointing I find — sometimes you find yourself expecting something absolutely lovely because you’ve been to one Café Rouge in your home town and THAT was great; and then you go somewhere else and it just doesn’t live up to your expectations. This Café Rouge is alright, I suppose — the service is really good and attempts to make up for the food which is a little sup-​par. If you want an authentic french taste, you can never really go to a chain restaurant because they always fail to deliver fully. The décor, also, is a kind of fake French… S’alright for a lunch, though.

I can’t be the only one who thinks it’s very strange to have a chain of French restaurants but I suppose it’s nice to have something consistent and familiar when eating out of your comfort zone.
I do really like this Café Rouge though, having visited the one in Bristol and the one in St David’s 2 this stands out mostly because of the atmosphere and good service.
There’s a really good selection of ‘light bites’ which I always find good on a summers day/​lunchtime when you’re not in the mood for something thick and heavy. Last time I went I had a delicious goats cheese salad with red peppers and olives and some french fries on the side. (I like salad and chips, try not to judge me!) and a cheeky little glass of wine and it all came in at under a tenner. You can’t really argue with that.
In the summer there is a huge out door seating area that overlooks the waterfront but fills up very quickly. If you manage to get a table it’s great, imagine sitting in a little bistro on the riviera (on a budget).

I’ve actually only visited this place twice but I’ve enjoyed the food and atmosphere there both times.
The first time I ordered the Croque Monsieur, this comes with fries and a side salad. I really enjoyed the meal, the fries were a little on the crunchy side but nothing I couldn’t deal with. The second time I visited I went for Baguette Poulet, which again came with fries and a side salad. Whatever dressing they put on the salad here I love it. The chargrilled chicken was wonderfully tender and I really liked the Dijon mayonnaise really worked well. The service was quick and friendly when we arrived, we were seated right away and got our drinks within minutes. However, as the restaurant became busier the service became slower. It took longer than I would have liked for our plates to be taken away and I waited far too long to have my waiting debit card taken from me in order to pay.
When I go back next time I’m going to branch away from the lighter options and try a larger meal.

Oh dear, really not what I expected when i went in here. Very poor service and quite abrupt staff and to be honest the food is very over-​priced considering it was of a poor quality.
I’ve had much nicer food from chain pubs and wouldn’t recommend this place.

Contrary to the other reviews listed here, I had a decent experience at this Café Rouge. Admittedly it wasn’t as good as the time I went to the one in Leeds, but me and my friends managed to have a good laugh all the same.
When i went, which was around 18 months ago, the staff were friendly and our waiter, in particular, was a right laugh. The service was quick, the food was OK (nothing special) and the wine was good. I didn’t come away disappointed, but I haven’t rushed back as there are other places in the Bay that I prefer, like Ba Orient and the Italian tucked in the corner next to Ba Orient (the name escapes me!).

This is not one of the better examples of this chain, the staff are not very welcoming in my experience. I have found the food to be very nice but perhaps not special enough to justify the relatively high prices. I have been spoken to quite rudely on a few occasions, including on the telephone. On some nights it seems bookings are not taken and you have to turn up and hope there’s a table for you. I can see why from their point of view, and I’ve never failed to get a table, but it doesn’t feel like good service. There is a shortage of good restaurants to recommend in Cardiff Bay but I’d try a few others before going back here.

This was a disappointing experience as I had visited another one of theses restaurants in the chain and had a great experience.
My iniitial impression was that the staff would have preferred it if I had not come into the restaurant. The menus were left with us for a particularly long time and we were on the point of leaving when they came to take our order. The food actually arrived fairly quickly after ordering, which we should probably have been worried about. We wondered how much was already prepared and just reheated.
The food was O.K. but I did not think it was good value for money.
In the summer they have an area outside with lots of tables and chairs, which looks very pleasant in the sunshine.
I would not recommend this restaurant although it always seems to be very busy.

I’m not very impressed with this chain, I found the food and service to be a bit lacking.
We went there as a family (me, hubbie and 4 kids) for an early lunch one day. The only reason we went in was because it was the nearest restaurant to where we had parked and it was pouring with rain and we were all hungry. It was very busy and we were really squeezed on to our table. Every time we had to get up to go to the loo (quite often with 4 children) we knocking over things on our table and the one next to us (sorry!). They were slow to take our order and then the food wad slow to arrive and turned up in dribs and drabs. I thought it was very expensive as well, especially the croque monsieur, which was little more than a prep-​prepared reheated in the microwave cheese sandwich. I couldn’t really understand why they were so busy as none of our meals were up to much, so maybe we were just unlucky.
I won’t be going back to find out though!

Really poor quality of food. I chose a salmon salad and having eaten some of the lettuce I discovered a live green catapillar crawling around.
The waitress was apologetic, and offered me the same dish again, which I turned down. The second dish they bought out for me was over cooked pasta with some cheap red sauce.
The wine was corked and even after speaking to the manager at length, she still refused to take any money off the bill. I have since complained to their head office and have heard nothing back from them in over two months. A disgrace.