Fox Ilkley — Restaurant in Bradford

AVOID.

Generally I eat somewhere 3 times before leaving a negative review.

Have eaten here something 5 times in the last year due to family or friends asking me and all 5 visits have been DIRE , and for the same reasons, quality of food, slow service and ridiculous prices.

It's on the main road towards Burley in Wharfedale from Guiseley.

Car park at the back.

An old pub so accessibility is not great.

I guess they think they are a gastro pub which in this case means they inflate the price, over garnish the food and underdeliver in most areas.

I ordered some artisanal bread and dips as a mini starter. When it came out my wife and I were hysterically laughing for 10+ minutes. It was toast! 4 slices of toast, with 2 dips and 2 pieces of butter that were frozen solid.

As it happens neither of us had eaten so we wolfed down the toast.

Artisanal bread = toast? £6? Nope nope nope.

Then I had a salad bowl. Not sure how you can mess up a salad howl....

It had zero taste from overripe avocado to underripe tomato, no dressing, etc, etc.

I gave up. It was something around 14£ by the way.

Service was painful. Slow beyond slow.

The young lad, and 2 young girls on duty spent most of their time behind the corner of the bar drinking coffee and chatting. I don't begrudge them, it was mostly empty and they were probably bored.

Best part of the experience?

Warm toast with a dip, which was filling...

Never going here again.

Waste of money.

Wetherspoons is a much better experience at a third of the cost.

PS just hit 11 million views so quite...

Our waitresses were friendly and accommodating, especially one lady who has been there a long time who is always great fun and goes out of her way to make you feel welcome and looked after - I think she’s called Chloe and she’s a credit to the business. The food was a massive let down, we have been coming for the roast dinners for years and today’s was really poor compared to previous experience. We had 6 adult roasts and all but one of them was poor, the chicken was dry, the beef was grisly and the belly pork was so overcooked in places that it wasn’t possible to cut through it so half of it wasn’t eaten. I did raise this with our other waitress twice, the response was she’d told the kitchen who said that the beef can be chewy because of the cut which I surprised at, if you know it’s partly inedible why is it being served? We visited the previous week without booking and were seated for food, then after ordering drinks we were told that it would be a 45 minute wait to place an order, having not booked I would normally be ok with that but it would have been good to have a heads up before we were seated and the pub was almost empty. It seems like the kitchen is having trouble based on that and our experience on Sunday. We will be trying other local restaurants ahead of the Fox after 2 poor experiences, hopefully the issues can be ironed out quickly and the responses to customers issues dealt...

Food was cold. Not "colder than we would have liked", but stone cold. We sent it back and the staff took umbridge with this, they seemingly were offended as they kept telling us "we probed the food and it wasn't cold". They were unable to grasp the fact that the food was cold by the time it came to us, so whether they probed the food or not, it was cold by the time we received it. When we said this to the waitress, she just kept repeating that the chef probed the food (insinuating we were wrong or lying). I spoke to her later and told her we were offended by her tone as she insinuated we were lying, giving her a chance to apologise, and she just said "no - the food wasn't cold". The worst bit was the staff avoided us like the plague afterwards, didn't collect our plates, didn't offer more drinks or dessert menus, just avoid avoid the table that dares to complain about cold food. They certainly didn't apologise or discount the meal. I complained to the manager over email, and he was no help - he gave me the same attitude of refusing to believe the food was cold. I don't understand what the staff at The Fox think we have to gain by supposedly lying about the food, but we didn't expect anything other than an apology which we didn't get. If you expect even mediocre service when you go out for a meal, I would...