Courtyard Cafe

Really nice and great people

First of all: The venue is lovely, with beautiful furnitures and despite the high roof rather quiet.

Unfortunately, the interior was the only positive experience we had.

A friend visited me in London and as she wanted to eat some scones we asked the staff of the cafe whether they offered a cream tea. The lady had to ask a colleague first but she came back and told us they would serve "cream tea for £7.50" .

However, when the bill arrived we realised that we had been charged €7.50 for the scones and €5.95 for the tea. The waitress was someone else than before, we pointed out the mistake and the manager came to discuss the problem - the cafe would not serve a cream tea and we would have to pay £13.44 instead od the communicated £7.50 - which is an 80% increase.

Our 1 star review is there summing up the following:
1) The staff is poorly educated and communicates the wrong information to the customer - and the management is taking zero responsibility for it.
2) The manager did not even apologize for it but rather said "this must have been a mutually misunderstanding" - which it wasn't; his staff made a mistake, communicated a wrong price and there was nothing to be misunderstood from the customer side. The right behavior would have been to apologize for the mistake, instead of trying to tell the customer he made a mistake: There is no possibility to even misunderstand "A cream tea would be £7.50".
3) Instead of offering some kind of compensation for the mistake of the staff (e.g. charging only half of the on top tea), the manager offered to take out the service charge. We pointed out that service charge is discretionary and taking it out would therefore not be any compensation as we wouldn't have to pay for it anyway. Sadly, the manager kept his focus on how kind he would be to remove a discretionary (!) service charge. It seems like he did not even know what word discretionary means.

Those three errors from both staff and management resulted in minus three stars. The fourth star was reduced due to the scones being rather small and dry - no comparison to other scones in London or England in general.

The place is amazing and charming but unfortunately I didn’t find place for my family to sit in Fortnum and mason which was sad specially we walked more than an hour to reach it..

Neat little Fortnum and Mason's bar/restaurant with tea and coffee. Great location with a special tea blend.

I came here for the English afternoon tea. The food was great and I had a wonderful time

Great place and view but I visited when closed for covid