To sum this up, it was an incredibly long wait for poor service and bog-standard overpriced food.

We arrived at the pub an hour early - our fault and we were told we could wait and have a drink and then to head back over at 4, which was absolutely fine. My partner went to get us a drink from the bar as were waiting and couldn’t actually get to the bar to be served because it’s surrounded with people eating.

At 4pm we head back over to get our table, the hostess at the front smiled at us and then continued to walk past us and straight out the front door. It wasn’t until 10 minutes later a waiter came over and apologised and told us he wasn’t the host but will try to help us as best as he could and then once a new hostess realised he was trying to help she then came and took over. She looks and says ‘your table is just getting set up, please can you wait by the bar and i will come and grab you when it’s ready.’ Not that another customer was leaving, just that it was getting set up. So we wait for another 15 minutes before she comes over and tell us to go straight through to another room where we will then be seated by someone else. We head through and then we wait again for another 10 minutes for another hostess.

The next hostess comes over looking confused and then checks our booking (however I’m not sure why she would need to do this as surely the first hostess would have told her we were coming through?) and then looks around the room (which there were many empty tables ready so we are unsure how our table took so long to ‘set up’ when we could have been sat on any of these tables?) before deciding on one and taking us to it.

The waitress we had seemed to be the only helpful and observant waitress in the room who made sure we were ordered as soon as possible and was always checking if everything was okay. The problem we then had was the fact we had ate our starters and we’re given our food before my partner was given a drink he had ordered at the same time as ordering the food.

The food was cold and normal pub food standard and half of the roast dinner was a cold and extremely dry Yorkshire pudding - definitely not worth the £81 that we paid.

Half way through eating, a singer comes on. She was a brilliant singer but at 5pm when eating a roast dinner, I would actually like to have a conversation with my partner and hear him over the incredibly loud singer and pianist. It was clear that where we were sat was not a restaurant but mainly a bar as we were surrounded by work Christmas nights out. Not what we expected when booking to eat a roast dinner on a Sunday afternoon.

That leads us onto the last issue. My partner paid for half of our food whilst I went to the toilet and when I came out, he told me that the waitress had taken half of the payment and then walked away from the table. We made eye contact with the same waitress 3 times to try and finish paying the rest of the bill as she clearly could see I was back at the table, before watching her go to another table and give them their bill, go back to the till, go back to the other table and took their payment, then we made contact with her and watched her go to the till, get another tables bill, go over to give them the bill, go back to the till and then head back over to their table and take payment and then head back to the till for another 10 minutes. In that whole time we made eye contact and tried to speak to multiple waitresses to try and speed up the process as we had a 4 hour drive home to do, and the response we got was a blank face and them carrying on walking past us.

Overall we spent 2 and half hours having a meal that could have been easily done in around an hour, we couldn’t hear each other and we were constantly waiting for staff to actually do their job in a not so busy restaurant for the amount of staff around. The food was not up to the standard of which it is charged and quite frankly the staff do not communicate with each other or their customers.