Le Creuset

Our beloved Le Creuset casserole pan started to bubble on the bottom of the pan. We were gutted but decided to test the Le Cresuet lifetime warranty. A lovely woman named Jo exchanged a few emails, said they needed to see it, had us post it, post free! Said it could take up to 5 days for them to receive. Not 3 days later we got an email saying they received it. Within a couple hours we heard back from Jo that they were sending us a new casserole. And not a moment too soon. We love this casserole!!! Fabulous efficient service! Thank you Jo!

This is the ‘flagship’ store for Le Creuset in London. After having been there I’d say it resembles more a ‘dinghy’. LDN Le Creuset ’boutique’ is awkwardly narrow with bits of display areas jutting out at the shopper at strange angles as she wends her way along the product. The size and space of the shop probably wouldn’t have felt so odd save for the fact that I recently had the pleasure of visiting the Le Creuset shop up in Glasgow. That store is large and square-​shaped, easily navigable, and very attractively laid out with goodies. The London space just doesn’t do the Le Creuset wares justice. Oh, yeah, there’s a sort of secret-​looking flight of stairs (shoppers entering the store had to be told about it) leading to an even narrower and shorter shop space that just feels a bit claustrophobic, if, however, showcasing a few more colours in the Le Creuset range.
I specifically sought out LC to buy a butter dish (21 pounds) for a friend’s birthday. They had a couple of said dishes on display, so I asked if I could purchase one. The sales person said she’d pull one from back stock (read: untouched by customers’ hands) for me. She brought it up to the counter for me and, at my bidding, went off to look for a gift box. The dish’s lid was scratched in more than a few places around the top (do sales people not see this, or do they hope that you don’t see this, so you’ll buy it in all your ignorant bliss?), so I asked if I could, please, choose another dish. Well, the majority of the dishes had scratches on them. I wound up buying the display dish (sort of the opposite of what I would normally do back home) as all the dish tops are stacked on top of one another in the back stock cupboards without a slip of tissue or bubble wrap in between them thus ensuring that they’ll probably become scratched as they make contact with one another.
The gift box found was really meant for a large item like a 24 cm pot, or something, so the dish wound up swimming in it. I tried to politely decline the box, but, as the other sales person was going through a bit of effort trying to figure out how to stuff the box (crumpled up sheets of tissue paper that wound up looking junky), I stopped protesting and let her butcher, I mean, complete the wrap job. To be fair, the main sales person sort of salvaged the whole affair by neatly wrapping the dish and base separately in bits of tissue and cello tape. Of course there were still the crumpled balls of tissue in the box to contend with… bleh. Frankly, it was all a bit of overkill for a measly butter dish and I wound up recycling the box when I got home and re-​wrapping the darn thing myself.