El Olivo — Restaurant in East Devon

This lovely looking little restaurant sits in the heart of Exmouth and in the past had served us very nice food. We booked to eat again but our experience this time was horrid.

The owner thinks he knows better than his customers and enjoys sarcasm and preempting their thoughts.

When we asked if he served spirits (some wine bars do keep a small selection) he presumed we had the wrong place, ( we were fully aware of where we booked to eat) and he was clearly irked by this question.

We then went on to order two beers and our food.

We had noticed the price of the steak advertised and it was part of our order and when it was put in-front of us (aggressively might I add) my husband then asked if that was what was going to cost £12.50. ( for a very small piece of steak this wasn’t an unreasonable question) The response from this supposed friendly owner was “if you don’t like it you can leave”, and so proceeded to remove my drink from my hand ,then my husbands and whip away our food.

If he’d just answered the question in a polite and courteous manor (as is generally expected of a business that is public facing) he would have heard my husband say that the steak in that case should be good , but no he insisted on us leaving the premises.

An utterly shambolic attitude to customer service ,and extremely unprofessional. When I think back to our previous visit he was sarcastic to another table then, so we should have booked elsewhere to start with.

We certainly will never return ,but highly recommend it if you wish to be insulted by someone who should never be allowed to be front of house ,and seems to readily enjoy conflict with you ,on what should have been an enjoyable...

We dined here to celebrate my 40th with family & friends. Definitely NOT child friendly. We should've picked somewhere else when we got told to take our own highchair (red flag) but we still went. My partner spent most of the evening walking around outside with our toddler whilst we ate. Plus no kids menu, didn't even have chips. So we fed them snacks out of the bag. We then went on holiday for half term and realised today (due to the rain) my partner couldn't find his Barber coat. We rang around a few places trying to retrace our steps from 2 weeks ago. Sent message no reply. Rang the restaurant and the guy laughed saying 'good job you called, in another week it would be on ebay'! I said 'well im surprised you didnt call people that were in that night'. He replied saying he was busy. (This restaurant is small, has 2 sittings a night, 3 nights a week) My partner went straight down there to collect and the man said 'oh you're the Barber man, nice coat looks brand new' needless to say we were...

Wow, the guy who runs this place is so pretentious and rude. Food was good, normal overpriced small tapas, but delicious. Just would never ever go back there because I have SO little time away from the kids, when I go out for a night with friends, I don't need to be treated like a child and snapped at by the guy who owns the restaurant. He was being defensive because he couldn't bring out a dish that kept falling apart in the kitchen and I think he was embarrassed about that, so when I tried to explain to him that he had taken our order twice by mistake, he snapped at me and told me to stop talking. I have no need to spend my valuable free time in that kind of company. He's quite miserable. I'd rather eat worse food and be served by people that enjoy their job. But...