Toby Carvery Kings Norton — Restaurant in Birmingham

One positive.

I had the opposite experience you would expect. The beef was actually tender and had flavour.

Now for the many negatives.

Took nearly 50 minutes until we finally had food on the table.

Service was slow to the table. Ended up spending just over two hours there. Last ones in the entire establishment because they forgot about us.

The chef was getting annoyed and shouting at everyone with an attitude because he couldn't fathom that not a single customer didn't want to be served until the Yorkshire puddings were brought out.

I know right. Who would have imagined people attending a carvery want a Yorkshire pudding. What is this madness?

The plates are extremely hot to handle. You burn your hands touching them. So you have to make your own oven gloves with napkins stolen from the bar area.

Another chef brought out brand new sprouts from the kitchen. And then threw the old sprouts on top of the new ones.

So instead of the last customers getting the finest freshest produce. Basically no one is allowed anything nice. Everyone suffers and gets the old dregs.

Some of the foods were contaminated with other foods. For example there was tonnes of sweetcorn in the carrots or something.

The chef saw this. And to make it look better. He just mixed the food from the bottom and brought it to the top. To cover up and hide the mess.

So people spooning one type of food, will unexpectedly get food they absolutely hate on the plate.

He couldn't be arsed to fix the problem. So he just covered the problem up.

Chefs had horrible attitudes. Just moaning about work and how difficult it was. They couldn't care about the quality of the product, or customer service at all. And if shows.

They don't give a toss about anything.

The Yorkshire puddings had a weird taste. Usually these are meant to be amazing and have that eggy dessert like flavour. But these were bland, cardboard.

Coffee. Tasted burnt and awful. But was also not even hot. Actually a challenge to drink.

The worst part is the cleanliness. None of the staff members care about keeping the food serving area clean and tidy.

With such volume of traffic they need to be extra on top of things. But it's worse than a run down McDonald's.

The sauce area had no sauces. I asked a chef loudly and he ignored me. So I had to ask a cleaner waitress lady who went into the kitchen.

During this time your food is going cold.

The sauce area was absolutely disgusting. Just sauce all over the counter top.

You have to reach over and hope you don't get covered and stained by the sauces.

The apple sauce tasted artificial. Way too sweet. Just cheap rubbish.

Cranberry sauce was also out of a tin too.

Didn't try anything else because they were all contaminated with random sauces.

None of them were labelled correctly.

Gravy area was also very dark and they weren't labelled correctly. Gravy was lumpy and looked horrendous.

No onion gravy or anything different.

One gravy was steaming hot. The other was mildly warm at best.

Again the area was really dirty.

Doesn't take much for someone to get a cloth and spend 1 minute wiping surfaces down.

£15 an hour / 60. 25p to transform the place from being horrible to reasonable.

The table was also sticky. They didn't bother to clean it properly with actual cleaning products.

Drinks machine was running out of syrups. So the tango was basically water. Drinks machine was also really dirty.

So when you put your drink back on the table. Your table gets soaked with water since their are no drinks mats. And the drinks machine is extremely wet since the liquid has nowhere to drain into.

£34 for 2 meals and fizzy drinks is far too much. Especially for the quality you aren't getting.

Apple crumble. Had no apple in it really. Crumble soggy. Was probably microwaved. Custard was cold. Lots of skin from apple getting stuck in my mouth I had to put on the plate too.

I would seriously avoid going to this place.

Absolutely...

We popped in here for a standard late decision on a carvery, before realising we had none of the ingredients ourselves.

Hoped onto Google - I know what I wanted, a Toby Carvery. I live around 6 miles away, that's how decisive my stomach was set on a Toby Carvery. Dragged myself out of my bedroom as the regret for last night settled in.

When we arrived, the car park was busy. I thought if last nights consequences had decided to empty my stomach after eating, it would be in front of a crowd. Parking is easy to get too. There are big steps if you don't walk around from the car park, but plenty of spaces free. Parking was free and you could register your car in the pub to be sure.

We walked upto the door, which was nice and clean; and opened the door as the Toby ornaments welcomed you in. There was a slight wait in the corridor, but we were so hungry we'd probably have queued outside the door.

After a couple of mins we were greeted by the welcomer. He quickly sorted us his only table for two and our waitress popped over and took and drink order and asked what we'd like to order. Carvery it was, she told us to go up and pointed us in the direction. Our stomach's by this point had latched onto the smell of the food. Obviously Mr eyes bigger than his belly went for a larger Carvery. My partner went smaller, as she only wanted a bit of everything.

We queued for around 10 or 15 mins for the food. Eyes filling up as we watched others filling their plate. Of course, being a manly man I proudly declared I was going hard and having lots of everything to my partner. The lamb was very fatty and rather than chuck the huge fatty part, the cutter decided to keep cutting the fat and getting the meat right down to the bone, my final slice of lamb was rather red. I didn't eat it as my stomach was not made for that on that very day.

Sadly the gravy ran out, so I had one scoop and had to wait 5 mins for it to be replaced, along with the mint sauce. An impatient lady behind me was loudly moaning, which made me feel slightly bad but it was directed at the staff more than me. None the less, Carl the chef (note - name wasn't actually Carl) arrived with the gravy and then a minute or two later he returned to rejoice from the diners with the mint sauce, walking out like a hero after winning the world Cup, with the international team.

I finally sat down as finally my stomach felt like it was going to empty itself rather than replenish, but that was down to the previous nights antics. I'd piled my plate super high (many man remember?!) As I sat down my girlfriend wanted to look me in the eyes, but as I had so much food she needed to scale half of the building to peer over me as I proudly smiled, then woefully admitting I now felt hungover haha.

The food was delicious. Cooked well, only complaint was the lamb meat was extremely fatty and the one meaty slice was covered in blood / very pink in the middle.

My partner decided to declare I was not going to eat more than half, so my mission was set with a clear objective: eat more than half.

The food was very filling, well seasoned and tasted fresh.

Our waitress was very attentive and quick at getting around her tables. I don't remember her name but she wasn't very tall but a total credit to the restaurant.

We definitely enjoyed our meal. Even though it was far away, I'd love to go back when I'm not hungover as I could enjoy the experience more.

Thanks to entire team, hope to...

We visited on Sunday 4th Aug at 5pm. It was a spur of the moment visit, so didn’t book a table. Though when I did look to book (about 20mins before we arrived) there were plenty of slots available, so we didn’t as we thought there would be plenty of space. When we arrived, we were advised there would be a 15ish minute wait for a table. Not a problem at all, we were happy to wait. Whilst waiting we noticed the absolutely massive queue for the carvery that didn’t appear to be moving, but hey ho, once we got our table (30 mins, not 15ish as initially advised) we joined it. There started our 35 minute wait to get some food from the deck. Staff on the deck didn’t seem to be monitoring to ensure as food was running low that they replaced it ready for everyone else, thus there were lots of delays waiting for mash, or whatever else had run out. Totally disorganised. We thought about leaving the queue, but thought ok well maybe it won’t take much longer. I wish we had. We both had king size carveries, the yorkshires were old (had been sitting in the pan a while ) and the beef I had, well it was both fatty and chewy and tough. I could have used it to sole my shoe. The roast potatoes were also quite hard . To top it off, we had ordered extra pigs in blankets, and they had been sat on our table ages going cold whilst we were in that ridiculous queue. We weren’t the only ones bamboozled, there was another couple complaining and leaving as we left . Myself and my partner have been to this Toby carvery many times on various days of the week, Christmas etc, and it’s never ever been this bad. We won’t...