Alma Park Harvester — Restaurant in Chesterfield

I really didn’t want to leave a bad review as we’ve been here 3 times now, the first two visits the service and food was excellent and I’ll easily have given 5 stars for those two visits. I never want to be “that” person to complain and cause staff any hassle.

However last night (6th October), pretty much every part of my meal was completely sub par. We were waiting 10 minutes to be seated at the door and the restaurant wasn’t busy at all. I ordered the mixed grill, which I was then informed they had no eggs left for it. It’s a bit poor for a restaurant to have run out of eggs right at the start of dinner service, 5pm! So I was substituted an extra sausage which I could make do with. I asked for my steak cooked rare, it was overcooked to medium well which is not to my taste at all, it was dry and tasteless and the chicken was dry as well.

I then ordered the cookie chaos sundae for desert. These sundaes come with a cone on top, which they completely forgot to put on it. There were next to no cookie chunks or sauce on it, no sign of any Oreo, there were literally 2 munchies chunks on the top, I’d pretty much just received chunk of very bland and very old tasting ice cream, even the cookie on top didn’t taste fresh either. I’ve had these sundaes twice before and they were delicious. This time was a complete and utter disappointment. Even most of the waiters tonight looked miserable, as did the young chef who came out to refill the salad area. I was too tired from a long day at work to raise a complaint but thankfully as my mum works in food herself she raised it in the right way with the male waiter (the only one of the night who actually had a bit of optimism for his job last night) and my mixed grill charge was gladly removed from the bill which is why I’ve not rated lower for this visit.

I may visit again purely on the basis that my first two visits the service was great, but if this standard is repeated I will go elsewhere unfortunately. Money is too tight nowadays to receive such poorly prepared food like this and I brought my mum and partner here from West Yorkshire on the basis of great past service and food for me and my fiancé. I was so disappointed...

Lovely warm welcome and told about meal deals. Decided to have the 3 course lunch for 16.99 per person with extra for drinks. Ordered starters and mains . Starters arrived not long after we'd been up to the salad bar and that was good. However 5 mins after they had brought our starters they brought our main meals. We were still eating our starters! The waiter looked annoyed when we told him we didn't want them yet as we hadn't finished the starters! He reluctantly said he'd leave them under the lights!!!! After we finished the starters we had to ask for our mains but one of them was gammon with fried egg and pineapple but because it had been under the lights the fried egg was no longer runny. Then we ordered desert. One of the options was an ice cream sundae which I ordered but my friend said she'd have just an ice cream . The waiter said that was an ice cream sundae........ well that wasn't what it said on the menu and ice cream was listed separately. He wasn't going to be moved on it either. After another long delay we were told the ice cream machine wasn't working but they were trying to get it going. Eventually a lady who looked like the manager came and apologised and said they could do an ice cream scoop rather than Mr Whippy style. Well I was expecting that a nyway. To be fair the food we had was generally good and we enjoyed it but it was a bit of a circus getting!!!! So 8/10 for food but 5/10 for service. Hence...

We were seated quickly on arrival, our order was taken quickly, glasses and bowls for salad bar brought were brought over in good time. At about 20 minutes after ordering our meals the waitress came over and said they only had 1 half chicken available (we had ordered 2 if these) so I was offered different chicken options and I went with the chicken breast, which was not a problem, then after another maybe 5 minutes the waitress came back to say they didn't have any half chickens left but did have a quarter! The wait time for our meals was about 45 minutes, the meals were also placed on the serving hatch by the chefs and we're there for over 5 minutes before a staff member collected them and brought them to our table, then two meals were brought to the table then the staff member took 2 meals to another table to customers before we were brought our last meal and a side we ordered. The food was not hot which I imagine was due to sitting on the side so long before being brought to the table. I started when our meals were brought that I would like to pay as I have 10 minutes before I needed to leave as I had an appointment, the lady did come back quickly with the bill and I paid. Upon arrival at harvester I had about 1 hour and 10 minutes before I needed to leave for an appointment which I think it's plenty of time, as it turned out due to poor...