Buddy's, Matlock — Restaurant in Derbyshire Dales

Buddy’s was recommended to us by a friend of my husband’s and we decided to book a table for 5 to dine on a Saturday evening at 7pm. We arrived promptly to be greeted and shown to a small table in a corner that was dirty and was missing the condiments, napkins, cutlery and a drinks menu. The chairs were not comfortable at all, one of them was not level to the floor and my husband tried to do a temporary fix.

We ordered the drinks first - 1 jug of beer, 1 lime & lemonade and water for the table. When the water was served we all noticed that the glasses were cloudy and one had something on it. The waitress said that they are not dirty and she would only change them if they were. We decided to leave it and went on to order our food. At this point it is worth mentioning that none of us had dined at a smokehouse before and we were excited to taste the different smoked meats.

Our first order was 2 x The Original Pit Trays, 1 x Porkapalooza Pit Tray 1 x The Hungover Buddy and 1 x The Disorderly Buddy. The waitress informed us that they had run out of the pork belly which was included on the Porkapalooza Pit Tray, so the order was changed to 3 x The Original Pit Trays instead. She then said that they had run out of chilli which was on The Original Pit Trays but they can add some extra meat to compensate for the missing chilli.

We waited for over an hour before the waitress returned to inform us that the chef had now run out of pork ribs and smoked turkey. We were very annoyed and hungry by this point and the only substitute meat that was offered was chicken tenders!! This therefore meant that the trays would be missing half of the meats as mentioned on the menu. At £30 per tray this was exceptionally poor and surely it should have been taken off of the menu?!

The waitress then informed one of us to go and speak to the chef… My husband spoke to the chef who blamed the lack of meats on another table of 7 men that had all ordered the pit trays and that they had been very busy during the day! Surely as a chef you plan in advance and order enough meats etc to fulfill your reservations?

We asked for a few moments to chat about what we were going to do because it was suggested that we could order different meals from the menu e.g a burger because this will still be available or we could have 25% discount off of the food that we had originally ordered. Before we had chance to discuss and decide, our food was served. The food had clearly been cooked before we could give our answer and had been on the hot plate for a while. The burgers were poorly presented and the fries were missing the Buddy’s red salt but the worst plates had to be The Original Pit Trays! No extra meats were added as previously mentioned and the items that were on the plates were dry, the beef brisket was thinly sliced and had a bit of sauce over it - one of us commented that it looked like cat sick! The portions were tiny! You do not expect to be served such poor quality as such a premium price when you are paying £30 per Pit Tray and £16-18 per burger!!

This was the final straw for the five of us! We got up out of the uncomfortable chairs and walked out! We will NEVER return to Buddy’s and personally for me it has put me off of the whole smokehouse experience.

To point out that only once we had walked out of Buddy’s the manager came to speak to us to offer us a 25% off voucher to return in the future or she could give us a table at the Remarkable Hare. She also admitted that she hadn’t been informed of our poor experience and lack of communication on what was or was not available.

We rate Buddy’s...

Don’t go here if you have young children.

We walked in earlier to loud house music; the speaker by the entrance strobing and blaring. The atmosphere would’ve been immaculate if it wasn’t checks watch 2pm on a Saturday.

We had our young daughter with us and it was simply far too loud for her without ear defenders, so we asked if the music could be turned down. The server obliged and turned it down to a decent level, which was lovely of him. We sat down, took our seats, and they took our order.

Then, the music got turned up again. Then the server turned it back down. Bit of music volume table tennis. The young cooks then called the server over and clearly demonstrated that the music was to be set at a loud level, and that this isn’t something customers have a say in. The music had switched to country at this point - a nice consolation - but the volume was still outrageous.

The tension rose and it became evident that the young, clearly immature cooks wanted their own way. We asked several times for it to be turned down, and, while they did eventually keep it to an above average level, the back-and-forth didn’t make us feel particularly welcome.

That’d all be passable if the food was elite. It wasn’t. I got the original which included ‘brisket’. As you can see from the picture, this was actually just strands of overcooked beef. The rest of it was lovely though, especially the cornbread and ‘slaw.

Nice place all-in-all, and the Buddy’s pale ale was elite. It’s just not somewhere to go if you have young children, and certainly not somewhere to go if you have a request that goes against their weird core beliefs, which appears to just be overcooking the red meats and playing music...

Only clicked on a one as there wasn’t an option for zero stars. Booked in on a Sunday for my mother in laws birthday at 19:00. Straight away the attitude of the waitress was rude as we asked for the cocktail and wine menu and she said “we aren’t doing cocktails”. Fair enough; it was only us in there and it was a Sunday. Then ordered our food on the menu to be told that a lot of what we wanted wasn’t available so we had to revise the menu again, once again, we understood. Then once ordered food, the chef decided to pop a packet of crisps in the most agressive manor which made our whole table of five jump and then decided to stare at us and laugh whilst he did it. He then proceeded to throw his cutlery and plates around. When the food arrived we had to send some back as it wasn’t what we had ordered to be told “oh sorry, we don’t have that” by the waitress for the chef to then shout across the restaurant “ I’ll make you some pulled pork if that’s what you want”. The whole atmosphere was uncomfortable and we felt like we was being watched the whole time we ate our meal by all of the staff. We then heard the staff say “once they’ve gone, I’m off so they best hurry up”. This was only 45 minutes after we arrived baring in mind they advertise that they are open until 23:00. They gave us a gift card with 20% off. I can honestly say I will not be attending again and wouldn’t recommend espically for a...