Rhubarb

Probably the best burger I have ever had in my life! The food, the service and the ambience was just great!

I feel that this is a great airport restaurant. We had two hours kill in the morning and enjoyed a pot of tea and the traditional English breakfast. I ordered vegetarian style so instead of pork sausage it came with veggie croquettes and instead of ham, it had a hashbrown. There was also baked beans, toast, poached eggs, a grilled portabella and a grilled tomato. This was a lot of food for 10 pounds. My husband enjoyed the traditional with the meat option.
Food came out in about 20 minutes, the service was really good. We were able to sit and sip our tea until our plane arrived.

Wasn’t very impressed at all with this restaurant. As we were flying from Terminal 3 and there isn’t a great choice of restaurants around, we settled on this as we had enough time for a ‘proper’ meal. It looked fairly pricey, but given it was airport fare, this was to be expected (even if £6.50 for their cheapest 175ml glass of wine is ridiculous with Duty Free next door selling 4 mini bottles for a tenner…). However, the quality only served to exacerbate quite how sore our pockets felt.
My partner had a beef chilli and I opted for a chicken/​bacon/​avocado club sandwich. After taking quite a while to arrive, his portion was meagre (the entire rice and chilli fit into a small silver dish, and the plate only really needed for two small accompanying pieces of corn bread), and while the club sandwich was plentiful, the chicken was dry and bland, and the filling was skimpy on the avocado and bacon, mainly filled with salad. We then sat for quite some time waiting for the bill — nobody even approached our table to offer to clear, let alone offer pudding or the bill, for about half an hour after we’d finished eating.
Overall, an expensive, unenjoyable meal, which was served at the speed of a snail. Next time, I think I’ll bring packed sandwiches to the airport if I end up in Terminal 3…

So so service. Good tea and drinks and prices. Fish in chips wasn’t the best. But overall good way to pass the time between flights

I stopped in for a quick meal while waiting for my flight. Eggs Benedict. First off «English Muffins» in England are quite different than US and much improved. I figured at a busy relatively modest priced place I would get over cooked eggs and Hollandaise not so great. I was wrong. Eggs were perfectly cooked, sauce was perfect. No complaints.

Stopped in for a quick snack between flights. I just ordered a bowl of chips, but they did have breakfast and lunch options and indicated what was vegetarian and gluten free on the menu.
It took a few minutes before anyone noticed me at the door, so I made sure to let them know I had a flight boarding in 40 minutes. I opted for chips so it would be faster, based on what I was seeing around me. The woman seated next to me gave up and left after several minutes of no service, and I watched a few people leave at the door after no one acknowledged them.
Chips were fine and I made my flight, but I wouldn’t go back.

OK I admit it. I was not in a great mood when I went to Rhubarb. After all, Jamie W. and I just experienced a sleepless 12-​hour flight from Cape Town and was only in Heathrow for two hours before embarking on another 12-​hour flight back to San Francisco. Terminal 3 is the hub for all the «long haul» flights that come through London, which means everyone was a zombie like us. And indeed it felt like a big shopping mall filled with people in various discombobulated states kinda like a Sondheim song. And another hundred people just got off of the plane.
And are looking at us. Who got off of the plane. Maybe yesterday. If you’ve ever been to this terminal, you would know there isn’t a dearth of dining options here with nearly fifty of them available for all tastes and pocketbooks. I’m not sure how we ended up at Rhubarb except I saw empty tables in the distance. Probably not a good sign if I was in a normal state. The menu was generically Brit-​American (photo:
), but we didn’t care in our catatonic condition. Jamie went for his standby, the £ 14.50 Dayboat Fish & Chips, a «filet of sustainable fish in ale batter» which must have been code for bland waters ahead.
It came sitting on a mound of «mushy peas» (their term, not mine) and was accompanied by a particularly arid cup of steak fries which they billed as «chunky chips» (photo:
). I didn’t fare much better as I ordered the £ 10 Classic Caesar Salad which came with grilled lemon chicken strips and sans quail egg despite what was described in the menu (photo:
). I was too tired to complain since the server made increasingly rare appearances at our table. I had better luck with the £ 6.50 cup of Vegetable Soup since there was little room for error there. Is it time to board yet?
FOOD — 2 stars… overpriced and as bland as bland can be
AMBIANCE — 2.5 stars…
SERVICE — 2 stars… indifferent…maybe they were zombies, too
TOTAL — 2 stars… sustenance at Heathrow is sadly no different than any other airport

