Baan Thitiya - Thai Cuisine — Restaurant in East Hertfordshire

We've been here a number of times before, and travelled far to get here, but our most recent visit will be our last. Reasons below (I must add that the staff came to us as we were leaving and asked us not to write a review in exchange for money, which we declined) we ordered a minced chicken with basil dish. But chicken stir fry with rice came. I told our waitress, and she tried to convince me that this is what minced chicken is in Thai. I showed her the picture in the menu against what I ordered and confirmed that it's different. She took what I was served away I was then served another chicken stir fry dish with slightly smaller chicken pieces. I told the staff about this and said that I was unhappy but by this point my family had almost finished their meals and my baby was due to finish her nap ready for us to leave. So there would be no point ordering another meal which is what they offered I tried to just eat as much as I could of what I had been given but it was unfortunately not great tasting, it was pieces of chicken and green beans in soy sauce. Even though I was incredibly hungry I just couldn't bring myself to eat it all. Thankfully my husband swapped the little he had left with me. The bill came, and I mentioned to them that I'd expect to not be charged for the meal I was given that I didn't order and didn't like. To which I was told I should be happy that I wasn't also charged for the dish I was initially given. I was very surprised by this response. nevertheless we paid but took off the service that they'd added to our bill (the first time I've done this in my 37years, we normally always do 20%) Taking the service of triggered a strange train of events where they followed us to the door trying to give us money in exchange for a promise that we don't write a review! We declined of course.

Other things to note. they've reduced items on the plate from the set menu. They used to have a little salad that came with the platter, which is now not included and the portions are MUCH smaller we've been visiting regularly over the last year and have noticed that in the last couple of visits we are the only table for a 1.5hr lunch time visit on a Saturday! Evidently others are having similar experiences...

Or.. they've found alternatives like us, I've heard there's a giggling squid close by.. much better quality authentic Thai food!

Sorry to have to take one off of our list but it's not easy spending hard earned money somewhere where they clearly don't...

So disappointed!

We order from here regularly and love the food but had a really special evening planned with our family who we haven’t seen in a long time. We ordered a large amount of food and 4 items were missing from the order which equated to 2 peoples meals and a starter. We ordered from Deliveroo but called the restaurant to see if they were able to rectify it or find out where the food had gone. Sadly we were told the only option was a refund of the missing items. We were not happy with this as our long awaited family meal was then ruined as 2 of our guests could not eat! We really expected more than just our money back for the missing items as we feel we should have had some compensation for this.

The problem went from bad to worse when the phone got put on the side with us waiting on the other end because we were told they were too busy to deal with our problem as they were dealing with customers in the restaurant. We waited on the line for around 30 minutes and called on a different line to prompt them to deal with our issue as we would have liked to got more food sent to us for our guests. Instead the lady on the phone repeated what she had already said and hung up on us.

The food by this point was all stone cold. We called the next day and spoke between the restaurant and Deliveroo and it was decided we could get a full refund and we had been reliably told this by the lady at Baan Thitiya. We awaited this but received a refund from Deliveroo for less than the missing items!!! We called the restaurant back and asked what was going on to be told that the manager had said we can only get a refund for the missing items however we have not even received that!

Considering the amount of other Thai restaurants and takeaways popping up in the town I’m surprised they would treat regular customers in this way, horrendous customer service on this occasion. They did not have any way to deal with the issue and didn’t actually even try to help solve the problem. Evening ruined sadly.

Edit to reply: Thanks for replying, the main problem here is how we were treated by the restaurant. We were told they were too busy to deal with us and then ignored and had to spend a great deal of our time to get our money back. Customer service was appalling. Such a shame as the food has always been great but out of principle we have now...

So there's no really good reason these guys couldn't have earned four stars (I only give five to truly superlative dining), as the food was very nice and the service nimble and attentive. But I have to only give them three due to their terrible seating policy during COVID.

We had booked the day before assuming that it would fill up due to the restaurant reducing seating in service of social distancing. But when we walked into the bar area which is well equipped with tables at which there wasn't a soul seated, we were subsequently ushered into the main dining room which was nearly full and displayed little evidence of distancing dining parties from one another. I suppose maybe there could have been a few extra tables squeezed in there previously, but if that was the case their removal didn't really go very far in spreading diners out.

I imagine it was the look of concern on our faces that caused them to offer us seating in a smaller alcove area that had fewer total diners (but still was full) which we took. It was clearly our own fault for not asking to be seated in the empty bar area. At the same time, it's really surprising why the restaurant didn't take it upon themselves to start to use the totally empty bar area as the main area got near to capacity. It was a mild evening so sitting in the garden would have even been possible, but that was closed. It's kind of difficult to interpret their approach to seating as focused solely on staff convenience, not patron safety.

This isn't to say they paid no attention to this aspect: there was hand sanitizer in the entry way to the main dining area, and it appeared they used some kind of disinfectant spray on tables once a party left. So they clearly paid some attention to these details. But not leveraging your entire seating capacity during a pandemic with an airborne virus seems to be a pretty fundamental point to ignore.

All this is quite a shame, really, as it was otherwise a fine meal which we both enjoyed very much. But worry about having made a poor choice in staying and dining overwhelms our positive reaction to the food, and sadly is what we're mainly taking away from this...