old tree 老樹

So so... Looks very nice, coffee is not too bad. Waitresses usually don't speak much english and the pastries are better looking than tasting.

Went in for a spot of lunch as I happened to visit a friend at Golders Green. Have read alot about The Old Tree and always wanted to pay a visit. Sat down and ordered the Grill Beef Bento Box and Bubble Milk Tea. Coming from a service industry myself and having been working in a cafe for years, I am less than impress with the service. The restaurant was not busy during my visit. There were 6 staff behind the counter. Service is rather below average, tone of the staffs whol served me were neither friendly or excited. I am not expecting a long conversation but at least ask your customer how his or her day was and try to look welcoming. One word to sum up the attitude is indifference and I felt even worst when I got up to pay for my bill. The bill was £14.74 and I was told that there is a mininum of £20 for card payment. The lady whol seemed to be the cash controller was rolling her eyes and was mumbling under her breath to what seemed like a sigh of inconvenience. I told her I only have £10 cash on me while apologising profusely. I even offered to buy some cakes just to make up the sum to £20. I felt extremely uncomfortable but she took my card and shove it into the machine. The card went through and not a word of thank you from the lady while I apologise again and left. The whole experience was dreadful and I will definitely not recommend this place and will never return. The food was fine. Nothing spectacular. The cakes do look scrumptious but I did not have the chance to taste them. To survive in the competitive world of restaurant industry, good food alone is not sufficient. It has to go hand in hand with good customer service. The Old Tree has the good fortune of having great bakers who produce great cakes but without the word class customer service that the establishment so desperately need, there is no way for this business to flourish. In my cafe, we do not bake a own cakes and I have to say they are not the best cakes I have ever eaten but we value our customers and we always go the extra mile to make sure our customers feel welcome. We have people from all corners of the UK and I have often been told that the main reason they come back time after time is because they feel valued and welcomed. I hope The Old Tree will look into the matter seriously and I wish them the best of luck because it is hard to find good chinese bakery even in Soho Chinatown and I would hate to see the business going down hill due to the often ignored but very important part of the business which is customer relations.

For full review & photos:
http://bit.ly/cQnne7

Open daily from 8.30am to 10.30pm everyday, this corner shop is bright airy with lots of window space for people to peer inside. We popped in for Sunday brunch and saw a continuous stream of people coming in to peer at the impressive array of pastries to be found.

We had two set meals which had a large bowl of rice, a soup, some pickled vegetable and the chosen meat. In Taiwan, it was always Japanese sushi-rice used and I think they also used it here but it was slightly undercooked.

Taiwanese Stew Belly Pork with Stew Egg in Soy Sauce 滷肉滷蛋饭. One of our favourite dishes from Taiwan, we ate nearly a bowl of this a day. The diced pork belly here has the perfect mix of fat and meat, is fairly tasty and well seasoned but it’s missing the dark soya sauce here and is a little on the watery side. A thicker denser gravy would have been more desirable. The sweet pickles actually went great with the pork here.

Taiwanese Stir Fried Chicken in Mint, Chilli, Garlic & Black Sesame Oil with Rice (a.k.a. 3 cups chicken) 台式三杯鸡. Another typical Taiwanese dish but something we didn’t get to try on our trip. Cooked with a cup of soya sauce, sesame oil and rice wine each with ginger, garlic and basil for flavourings, this is a simple dish but done well here especially with using deboned chicken legs. The menu mentioned 'mint' but I think it's meant to be basil.

Taiwanese Deep Fried Chicken in Salt & Pepper 盐酥鸡. A popular street food, it is essentially deep fried breaded chicken with liberal dashings of salt and pepper on it. Not too bad here, it felt quite light and not greasy at all but it did make us very thirsty later.

For drinks the PigPig had a custard milk tea 布丁奶茶 which is a bit like having a dessert and drink in one – a standard milky tea with a creme caramel pudding dropped into it. Surprisingly nice. I had a cold longan tea 桂圆茶, it was slightly oversweetened, nonetheless refreshing.

Normally, that would be the end of the food review. But we decided to continue on by taking away some stuff to have for dinner too. We shared some Stir Fried Sate Beef in Gravy with Rice (a.k.a. shacha beef) 沙茶牛肉烩饭 – tenderised beef slices in a shacha based gravy – which was excellent eaten with rice.

Remember the pastries mentioned earlier? Well the PigPig spent the 10 minutes waiting for the shacha beef hovering around the pastry section trying to decide which to get amongst the multitude of savoury and sweet goodies. In the end, I had to go and pick some out myself. So we had a red bean, a peanut butter and a custard filled Mexican bun, all of which were pretty good and they were quite generous with the fillings although the custard was weirdly dry.

All the above cost £35 for two of us which actually fed us for the whole day.

Ok so the food was pretty tasty in a completely straightforward no-nonsense approach. We had better examples of lu rou fan in Taiwan but to be fair, everything tastes better while on holiday anyway.

Best bit: the pastries.
Worst bit: undercooked rice is pretty sad.