Wildwood Restaurants Ely — Restaurant in East Cambridgeshire

I came on a Friday at 6pm for their meal and a movie deal. I was seated and served quite promptly and my drinks came quite quickly. It wasn’t busy and the restaurant had a pretty chilled vibe.

For my starter I ordered the arancini. I was so excited by this as I absolutely love arancini but what was served was honestly just sad. I can’t imagine how it must feel to be a chef and have to make and serve this. Honestly no flavour, just mush. I felt a bit sad eating it to be honest and didn’t finish it. I absolutely adore arancini and it’s one of my favourite dishes, but this was by far the worst arancini I’ve eaten.

For my main I ordered the mushroom burger. I absolutely love mushroom burgers and it was a nice surprise to see it on the menu as it used to be a staple veggie option before all the veggie and vegan alternatives became avaliable so I’ve not had a mushroom burger in quite some time! The burger was tasty although the amount of mushroom was small.

For dessert, I ordered the chocolate brownie, which was pretty small but quite tasty.

I assumed they’d time the dishes coming out so they’d come out in time for when the film started but I ended up having an hour to kill before the film started, however I was allowed to chill out upstairs where the film is for that hour which I am grateful for.

Their cinema room was pretty spacious with quite comfy seats. One of the waiters, I believe he was called Aaron (?) was super lovely and bought me up a glass of water while I was waiting for the film which I didn’t even ask for, which was really really lovely. The toilets were clean, stylish and well stocked. I used them around half past 7 after chilling upstairs in the cinema room and the restaurant was very busy when I went downstairs to find the toilets.

Overall, a pretty mediocre 3 courses and I’m no longer surprised by how cheap the £24.95 deal was for a 3 course meal, and a film, however I’d probably come back again if they had another film I’d want to see. I’d like to try more of the menu to see if I have a...

What a shame. We’ve been coming to Wildwood every few months for years, mainly because it was brilliantly child friendly when our kids were small, with a great play area - and the food was always decent. This latest trip though was really, really poor. Hopefully we just got them on a bad day when everything went wrong, but it did feel like we were experiencing systemic problems. I’ll just list the issues: the table was sticky and dirty, and while it had clearly been cleared after the last guests, it hadn’t even had a cursory wipe and was horrible to touch. Our drinks order took 25 minutes, on a quiet evening. My wife’s cocktail was poor - with none of the tastes of the ingredients, and what felt like a short shot of the alcohol. The meals themselves were all disappointing in their own way: the kid’s menu mac and cheese was tasteless, my food had clearly sat on the counter for too long and had cooled and formed a crust on the top, a pizza was slightly burnt. We had the sense that they have no system for which waiters/waitresses had responsibility for our table, and the effect was that nobody was responsible, and when we had to chase them up, it was like whoever we spoke with felt like we were putting them out. There was no sense of service, or care. Towards the end of the meal our kids went to the playroom for old times sake, but found faded, broken down toys.

Our family is not hard to please, and we don’t make a habit of negative restaurant reviews - a place must be pretty terrible before we criticise it in public like this. It WAS pretty terrible.

BUT! This has been such a lovely restaurant in its time. Maybe it still can be lovely on another night. Hopefully we got them on a bad day. We’ll give them another go...

So I'll start with the positive in that we got a table without booking at 7.30pm on a Thursday night, but maybe this is because the locals know how bad it is. We were seated and then left sitting for 25 minutes before anyone came over, it was so long that the 2 girls on the table asked if we were dying of thirst and then explained they had had the same experience. Eventually a waitress came to take our order after 30 minutes and after taking our food order said 'have you ordered drinks yet?' which I thought was a ridiculous question as we were sat there without any after such a long time. Anyway the food came after a while although we could see it sitting on the pass for at least 3 or 4 minutes before a waitress got to it (which would have been ok except the pass has no heat lamps and the restaurant was very cold). As a result my pizza despite tasting ok was luke warm at best. However worse than that was when my partner found that most of the meatballs in her meatball cannelloni were not cooked in the middle (not just rare they were raw) and as we assumed they were pork she was unable to eat them. By the time anyone came back to our table (to clear the plates not to ask how the meal was) I had finished so when she was offered a replacement we turned it down as we didn't want to be there any longer than we had to. One thing they did do right was remove that dish from our bill but as far as I'm concerned it was too little too late. Cold restaurant, cold uninterested staff, poor food and no atmosphere. I would avoid it like the plague...