Our arts correspondent, BELLA BARTOCK, can never resist if invited out for a slap-up meal, so when offered the chance of revisiting one of the old haunts of her youth…
Fresh look: the refurb has retained the dining room’s charm, but offers a modern setting at Coombe Wood House
It would take a person with a very strong constitution – with real guts, or balls of steel, if you want to be coarse about it – to go into the restaurant trade in 2025. Inflation, National Insurance increases, local council red tape, there’s more obstacles for the budding restaurateur than in the Grand National.
Dreams have been shattered, fortunes whittled away, by countless best-intention attempts to do something new, different, properly. It is not only Gordon Ramsay who has kitchen nightmares.
But to do so in Croydon, run-down, down-at-heel, rotten borough Croydon, in the current trading environment for the hospitality trade, that must take a special kind of fortitude. I mean, look at Selsdon Park Hotel. If even Wetherspoons start closing their pubs – three of them in Croydon, last time I counted – things must be grim.
Undaunted, that’s what the people behind Coombe Wood House Restaurant are trying to do.
A little way up the road, Coombe Wood Gardens is now a shadow of its former self, when the council’s parks team maintained the prize-winning, beautifully planted public space. Its state today is a reflection of where Croydon stands. Adjacent to the gardens was another Croydon institution, the restaurant originally named “Château Napoleon”, and then “The Château”, and which operated from 1978 until 2022.
Inside Croydon reported the demise of The Château in November 2022. The closure came after a decade of development blight in the town centre, when the restaurant lost much of its midweek, corporate lunch trade. But covid took its toll, too. Hospitality and catering has been hit so very hard.
I had always been a regular at The Château, and enjoyed its faintly Fawlty Towers-style grandeur in the oak-panelled dining room, with the slightly pretentious air to its menus.
The opening of Coombe Wood House Restaurant has happened without great fanfare, but when my nephew Kenny was driving me along Coombe Lane a week or so ago, I noticed the new sign outside the old venue. Intrigued, I just had to visit.
From what we can gather, The Château’s owners’ attempt to sell the building came to nothing. So instead, they set out to try again, with different lessees, whose senior staff include impressive professionals with Mayfair restaurant experience.
The old place has had a significant refurbishment, redecoration, refresh and some investment. The charming Victorian character of the place has been retained. There’s a more modern, brighter look, an improvement on how it had become when it closed.
The place faces some stiff competition, from the various gastro pubs in the countryside on the fringes of Croydon, where the food often comes with high-end restaurant prices, as well as from the predictable Harvester and Beefeater chain restaurants nearby.
Coombe Wood House provides a really stylish, and affordable, alternative, the kind of restaurant that Croydon has been missing for some time.
On our visit (I took Kenny in with me; the boy deserves a treat from time to time), the restaurant delivered first-class food. I loved the warm, welcoming and very personable attentive service.
Fine dining: Coombe Wood House is a sumptuous setting for a decent restaurant
The menu style is European-style food – leaning towards traditional English favourites such as sole, salmon, lobster, lamb, chicken, pork, steak, but with veggie options too – all pitched in a brasserie style.
The menu prices include potatoes and vegetables with most dishes (not with pastas – that would be silly) – so not as hidden extras, which is another plus.
There’s also complimentary bread and butter, which is a very French way of doing things, and very welcome. My old friend, Julia Child, would approve.
The cheapest non-veggie mains start at £18.50 and £19.00. There are set menus available from Wednesday to Friday, for lunch and dinner, at £22 for two courses and £28.50 for three courses. Sunday roast lunch set menus, for two courses, come in at £27.50. Bottles of wine start at a little less than £25.00.
The new operation is a huge improvement on what was sadly the situation in the last year or two of the former Château. Having made use of its ample parking right outside the restaurant door (Kenny was on mineral water all night), I left absolutely delighted with our meal and experience, and that this new business is investing in Croydon.
My one concern is that Coombe Wood House is quite close to those “millionaire rows” of big houses opposite Lloyd Park, such as on Castlemaine Avenue. With such competitive prices, how will the management keep the riff-raff out?
We will certainly be going back and taking family and friends. In fact, I might have a word with iC’s notoriously tight-fisted editor and get him to book an office knees-up in the Lloyd Room. So watch this space…
- For more, visit the website https://www.coombewoodhouse.co.uk/restaurant
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