Lone Star Palmerston North — Restaurant in Palmerston North

First time and last time dining at Palmy Lonestar. Nelson and Napier Lonestar are great but Palmy needs to step their game up and provide staff with better training.

1st hiccup: Drinks orders are being taken for our table. I ask for a house red and they give me a rose. I ask why I'd been given a rose but she said there was no house red, but 2 mins later see a tray of red wine being taken to another table. 2nd hiccup: a loaf of bread, calamari and chips takes 30mins as starters to get to us and it wasn't terribly busy. 3rd hiccup: mains were taking so long the children started to get figity so we tried to order a kids ice cream and it took me 4 mins to explain to the first woman I asked, she couldn't understand what I wanted. Another woman came up to us and I asked her and instantly she said yup I'll sort it. 4th hiccup: I ordered John Dear Venison and father in Law ordered the Maverick Fillet. The same woman who couldn't understand about the ice request yelled out "who ordered the Maverick?" so that was placed in front of my Father in Law then a different woman came out and said "who ordered the Maverick" so turns out my father in law was 1/4 the way through my John Dear. NICE! 5th hiccup: my partner was left with no food while we all had our mains for ages. 6th hiccup: Salmon and ribs weren't nice. Mother in law didn't even eat 1/4 of her meal and Partner said out of a life time of ribs he's eaten, those have been the toughest ribs meat to chew. 7th hiccup: no finger bowl for ribs or steak knives 8th hiccup: complaint from the father in law: the amount of staff walking back and forwards to the kitchen empty handed, the tables would get cleared a lot faster and tables wouldn't sit with dishes pilled up for 30 mins between courses.

I emailed Lonestar Palmy to give my feedback and give them a chance to come back to me, but they never did - so sharing feedback with everyone else to see. On a positive note the staff were lovely and the 3/4 of my John dear I got to eat was amazing flavours. Glad at least the kids ice cream was free!!

Update: after emailing Lonestar Palmy and finally getting a reply after a few weeks, I talked to the owner (who was lovely), they offered to send a voucher but it's...

Picture this... I havent seen my big sister in 10+ years except for an hour or two for a funeral. She calls me and says she is in Palmy for one night and could we catch up? Definitely! Of course I decide we need to do dinner, she will want wine and I need cheesecake. Somewhere busy but not super loud. Somewhere we can people watch because we both like that. She is vegetarian so somewhere that has some variety. I spend an hour or two looking at menus online and I decide to go with Lone Star. I book online for 6.30pm and all is done, simple, easy. We get there and we are seated by the very lovely Joseph. We ask him to keep the wine topped up and give him our orders. My sister is stoked because the vegetarian range is huge and she actually had to think about what she wanted. Not very much longer our meals come out. We are on a roll by this point. We have had some chats and laughs with Joseph. We have made ourselves known to Maxine and we are all having a great time. A bit of banter and laughs with the tables around us, some laughs with the Joseph and Maxine and eventually we go back to chatting among us. Later on in the night, my sister is loving the wine, I am not leaving without dessert so Maxine and Joseph come along to top up our glasses and clear our plates (super attentive by this stage) Now picture some mere hours later..... the place has closed, everyone has left, the staff are cleaning and closing up and we are still chatting and laughing with the staff who has grabbed seats and were sitting with us. We THOROUGHLY enjoyed the night, we thoroughly enjoyed the meals. Maxine and Joseph were AMAZING and are worth their weight in gold. My sister and I have both worked hospitality and we appreciate the extra mile that everyone took for us so we could spend some precious moments telling our stories. On leaving, there were hugs all around. We arrived as strangers but when we left they were more like the family we didn't know we needed. I cannot be more grateful to you all. We wish you the...

Haven't been to Lone Star for a while and so decided to go there for the in-law's birthday. I think I'll stay well clear from now on.

First off, the good. The food was really good. We had a few burritos and I'd ordered the classic ribs, which I didn't get to eat (more on that soon). Instead, I had their special lamb dish, which despite not looking anything like the picture, was actually superb!

Unfortunately, here comes the bad. For starters, the wait between ordering and the food actually arriving was a tedious 45 minutes. It wasn't as if the place was busy either. They had 5, maybe 6 tables of customers; some of whom came in after us.

I also didn't get to eat my ribs because it had a long, long hair embedded in it (and none of the kitchen staff had long, long hair). But despite the yuckiness of finding hair embedded in my food, the worst part was how the staff dealt with it afterwards. There was no apology from any of the wait staff, and when I went up to pay, the person at the till had the cheek to quip that she had to find "something to do with those ribs". She's quite lucky I had my in-laws in tow and didn't want to make a big deal of it, as well as insist that I got my meal on the house.

And the final touches that made this a rather unpleasant experience? The overly-loud music that drowned out all our conversations, the clueless wait staff who offered us desserts when we had a BYO cake that was in the kitchen and while I was still waiting for my replacement meal; and who offered to clear the table and left with only one side dish, and the cashier who didn't know how to work the Lone Star app when I paid.

Not sure how they can claim to be the best restaurant in...