Quite dreadful evening I'm afraid. Excellent staff but food service extremely slow. Capped off when management allowed a "boisterous" group of around 18 to 20 drinkers to park up on adjacent tables shoved together with chairs dragged from all over. So now we have 20+ rowdy drinkers close by a similar number of diners waiting for food. Of course, eventually bread was thrown about by the drinkers, hitting some of our group and other diners. Candidly the staff were undermanned and unable to restore order. We left our meal half eaten in protest and left. Very surprised the management allowed the diners to be put upon in such a way but the mad covid regs don't help. Had this large group been allowed to stand at the opposite side of the bar, none of it would have happened and social distancing, admittedly guidance, seemed to have gone for a ball of chalk. Of course there seemed nowhere else to put such a party as table service only meant they had to be pitched in next to the diners. So we left after bring invited to "sort it out later" as once food starts getting thrown about it's rarely long before something more solid follows. It's a shame as this is usually a quality country gastropub style establishment with good food and helpful staff. On this occasion the management was completely out of its depth, but whether our complaints to the manager on departure find their way back to the brewery company, who knows? I suppose I could have followed through with Liberation Group but really what would be the point? Staff are under pressure to serve drinkers but having allowed the situation to develop and continue fuelling it with shots and so on, they were then completely out of their depth and overwhelmed by the noise and agression they had introduced in the first place. Maybe try when sensible regs are back in place in a month or two but couldn't recommend just now. What little food I eventually tasted was ok but we had no appetite as the evening was spoilt by management's decision to impose an unacceptable situation on the diners and then fail to control it. One star as the serving staff were very friendly to start and did their best to help when things kicked off, a couple of the waitresses seemed pretty upset to be fair to them.