Est Est Est Italian Restaurant

Est Est Est Italian Restaurant

5, London Rd
Alderley Edge
Cheshire
SK9 7DY
Tel: 01625 583993

Est Est Est is a significant chain of Italian restaurants with a modern café style theme. They have a particularly strong presence in the North West of the country but are also represented in London and Scotland. We have visited Est Est Est before, in Liverpool, so if you would care to compare and contrast, click here for our review.

Alderley Edge itself, is a rather affluent ‘suburb’ of South Manchester, home to sports stars, media personalities and the generally well-heeled in society, so the presence of a swish Italian restaurant chain is no real surprise.

Est Est Est is located in the main road through the centre of the town and has a large prominent double frontage onto the street. It has a modern open frontage onto an outside ‘pavement terrace’ for the more intrepid dining experience, or else to take a drink and watch the world pass by.

There is no apparent private car parking, however street parking either on the main road or side streets seems perfectly adequate in the evening.

I can claim to have eaten there three times recently in the space of about three weeks. The first excuse was a family birthday outing for a nine years old; the second two were unplanned lunchtime excursions with a number of colleagues when we found ourselves in Alderley Edge for other reasons. I’ll deal with the birthday outing first, which really sets the scene for the restaurant.

The reason why we chose this venue was that Est Est Est has become a trendy place to take today’s sophisticated offspring for parties, rather than jelly and ice cream at home or some naff playbarn in a pub. I think it goes more with their mobile phone and Brittany Spears image.

The big attraction for the kids is that they get to make their own pizza, crayon on the disposable tablecloth and wear a paper chef’s hat. They simply choose what toppings they want from the list on a special kids menu, plaster it all over a shaped pizza base and send it away to be cremated. Meanwhile they can tear around the restaurant wearing their chef’s hats and crayon all over the tablecloth to their hearts content.

Est Est Est also has a published party menu quoted at £11.50 - £14.95 per person.

We chose a Friday evening, and booked a table for 7 o'clock. When we arrived it was busy with adults and children. We had booked a non-smoking table, but that didn’t seem to influence where they seated us as we discovered later when people all around us lit up.

The kitchen is a large open affair with large pizza ovens, butted up with stacks of logs, although I doubt that these were for any other purpose than show. Correct me if I’m wrong.

The menu is perhaps rather predictable; designed to suit all tastes I would hazard. There are sections for Pizza, Pasta and Specialities and also a board in the restaurant with more specials, which only got updated after we had eaten that night. It appeared to consist of mainly fish such as swordfish, monkfish and mussels.

I ordered Lasagne to start, which was chosen off the main course selection but is also served in smaller portions as a starter. Linda had the Crostini al Funghi, garlic field mushrooms on chargrilled ciabatta bread with lemon mascarpone cream. I ordered Pizza Calzone Est, filled with white crab meat, prawns, tuna and mozzarella, for main course, Linda ordered plain old Pizza Calzone, filled with ham, prosciutto, mushrooms, onions, mozzarella and basil. The kids both had the childrens make your own pizza meal, without starters.

While we eat our starters the kids were given their pizza kits to occupy themselves with, which seemed to work well. Our starters were both very good. Linda reported the Crostini al Funghi was exceptionally good. My Lasagne was fine too.

Our main courses arrived, along with the kid’s pizzas. Both our Calzones were a little disappointing, we both felt that although they had plenty of filling, they were rather bland and perhaps over cheesy, with copious amounts of mozzarella.

The children at first seemed to be enjoying their pizzas as they ploughed through the toppings, and then we noticed that they visibly lost interest. On extracting the reason it appeared the pizza crusts were both burnt and they didn’t like the taste. On inspection, the undersides of the pizzas were indeed cremated. We mentioned this to the waiter whose response was rather expressionless – no, ‘sorry do you want another one?’ Anyway we decided to order ice-creams.

I joined the kids in this and Linda abstained. I enjoyed the vanilla ice-cream which went down well on top of the Lasagne and Pizza.

The bill came and we found they had actually deducted the cost of the kid’s meals, which softened the blow a little, so we weren’t too disappointed at that. Although it had been a kid’s treat I think we would have preferred them to have had an enjoyable and memorable meal rather than us getting away with the cost.

The total was £33.85, which included one round of drinks (Peroni and 3 soft drinks) and excluded the cost of the kid’s meals.

On subsequent visits to Est Est Est, as mentioned above, meant I also got to try the Fusilli con Pollo Primavera, strips of chargrilled chicken with mozzarella, mixed vegetables, pine kernels and parmesan, and the Pizza Quattro Stagioni, with ham, pepperoni, mushrooms and sweet peppers.

Both dishes were fine. The pizza was of ample size however I would describe the portions of the other meals we ordered as a group as a little ‘economical’.

Overall, a tentative recommendation, only the children’s pizzas really put us off. I should imagine the atmosphere is buzzing later in the evening and at weekends. The surroundings were very pleasant and in general the food was good but a little ‘standard’ in choice. Perhaps individually each restaurant is constrained by being tied to a chain.

Phil
July 2001

There are Est Est Est Restaurants in the following locations, with more planned in the near future: