Pierre Victoire

My wife and I have been using this restaurant since he days of Chez Pierre and the reason we eat here every week is because the food has always been excellent. I have eaten is far more expensive restaurants in Edinburgh who have disappointed whereas at Pierre Victoire we have never had a bad meal or service.
The food is always delicious and the staff extremely friendly, the prices are amazing (I don't know how he does it).
Too many people with trumped up ideas on food knock places like this. You will not be disappointed with the taste, presentation or price.
Great French cuisine at affordable prices and all with a smile.

We were really looking forward to our visit to PV, having enjoyed great meals at Chez Jules and knowing the PV of old. This just makes the experience we had at PV such a disappointment.

The nice touches of water and salad being on the table are welcome and the menu is big if a bit fragmented. There were a number of dishes which were very tempting and making a choice was a challenge. It' a shame what arrived on the plates didn't match the billing; literally in some cases with missing ingredients! The food itself was just poorly executed. One particular stand out being the crab-cakes which were thin and overcooked to the point they were brittle.

Service was haphazard and notable that they didn't ask why dishes were returned partially eaten.

Maybe a a bad day, it was very busy, but a million miles away from then experience of Chez Jules..

I approached my meal here with some trepidation as a result of the comments.

The result was a pleasant surprise. Smallish portions but the value for money was good; and the food straightforward and well presented.

I suggest trying this place.

So disapointed with our meal last night (30/6/11)... I had previously been about 3 years ago and loved this place. We went back last night. Our starters were awful - The French Onion soup was thick and gloupy and had clearly been microwaved as it was hot for all of 30 seconds and no guyere cheese to be seen. The Rosti with Duck Egg - Rosti soggy and duck egg had the brown chewy coating on the bottom you get from bad cooking. My main was one of the "specials" at £15 you'd expect something decent, my monkfish wasn't cooked so sent it back, was ok on return.. but just ok and was served with frozen chips... sorry "handcut" chips. The crabcakes my partner had were again just ok. When asked how the meal was I think the waitress already knew the answer, I was polite enough but just said that it wasn't good. No discount, no acknowledgement of the poor standard = no tip (its a shame the waiting staff get punished for bad cooking!). Table next to me sent back their salmon too.

Won't be back

Hey Pierre - I just read in the EEN that you are considering action against the council re the scaffold outside your Victoria Street restaurant.

We think you may have lost the £14k you claim is lost because you made it a fish restaurant???? It was perfect before and one of Edinburgh's hidden jewels. The scaffols hasn't helped but the fixation on fish is worse!

My friend and I meet each Friday for lunch. Friday 1 April found us at Pierre Victoire. We were brought complimentary gnocchi, small but tasty and some lovely greens. We don't normally eat large lunches and ordered a starter each, having enquired as to the portion sizes from a waitress. Incidentally, one of the serving staff asked if we were ready to order and before we could say anything she walked away. It was fully 5 minutes before we attracted another girl's attention.

The dishes when they came, were very,very disappointing. My souffle was far from light and tasted awful. I ate only a small piece of it. My friend's rosti was no better. The salad greens were the best part.

The restaurant was also very noisy.

I don't think I'll be back.

We were really looking forward to lunch at Pierre Victoire
I used to go for lunch often when it was in Victoria Street years ago ...

I couldn't be more disappointed !
We were led to a dingy table in a very warm downstairs and then forgotten about !
From sitting down it took 1 hour 45 minutes for our main meals to arrive !.We had only ordered 1 starter and that took about an hour to come ! When our main meals did arrive 2 arrived and the third didn't arrive until the other 2 had finished eating ! Not very sociable ....
When my monkfish did arrive it was over cooked and without the promised sauce ! It did come with a very large portion of potatoes though ! Not a cheap option at £15.95 !

When we told the staff we were unhappy with the service - Pierre Levicky did come to the table but we were told that he was sure that we had waited this long for food in other restaurants and made to feel we were making a fuss about nothing.

We didn't end up paying for our meal but only after Mr Levicky had thrown the bill at us

Not really the relaxing sunday lunch we had planned
We will not be returning and wouldn't recommend to others

I will just have to content myself with fond memories of days gone by in Victoria Street

ate there with a group and it was fun and delicious. Pierre revolutionized the eating concept in Edinburgh with good imaginative menus at more than fair prices. Have read so many reviews of "emperor without clothes" restaurants where minimal quantity and mediocre quality is decorated, novelled, constructed and BS'd. Have to say would take most of these bad reviews with a grain of sea salt,,sorry to say the majority of people eating out havent a clue . Carry on Pierre!! You are a a good thing for the culinary wasteland!!!

Lunch today could only be described as surreal. I have wasted too much of my day over this restaurant but feel I should warn others:

Table service - below average
Food - strangely, strangely terrible from a brand I loved & wished to enjoy again.
Response to complaint about unpalatable dish by owner - Basil Fawlty with PMT. Very similar to another reviewer's experience but far too late to save my Thursday treat.

Pierre Victoire - an absolutely awful experience at not inexpensive prices. Don't do it!!

P.S Mr L: you can write a rebuff if you like (as I see you did with a previous bad review) but you need to spend your time better - improving your behaviour towards paying customers & raising these very poor standards.

My husband and I regularly visit and enjoy your dishes. High cost performance! Hardly believe we can have set meal just for 10 pounds. Food is delicious for this price. I took my friend and she was fully satisfied.

Complainers should go to other high street high price restaurant! Some people pay cheap and demand too high.

Thank you Pierre as always!

I have eaten here many times since it opened. Good food, reasonably priced and never had a reason to complain about the quality of the menu. Nothing has happened to change this view but when I visited 3 weeks ago with my elderly mother she was treated appallingly. It was a small incident but symptomatic of Pierre's latest reincarnation that has taken nothing from his previous unsuccessful ventures. The waitress dropped a dirty knife which fell on my mum's shoe leaving food / balsamic vinegar on her trousers. The restaurant begrudgingly agreed to pay the dry cleaning for this - the manageress at first denied that it had happened - only after the waitress admitted she had separately dropped a knife did the manageress reluctantly accept what had happened. My mum, not wanting to cause a fuss subsequently handed in a bill for £3.50. The management again denied that the restaurant had been at fault and were unwilling to pay the dry cleaning bill. The stain hadn’t fully come out and this was detailed on the receipt. My mum didn’t want a new pair of trousers but wanted the restaurant to know that she wasn’t being unreasonable in claiming £3.50. It sounds petty as I have no complaint about the food, but after hearing of other instances of unreasonable behaviour from other restaurant goers Pierre clearly doesn’t understand what good customer service is about. I can’t overlook this and won’t be back. If you can live with this kind of bad service then go. Ps the waitresses are always friendly and competent the fault clearly lies with management who don't realise the commercial nature of running a restaurant since we visited often.

I wish complainer would reveal their own identity in order to have a proper dialogue. However in this absence I thank you for your comments.
I know that the skills of my chefs and the dedication of my waiting staff are not reflected in your poor comments. I may add that we all sleep easy at night sharing the satisfaction of having truly served and satisfied all of our other customers. Regards
Pierre Levicky

This place is the worst restaurant in edinburgh by far. Im a chef at very good hotel. ive been a chef for 6 years in some very good restaurants so i no wat im talking about.
To start i had goats cheese fritters which were flavourless and bland.
My father had the terrine which when i tasted made me wretch. the presentation of both was a disgrace.
this put me in a hesitant mood.
for mains i had the chicken with bacon and cheese. the chicken smelt abit funky and for £12 it was basically a tiny chicken breast with some melted cheese and parma ham, soggy chips and parsley chucked over.
My girlfriend had monkfish which was not preped properley and the dauphines again made me wretch.
In asking to see the manager the waitress didnt realise that she was the acting manager. she made 2 trips to the kitchen and in the end only took off the terrine and a chicken. It was £78 worth of pure garbage
DO NOT GO!

After been there for a few time I can express a good opinion about the Restaurant.
Great place, nice environment. Prefect for a lunch outside on a sunny day.
Menu: Well done, nice option, good portions. It really worth the "Les Complets" Menu. Otherwise the traditional "a la carte" becomes a little overpriced for the quality.

very good indeed!

Delicious!!! I had a great dinner tonight at Chez Pierre, lovely food (I had a Monkfish with chanterelles which was absolutely amazing!).
Big choice of sweets, all kinds of coffees (at £0,90!),also very friendly waiting staff (which can be hard to find these days)

We had a really nice evening and a very tasty meal, so thank you! And we are going to be back soon!

Sally W.

I ate here with a large group for a friend's birthday on Friday. First the good bits. The restaurant itself is attractively appointed and we were given a room to ourselves so it felt like private dining. Its inexpensive and they do very good chips. Also the staff were friendly and attentive which was good because the food (other than the chips) was just terrible. It wasn't just that the flavour combinations were questionable (although it'll be a while before I want to have my melon and ham served with a brandy sauce again) but also the execution of the dishes was woeful.

As a pre-starter the staff brought us plates of mussels in a curry sauce. The mussels (when we found them amongst the sea of empty shells were overcooked and the curry sauce tasted like a value curry meal. A really bad one.

My starter (the aforementioned ham and melon) was a good sized portion but the melon was the wrong side of crunchy, the ham was billed as crispy but turned up uncooked and had to be returned to the kitchen and then there was the brandy sauce.. Just awful.

