My friends and I dined at the pub/restaurant for about 3 hours. I vividly remember saying to my friends “wow, this is incredible. People are so quick to leave negative reviews when things go wrong at restaurants, we need to make sure we leave a good review because this has been phenomenal”… within a few minutes of saying that my review went from 5* to 1* (lower, if I could).
We arrived at 4pm. Seated promptly. Incredibly clean and our waitress was lovely! She couldn’t do enough for us and was quite honestly, along with the food, the saving Grace of this place. Unfortunately I didn’t get her name but she was very attentive.
We sat, we ordered drinks, ordered our roast dinners and ate. We didn’t know there was a time limit on the table to be honest (our own fault, we hadn’t looked online hard enough, but in our defence, this hadn’t been explained upon arrival either). After we had finished our dinner we ordered a few more drinks (I believe we ended up spending about £142). We were drinking and a waiter, who hadn’t served us up until this point, came up to the table and said we had half an hour left on the table as they needed the table back - absolutely not a problem! We were enjoying ourselves and hadn’t realised 1) how long we had been in there for and 2) that they’d need the table back soon for other guests. I would say about 25 minutes later we started to finish our drinks, we were a party of 4, we hadn’t ordered anymore drinks and had requested the bill. We had paid and 2 of us had gone to the toilet whilst the other 2 stayed at the table to wait for them to come back, we were putting our coats on and bags on and clearly finishing up. The waiter then came back over, and unleashed such a level of rudeness, it wasn’t until we got outside that we really embraced what had just happened to us and how unbelievably ill-mannered this waiter had been to us. He told us that we had had the table for 3 hours and needed to leave, usually people only get 2 hours (he had told us 25 minutes ago we needed to leave in 30 minutes and were clearly in the process of doing so, putting our coats on and getting up etc). He then said I could finish my last sip of wine at the sofas near the bar (which was cluttered with someone else’s empty glasses) I said “no, it’s fine, I’ll just drink it”, I actually thought he was joking due to how little was left so I laughed. Anyway, I finish it whilst he was clearing our glasses. It wasn’t until he suddenly turned and said “I’ve been nice up until this point but now you’re annoying everyone” that I realised he wasn’t joking! He was behaving as though he had asked us to leave and we were staying and ordered more drinks, we were clearly getting ready to leave. At this point, we were embarrassed so my friend and I got up to stand in the middle of the pub to wait for our friends to finish up in the loos, probably making other guests uncomfortable as we just loitered, but we had been pushed out of our seats so had no choice. As we stood there, the waiter bellowed to the poor young lovely waitress “THAT TABLE NEEDS TO BE CLEANED IMMEDIATELY”, I wish I could say I was shocked at the way he spoke to his colleague but at this point I had realised how sharp, unpleasant and impolite this man was. I strongly believe in tipping service staff and upon seeing the bill was delighted that a service charge was added to our bill as at that point, the staff deserved it. However I now wish it wasn’t added because I would like to have given our waitress the tip, it seems a shame she has to share it with a colleague who, while she provided us with exemplary service, was horrendous. Hopefully this isn’t the case and she receives the full tip. Anyway, food was incredible, service by our waitress outstanding, pub decorated lovely, incredibly clean, state of the art ordering system however all of this has been let down by one person. I like to take everything into consideration when writing a review, I weigh up EVERYTHING that happened but I’m afraid to say this one worker has let you down and turned a 5* review to a 1*
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