"Fantastic" Georgian restaurant London EC1

This Georgian restaurant opened just a couple of weeks ago and it shows it. More than a restaurant in fact it looks like an office space made up for employees’ party with last-minute tables, a couple of pictures on the walls and a Coke vendor machine at the far end of the room.
As we entered the restaurant there wasn’t much of a greeting. The guy and the girl in charge of the restaurant just pointed the finger to any available table without any bother to accommodate us. The waitress coming to take the orders wasn’t friendly at all. She barely smiled and looked at us as if we were a kind of a nuisance.
The menu was manageable and there were no alcoholic drinks (they don’t have the licence yet) so we opted for a bottle of water instead. For starters we ordered soup (kharcho) and bread (lavash) for my girlfriend and bread with cheese (khachapuri) for me. Two different lamb dishes were our choices for main course: khachapuli and mtsvadi.
The water didn’t arrive for an awful long time and when it finally appeared it was nothing more than a plastic bottle of water of 50cl. Apparently they didn’t have any bigger sizes.
Another fifteen minutes or so later a round yellow bowl with meat floating in basil sauce appeared alongside rice and bread. The waitress served the dishes without a word or, God forbid, a hint of a smile. I mistakenly thought that was some kind of a Georgian snack due to the size of the meat in the bowl (not much) and also because I was still expecting the starters and that did not looked to me like any of the dishes we had ordered.
Shortly afterwards kharcho and lavash arrived but what about my cheese and bread starter? The food was eatable but not “fantastic”, as bland as the non-existing décor around and the still-life expression of the staff. The girl was visibly struggling to cope with the orders and the guy, probably the owner, was sitting at the table with some friends of his where the wine was generously flowing, even if the restaurant didn’t served alcoholic drinks. I guessed they had purchased the bottles at a nearby off-licence.
The waiting after the first set of dishes was so unbearable that we lost track of time. It was already an hour after we had entered the restaurant and we still had one starter and two main courses to go, or so we thought. We decided to cut short the suffering and asked the waitress if we could forget about the main courses when she explained that the yellow bowl I had eaten was in fact my main course and that she had no record of my starter…My girlfriend’s mtsvadi arrived shortly after but I couldn’t care less. The waitress positioned the dish on the table between me and my girlfriend, gracelessly, as if she was handling an ashtray. The dish looked basic or maybe it was just my impression but I had been in that pseudo-restaurant for much more than an hour and everything by then looked numb to me.
The bill was in rhyme with the rest of the experience. Even half of it wouldn’t have been worth it. £32.50 will buy you a better meal with a decent service in many restaurants in London with a wait of less than half of what we had to endure at the so-called Fantastic restaurant.
It has just been open for a couple of weeks but I will not be there to check the improvements, that’s for sure.

Fantastic restaurant, 65 Farringdon road, London EC1M 3JB (Georgian cuisine)