My girlfriend had ordered the scallops which were plump but ranged from undercooked to burnt and were overwhelmed by the heavy dusting of cracked black pepper that had been dredged over the plate. A similar fate had befallen the king prawns which my friend was eating.

For main I chose mushroom omelette with fine herbs and chips with a side order of ratatouille. Not one of the more challenging dishes however it must have taken a fair bit of cooking as it turned up at least eight minutes after everyone's else's dishes had arrived and five minutes after the ratatouille had shown up. The ratatouille itself was hot on one side and stone cold on the other and tasted only of tinned tomatoes. The omelette, when it finally arrived, was overdone and sat in a pool of mushroom juice as these had been undercooked. Apparently mint is now a fine herb but it does not live well with egg and mushroom. As previously stated the chips were very good.

Which meant that this was still better than the monkfish and spaghetti with pesto that my girlfriend ordered. The monkfish was brutally overcooked, the pesto was missing, the spaghetti had clealy been done in a batch some time ago and the whole thing sat in a bath of oil. She returned the dish and was offered a replacement which my she declined (just to be on the safe side) and shared my chips instead.

The staff took the monkfish and the ratatouille off the final bill but it couldn't dim the memory of some truly awful food. The idea of french food at reasonable prices is a good one but not when the cooking is so far away from even average. Cheap doesn't have to equate to bad and I'd recommend Tony's Table or The Dogs to see it done so much better

I would just like to help set the record straight about Chez Pierre, which imho should actually be considered as something of an Edinburgh institution much like Luca's ice cream and Valvona and Corolla.

As a child I used to stare longingly into the windows of the Pierre Victoire restaurants on my walk to school. The only thing that stopped me from going in was a lack of ready cash but the smells that emanated from those restaurants were so seductive that, as an adult, when I found myself in Islington and the restaurant had expanded to London, due to it's success, in no small part down to Mr Levicky's fabulous food and fantastic training of his chefs, I became a regular in the Islington restaurant- or at least as regular as my funds would permit. You may be wondering what Pierre Victoire has to do with Chez Pierre?

Pierre Victoire was Mr Levicky's previous restaurant incarnation and I ate some fabulous food there. The atmosphere was always lively, chatty- the staff extremely attentive. Most importantly the food never failed to impress- I can remember a particularly fantastic lobster stuffed with crab which was absolutely delightful.

I was very sad when the restaurant had to close due to the over-rapid expansion of the chain. The chef at Pierre Victoire in Islington was personally trained by Mr Levicky and indeed was one of his prodigies and, as such, he never failed to impress but was always very mindful of what Pierre would think if things were not just so and also aware of the opportunities that he had as a result of being personally trained by Mr Levicky.

I have to admit, to my shame, that I have not yet visited Mr Levicky's latest enterprise and that I do think for someone that is doing what he does and that is good honest top quality restaurant food at fantastic prices that this is quite an achievement which should not be ignored. As far back as I can remember, in Edinburgh at least, no one else started this but Mr Levicky and long may he continue.

As a final note once I have been to Mr Levicky's restaurant, which I expect to attend within the next two weeks, I will be sure to report back here but I am equally sure that I will not be disappointed!

I think the last complainer a tad harsh. You get what you pay for generally and the food here is ok for the price. For sure it's a bit rough and ready and the chef Pierre somewhat inconsistent with the quality of his food preparation but, hey - as he tells us - he's the expert.

I've eaten there twice - once ok, another time bloody awful. I paid because I was in a hurry and couldn't be a***d to complain. No-one asked me if the food was ok sir? I would have told them if they had.

I thought it slightly odd that the main man admits to "some of his patrons complaining bitterly - with reason" about his food quality so it makes one wonder just how many punters the guy's losing to his somewhat indifferent approach to his job?

I like a story to be right. My name is Pierre and I own the restaurant
Our lunch costs £6.90 and yesterday included the following
For tapas
A small fish and chips of haddock in fresh breadcrumb deepfried with a few chips and garlic mayonnaise
The choice of main dishes was
Escalope of chicken Chargrilled (this was a chicken leg boned) then Chargrilled and baked in the oven with garlic white wine and rosemary, this was served with a cheesy polenta, a rich roasted cherry tomato tuscan sauce and a small salad of canellini beans with peppers and celery. A very "Italian affair".
The fish dish was indeed a good slab of fresh cod roasted in olive oil with garlic and herbs served with hand cut chips.
This couple arrived and were served what they ordered, they had two drinks and coffee. Only when they asked for the bill (1hour or so later) & got presented with the bill (£18.80) the gentleman stated that he did not want to pay for his chicken dish because he found it disgusting. May I add that he had ample opportunity to return the dish anytime when it was served.
I agree that my food might not be to everybody's taste and indeed for this reason we always ask our customers a few minutes after they have been served whether everything is ok, which we were told was.
We were never given an opportunity to rectify (if it was required or indeed even change the dish if this was so bad).
The gentleman started to monopolise the full attention of our waitress and for this sole reason I came out of the kitchen. Indeed I stated that I would have no alternative but to call the police so that he paid his bill.

