Chez Gérard

I have tried this place three times now, mostly for its convenience being local and French. They have been rude with very slow service. I hadn’t been there for sometimes untill Last Sunday when I thought we could give it a try. We wanted a ‘steak frites’ with our Taste Card buy one, get one free. They sat us in a corner, came long time after to take the order. While I had checked with them if they took the Tastecard, they said not for the set menu. We had to change our choice to go for the burger, well they did not had it either. We left and that was our last try. If you want to work you better put a smile on your face and have more honest attitude.

Great steaks but poor service lets them down.
I keep trying, hoping that one day I won’t be kept waiting for ages, but not yet.
Food good. Staff could be a lot better.

Brilliant quality… staggeringly good value for money… excellent service… wonderful décor… well cooked food… I have been to this restaurant many, many times as it is about 100 yards from my front door… and have never been let down.
Breakfasts there are weonderful as well, especially in the summer when you can sit out side in the sunshine without worrying you are going to get run over by traffic.
The lunch for Pounds 6.95 for a course is really excellent value at the moment
ADDENDUM…I was invited by friends there for dinner last night (16 March) — and had a meal of 2 parts really. We all had a starter of Greenlip mussels with breadcrumb topping which was wonderful… really tasty, but then we diverged on the main course and came a little unstuck.
2 of us had the cod in tomato sauce with roast potatoes… God, what a let down. It was inutterably bad, with a tiny piece of cod, which was overcooked to the point of being grey, with an acidic tomto sauce, and soggy potatoes… dreadful
I ON THE OTHER HAND… had the chicken fricassee which was so good I would willingly have eaten a second portion.
Beautifully cooked pieces of chicken and mushrooms, with a fairly light cream sauce and corianer topping, with a wonderful saffron flavoured rice. Really excellent.
How the restaurant was able to produce 2 dishes of such different quality is beyond me, but one lives and learns.

We visited Chez Gerard with my extended family to celebrate my birthday — a mistake. When we arrived the table wasn’t ready — in fact they had the wrong time for the booking even though my husband had phoned to confirm the previous day. They kept us waiting (at the bar of course) for at least 20 minutes while they organised a table even though other people arriving were seated. Although apologising they offered no recompense.
After asking twice for a jug of water, I eventually went to the bar myself and collected one from the friendly bartender.
The food wasn’t great and the service continnued to be slow — they appeared to be seriously understaffed which made we wonder why they’d taken the booking.
We will not be returning.

I like visiting Chez Gerard brasserie for lunch, the place is always busy, has a lovely atmosphere and the food is good.
Although this is a chain, I think they have a very individualist approach and cater for the ‘Cobham types. This is not quite as French as the name suggests however. the menu is very varied. They offer many healthy choices as well as decadent desserts! The wine list is reasonable and the bill generally is too.
They cater very well for children with a healthy, varied menu that is very reasonably priced and quite often there is entertainment for all the family whilst eating which adds to the atmosphere.

Looking for somewhere child-​friendly for lunch on a Saturday in Cobham, the missus pointed at Chez Gérard and asked what I thought. My experiences of this chain aren’t that recent, so I said I remembered it as ‘only slightly up-​market from Café Rouge, and that is a Bad Thing’.
However, looking at the menu and looking inside, it looked like either my memory served me badly or Chez Gérard has made serious efforts to distance itself from crap like Café Rouge, so we found ourselves having lunch there.
The staff could not have been more welcoming to my one-​year-​old daughter, and they even situated us at a table where we could park the buggy out of the way yet within easy reach.
They’ve clearly dealt with a lot of, shall we say, slightly better off families, as the children’s menu was full of good stuff that your average mung-​bean-​eating, sandle-​wearing food snob (like me) would be happy to feed to a child, even to the extent of the dessert giving you the option of a flavoured milk ice lolly. On behalf of my daughter, we chose the pizza, which came freshly-​made with our choice of fresh sliced tomato and ham. The whole menu, which includes some bread, a main course, dessert and a juice drink, is £5.50 — a price we’d have been happy paying for the pizza alone.
The food for adults is pretty decent, too. My main course of spcied beef and lamb skinless sausages (sounds better than I’m describing) was spot on.
Great service throughout the meal, and really very accommodating to children.