I’m giving high marks for a very small meal.
An hour or so before I should be at my gate I realized I’ve not sat down to a proper cup of tea or crumpet and I’m about to leave London. I walk around and see lots of restaurants that look like far too much to-​do and expensive. Rhubarb, or R, has a fairly cheap breakfast option that will suit my last minute freakout about not being British enough.
2 crumpets with Wilkins & Sons Strawberry Preserves with Twinings English Breakfast tea and cream and fresh O.J. Absolutely perfect. I mean truly perfect. Your own little tea pot and pot of cream, the tea is more delicious than it has reason to be. The crumpets are excellent, the preserves so much better than the jam I eat in the states and the O.J. delicious and freshly squeezed.
I can’t remember how much this was, maybe 12 or so pounds. Not really that cheap when you covert to the dollar but certainly one of their cheaper options and exactly what I wanted. It came out fast so I didn’t have to feel panic-​y about getting to my gate. Rarely do I find any airport eating establishment worthy of 3 plus stars. I’d hit up R again for sure for one last cup of tea before I depart if, god willing, I find myself in Heathrow again.

This looked like the best option for lunch in Terminal 3. The décor looks aged, but, of course, this is not the most important thing. We just wanted to have a tasty, filling meal before our flight.
I ordered a bacon buttie with chunky chips and a hot chocolate. My wife chose the soup of the day (mushroom) and a ginger beer.
The mushroom soup was good: it seemed to be mushrooms and stock blitzed, a good simple recipe. My bacon buttie was more of a sandwich (maybe my expectation was wrong). It was good, but I have had better, less expensive ones in Canary Wharf. Perhaps this is just the airport premium pricing. They forgot my chips. I decided that I didn’t want them badly enough to follow it up with them.
Overall, an ok meal and a 3-​star rating seems fair.

LESSON OF THE DAY: 1 British pound = $ 1.61 USA
Our 35 pound lunch turned into a $ 58 bill!
That’s OK, I’d never been to the UK, always wanted to go, and had a 2.5 hour layover in Heathrow… I really wanted one British Pint and meal!
14.95 pds Fish N Chips… delicious! Though $ 24+ US
9.95 pds Chicken Tenderes… delicious! Though $ 16+ US
4.5 pds pint of Spitfire beer… delicious! $ 7.20 US… thats cheaper than American airports! :)
2.5 pds for half pint of Spitfire… delicious! $ 4…cheaper than Amurr’ca!
3 pds for can of Guiness… good as always, and cheaper than America!
Hopefully London’s food is cheaper than in the airport… I plan to visit next year! Or 2015. Maybe 2016. Who knows!

Just what terminal 3 needed: a decent, classy (although a tad pricey) restaurant away from the endless food court options and the pubby options of Bridge and the other restaurant unfortunately stationed just before the gates (and whose name I always forget). They make really good cappucinos, the on-​tap beer options and other drinks are numerous and the food choices are different and endless. We had a few options from the ‘small plates’ section: sesame prawn toast, satay chicken skewers, prawn dumplings. Everything was excellent. We visit the UK often and usually end up with a terminal 3 departure — mainly because we fly with the world’s best airline, Virgin — and next time we will be sure to pay our last respects to Rhubarb and will hopefully be hungry enough to move onto the large plates.

Meh. Food is ok but way overpriced.
I do like their bar seating though which has power outlets for every seat (convenient for charging your laptop/​phone/​iPad).

Rhubarb offers a lot of definitions on their walls & among them is something like «Excellent morsels, served in miniature…»
And this is just what Rhubarb did
Needing 1 last Cream Tea fix before heading onto our plane back to the US, we saunter over to Rhubarb for breakfast
Sis ordered the Healthy Option which was a trio of fruit & yogurt combos — 1 w/​granola, 1 w/​a cream granita & the other I forget but Sis said they were all lovely
I opted for my Cream Tea & got 2 teeny tiny Scones w/​a mountain of Clotted Cream & a tiny jar of Strawberry Jam. Props for the adequate clotted cream but man, could those scones have been any smaller?
(The answer here is no)
Grand total: $ 30 breakfast which we’ve come to expect from airport price gouging