Fluffy Fluffy Bristol — Restaurant in Bristol

Hi there, I have plenty experience working as a manager in establishments from pubs to high end restaurants. After my experience, it is clear to me that Fluffy Fluffy has many structural issues in their team. Simple things: The person washing up needs to scrub cutlery properly and then polishing is vital, especially with gold metallic cutlery like this; its simple, allocate roles between your team so the workers arent questioning what they're doing and also not just standing there. Maybe you have one employee who does the fruit/decoration chopping while another stirs the souflee dough, then puts it in the cooker. You create a sort of supply chain which works efficiently so you can shorten your cooking times. I know you mentioned not being able to pre create the souflee, but you can do this with the decorations e.g. strawberries, pistachio chunks, banana slices (just keep in fridge). Youre going to save time and that way you can shorten waiting times. Then, sort out your communication between staff members please. It's horrible to see an older man belittling a clearly new student girl into getting her to do something. Your senior staff should have clear roles set out for their employees. To make this worse, the senior staff member doing this was sat on the till with his phone out waiting for customers; a managers job role isnt to tell people what to do, its to be part of the team while offering stability to others. The customer service: Its all a bit fake. I was trying to talk to one of the team members and as they were saying their part they were walking away; it all seemed a bit rushed which made us not feel cared about. Again, too many people standing around. The pancakes were fine, but cold-im putting this down to the teamwork, as the people sat next to us got their pancakes after us despite ordering about 10 minutes before us. I think there are a lot of structural issues and I hope my insight can help; there is hope for this business but the reviews just keep bringing up simple solutions, the teamwork is just not there. The place is lacking communication, so workers dont know what they're doing, there is so much opportunity to be more efficient and productive. Maybe more training is required? I also agree with compensation for waiting times and issues, I was happy to read the owner offering complimentary meals; keep doing this. If you do wrong, you need to make it right or people arent going to come back or theyll leave bad reviews, so what if you lose profit, I would rather that then my business be shut down because too many people complained about hygiene standards. Cutlery not being given before their food arrives; this is a simple fix, jsut lay out cutlery after you wipe down tables after a customer leaves-just make sure your workers know they should be doing this and pray they are intuitive, if they're not, make them , make them know everything they could be doing. For the 30 minute waiting times, if you know it's going to be long-TELL YOUR CUSTOMERS. A 30 minute waiting time is absurd, but if it's not changeable then it is what it is. Most people expect a 15 minute waiting time, so tell them it will be 30 minutes and offer them a drink. Also, please please please make sure your workers know their table numbers and where the food is going-again, communication and training issues. I hope you see the common fallacies coming up, and I really hope you can act on this feedback. Wishing...

This will be the longest Google review I will ever write.

I cannot recommend this place due to their utter contempt for customers. It’s clear that they value “likes” on Instagram more than they do paying customers. It’s a shame as the pancakes weren’t that bad and the environment inside was pleasant.

Please don’t let the wave of 5 star reviews fool you. They’re quite clearly from their friends and family who were invited in on the opening day that cut the line.

Arrived at 11:20am, 40 minutes before opening. Number 96 and 97 in the queue and lucky enough to qualify for a free drink each as we were one of the first 100 customers. Note how long the queue is from the photos. When they finally opened the doors at 12pm we were told the wait may be up to an hour as all the pancakes were freshly made and that they had a capacity to seat 38 people. We later found out both statements were outright lies.

We ended up waiting 3 hours to finally get in to order and waited another 20 minutes for the pancakes to arrive. When we were seated we looked around to see they only had capacity for up to 18 people, less than half the capacity they quoted.

While the sun was out it was incredibly cold, windy, with the odd downpour of rain and at one point hail. To add insult to injury they were letting their friends and family cut the queue while paying customers waited outside freezing. The smart move would have been to open the restaurant an hour earlier and pay your staff that extra hour, so you can serve your friends and family during this time without it interfering with paying customers. The 3 hour queue was made worse as no hot drinks, not even green tea were offered, it would have cost them nothing to hand small cups of hot drinks out, and this would have kept the people in queue happy. Unfortunately, there was a girl that collapsed while in queue at the two hour mark, and all they could do was wheel a chair outside for her. How about invite her in, offer her a hot drink and let her wait inside? On the subject of hot drinks, once you arrived inside to order, hot drinks weren’t available that day, cold drinks only. You couldn’t make it up!

The whole queue and customer experience was mismanaged. Why not operate a raffle ticket system, assign groups of say 15-20 people with numbers and allocate them with a 30 minute time slot to show up and order food. That way people could get a ticket, go away, or go to some place to keep warm, and then return for their time slot. Better yet, offer takeaways, both would have eased the pressure and ensure people weren’t standing in the cold for 3 hours.

The management cared more about creating social media content with their drone and cameras on gimbals than dealing with customers at hand. Not only that, they had staff sitting down on the window sill playing with their phones while people stood outside waiting to get in. Awful customer service as a whole, and their empty apologies meant nothing. How about a free hot drink? Oh wait they couldn’t even boil a kettle to make hot water and put a green tea teabag in a cup. No teabags? there’s a Tescos around the corner.

Avoid this place...

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TLDR: I paid £25 to drink salt and eat plastic.

I personally can’t work out why there are so many good reviews for this place! I would like to preface this by saying that the staff were generally polite and (seemingly) apologetic for our experience.

THE AMBIANCE Firstly, we were pointed through to find a table despite there not being a clean table in sight. After a while of walking around, we decided to pack up and clean a dirty table —multiple staff walked past and didn’t do anything to help, at which point I went to the till to ask for blue roll to clean the table with. The actual seating area itself is pretty jarring actually- neon yellow with a heinous tiktok trending top 40 soundtrack. It was dirty, with the self-serve customer water area stacked high with unfinished drinks, used plates and dirty cutlery which had clearly been placed there by other customers clearing their own tables. We noticed that there were tables of people waiting on missing orders, or incorrect items. We also noticed a lot of uneaten food left over. At the point we were getting nervous for the food!

THE FOOD One positive: the pancakes themselves were yummy, which I guess is the point of the place at the end of the day. We were given them after maybe 15 minutes, which was fine, although they did give us the wrong order and we had to wait for our second set to arrive. The toppings of both were very cold, and very frugal with the fruit considering we were paying so much for 2 pancakes. The creme brûlée was nice (albeit cold) until we found a beautifully caramelised piece of plastic on the brûlée. It was later explained to us that it was a sticker from the bananas.

Our drinks came, blueberry soda was nice. The yuzu soda I believe is supposed to be a nice sweet/salty balance however I was unpleasantly surprised when I drank from the straw and got a thick mouthful of crunchy salt. I spat out the salt paste (?) (I have never had to do this at a restaurant before) because I initially thought it was cleaning product or something in the bottom of the cup! I asked nicely if it was supposed to be so salty in case it was my fault for not having read the menu properly, at which point they confirmed it is not supposed to be that salty at all! They again offered an explanation rather than an apology , and returned with a nice sweet yuzu drink. I wonder if salt was accidentally added instead of sugar. Either way, it was strong enough to make me wonder whether I was drinking cleaning product so that’s never a good thing.

Regardless, no discount, refund or actual apology was offered, more so explanations for what had happened. We left having paid a silly amount of money to drink salt and eat plastic, and went for really delicious tacos afterwards to make ourselves feel better. Save your money and get yourselves some £1 scotch pancakes from the supermarket. Xxxx

Edit: sorry I can’t find a way of responding to the owners below comment! Thank you for your response. I’m sorry you can’t recall the Banana sticker issue, more than happy to provide the photos & video I have!...