I never had in so many years experienced this type of request, some of my patrons complained bitterly (sometimes with reason) on the quality of my cooking but we always managed a happy compromise.
This gentleman simply did not want to pay for his meal.

The gentleman threw a 10 pounds note on the table and told me to call the police and left. I followed the couple out of the restaurant and 10/15 meters outside our restaurant I asked them to stop in order for me to call the police.

They refused to do so and only stopped when I stated that I would walk with them until such time as they stopped. So we started walking together (amusingly) and his girlfriend turned around stating that it was all her fault, pulled a £20 note out of her purse and handed it to me in order to pay the full bill.
The gentleman demanded that I gave him the change which I did and he threatened to start sending reviews about how bad Chez Pierre restaurant is. Hence my reply.
I am really sorry Mr ColinG that you did not enjoy your lunch but wished that you mentioned it earlier when something could have been done. Yesterday 38 clients enjoyed our £6.90 Les complets lunch

Have just come from having lunch at this restaurant and the initial impression was good. My friend and I were sat at the window seat and were given tapas to start the meal off. No menus are given so you have to crane your neck a little to read the boards which are outside. We ordered the chicken escalope and the cod. Both dishes were not good. The chicken was very tasteless and the cod was swimming in oil. Having not eaten more than a mouthful, the plates were removed without comment and a bill for the full amount was presented. When I asked if the bill could be reduced, the manager came storming out of the kitchen and I was subjected to a stream of abuse and threats of calling the police. His argument being that you ordered it - you pay for it. My friend and I were rather embarrased, paid up and left. On the basis that the pen is mightier than the sword, I am now posting reviews of the restaurant.

What an excellent dinner! We went for the 10 quid special and were so happily surprised! a whole bream, cooked to perfection, but tapas starter and yummy dessert.

It's a great local. We'll be going back.

I ordered the goose, duck cassoulet with toulouse sausage and pork belly. The duck was off and tasted like a game bird gone bad. Thought maybe it was a pheasant. So I asked the waitress what this meat was and she went to ask in the kitchen and came back to tell me it was lamb!!!!!!! and that it wasn't mentionned on the menu. I couldn't believe it that the so called chefs didn't even know what was in the cassoulet and couldn't even spot the difference between a bird and a piece of lamb. I am french and I know what duck should taste like!!!!!! and what lamb meat tastes and looks like. The so called Toulouse sausage was a venisson sausage as it was bright red inside and tasted like one. The so called confit belly pork comprised of 3 slices of bacon! I felt that I was been taken for a complete fool. How dare they put 3 slices of bacon like that and call it confit! The goose was rather dry.
The service was abrupt and the waitress was rude. It took her 10 minutes to bring the bill when they were 2 waitresses to look after 3 tables. (Not exactly difficult to manage). One waitress was stuffing her face with bread behind the counter. I am not asking for much but really....
The restaurant had no atmosphere and was over- lit. I agree with DB comment above.
My advice, don't go there.

I've visited this restaurant a couple of times now and it's been lovely on both occasions. The first time for a great value set-price family Sunday lunch which was delicious (especially the fish and salads). The second time for dinner with friends where we ate from the largish tapas dishes which were fantastically good, and given we all had a huge amount of food, dessert wine and coffee good value at less than £25 a head.

This restaurant lacks atmosphere. It's over-lit, there are too many hard surfaces and the dining is in one big room. If there's a large party dining at the same time you won't be able to hear yourself think. I thought we'd seen off the days of wobbly Formica tables but at Chez Pierre I regret to say that they're making a comeback!

The menu is confused to say the least. The restaurant bills itself as French but has a slightly strange Asian influence...my seared scallops came with a plate of basmati rice! However, the food is prepared and presented well.

The service can be on the abrupt side but I suspect this is down to who serves your table.

Overall this restaurant is best avoided. There's better atmosphere, better food, better service and better value for money elsewhere.

I've eaten here twice and been pleasantly surprised both times. The first was for a light evening meal where my friend and I had a pair of light bites. The tempura was generous although a bit underdone in some areas. My friend enjoyed the lamb shanks. The second occasion was for lunch where we dined sumptuously on two of the daily specials: poached salmon and chicken with fresh tarragon. The starters for our two-course meal were stuffed pepper and minced pork balls. But wait! The price each was a mere £6 and we couldn't even consider dessert! Surely the best buy in Edinburgh.