Marina Spice Lounge — Restaurant in Dacorum

Having seen an article in hemel today which listed this as the no.1 curry house in the area we thought we'd give it a try. Having tried it, I have to wonder what planet all the people who voted for it are living on. Service was desperately slow, to the point of being comically bad at times. If it was a massive restaurant, or was massively busy i could understand it - but it isn't and it wasn't, there was only a couple of tables occupied. The interior is extremely dated and gives the ambience of eating in a bus or railway terminus.

High spot of the terrible service for me was when they brought us 3 bottled cobra beers that we didn't order. They took them away, proceeded to fish the caps out of the bin and then put them back on the bottles and the bottles went into the fridge to be resold to the next unwitting customer. Then they brought us 3 kingfisher beers - which again we hadn't ordered.

One of the waiting staff took it on himself to pour my beer into the glass so quickly that it overflowed, leaving me with a glass of 95% froth and a small amount of (now flat) beer. He set my glass onto a saucer as it was overflowing, and then just walked off without saying a word. I had to spend the rest of the meal watching my drink in case he tried to do this again.

As for the food, i had the house starter which tasted like tinned curry from a supermarket shelf. My main course actually tasted ok, but was let down by cheap rubbery meat, the rice somehow managed to arrive with a film of grease on it, and the saag paneer had a total of 3 very small pieces of paneer in it. Not the worst dining experience i have ever had, but not far off it. I wouldn't go back if...

Arrived fairly late with my partner and all throughout the meal, we were constantly being rushed and reminded of the time. If it was too late, why did they let us in in the first place?

The food was average at best, felt and tasted like it had been chucked in the microwave to warm up and served.. just to get us out the door quicker.

Every 2 minutes a staff member was coming over asking if we were finished. The server in his own hurried state even forgot that I had also ordered Samosas with my meal, until I reminded him when the bill arrived.

To add insult to injury, there was another slightly larger group also in the restaurant, who were having a good time between themselves; where we only saw the server visiting them once to take payment, while they continued to harass and hurry us. I even spoke to the server in private to point out this issue, which he acknowledged but then continued to harass us along with his colleague.

I was careful not to make a big issue out of this and had the manager come over so I could request the bill, I also asked if there were any solutions to the service we had received today.. which he completely ignored.

I did pay a discounted rate after refusing to pay full price for the service we were given and still no apology was made. We even ended up leaving before the other group!

I felt VERY offended, especially given the contrast between how we were treated compared to the other group.

A lovely location and a nice atmosphere but I will never be returning, nor would I ever recommend to...

Ordered the breast roast chicken with chips, peas, tomatoes and apparently gravy (Not something that you order from a curry place usually, but I eat curry most days so was after something more with an English tradition). No gravy came with the dish, even though it clearly states on the online menus that it should. After ringing the delivery guy he was explaining to me that it did not come with gravy, so I read out what was said on his website, his reply was that its out of date! My reply to him was "don't ever serve breast roast chicken without some kind of sauce...the chicken is too dry and should always be served at least with the option of having some kind of sauce...and UPDATE your MENU!". The food was delivered over an hour after the order was made even though I was under 5 minutes away (I guess I should have just done a pick up, my bad). When the food arrived it was pretty cold. The lamb noodles wasn't anything to be desired either...My advice to Marina Spice Lounge is stick to what you know! Make Indian dishes...Don't try and sell food of other cultures with a half assed approach, taught me a lesson to try out something "different", won't be...