Bill’s Newbury Restaurant — Restaurant in England

This was our first visit since the refurbishment, the new furniture and layout was nice and more cafe oriented, the experience was quite different then we had experienced before for the following reasons:

1. The have reduced front of house staff and now insist on you ordering via QR code, I find this impersonable as you cannot ask about their (new) menu, I had to call the waitress over to ask about several things, it made the process awkward and take longer than having some take your order. If I was going to a fast food restaurant such as Mcd's then fine, but I expect something with higher service from Bills.
2. The food arrives all at once, again caused by this insistance to order and pay online, this is simply ridiculous and very annoying, I know and like the Wagamma system as the sides are sides and not starters.
3. Again because you order online you are obliged to tip upfront before you have had any real "service" I very much dislike this and find it frankly rude and presumptuous, tips are discretionary and earnt, that said the Newbury staff were extremely courteous and tried their best in difficult circumstances.
4. Their website still says the set menu that I have had previously is available but whe you get there it isn't available. This was a minor disappointment but still annoying, it was always great value but we were informed it is not a feature of the new menu, also a few of our favourite dishes have now been removed/replaced with other things. The food was still very tasty and (after ordering online) the food all arrived quickly, in fact we were all done in less than 1 hour, this makes me question if Bill's is now a higher end McD's it certainly felt less of an experience and more or a transaction with their new set-up. I will therefore not be returning again anytime soon, I pity the staff who have to work around this awkward set up and were...

Bills is our to go restaurant for special occasions and we recommend them to our family and friends as our experienced has always been great with both foods and service. However, today I took my family for an easter lunch and we were served the worst meals of our lives. My husband ordered steak and eggs and I ordered ordered seabas florentine; everything in our plates was cold and the potatoes and chips were soggy as if it was cooked in old fat. The only decent meal was my sons Macaroni Cheese which he enjoyed.

In hindsight, we realized that our meals were not cooked fresh although they claimed they have! Our drinks, flat bread, and main courses were served within 5 minutes of ordering. Whereas the table next to us were there before us, placed their orders before us and they were not served until my son had his dessert! What's worse was that some of the people sitting on that table ordered the same meals as us and it was clear as day light the difference between their chips and our chips, theirs looked freshly cooked and clean while ours was brown and soggy.

We were asked by a very friendly and kind waitress how was our meal? We told her the truth, she was very apologetic. 10 minutes later the on duty manager came in, he was the most unhelpful manager. Don't take complaints kindly and no apologies. Instead of saying thank you for letting us know I will check with the kitchen and make sure it will not happen to our upcoming customers but instead all he said was I'll take it off your bill. That's not the point of our complaint and giving us a discount certainly wouldn't stop me from writing review based on...

Embarrassing end, to an ‘Ok’ evening! I went yesterday evening with all my children to celebrate my daughter passing out the Army. We had a lovely and set up at a nice table. We ordered out food, which was pretty good. My sons order was wrong as it had avocado instead of bacon, but the lady serving offered to change but my son was too hungry to wait. We then we’re offered 1 more round of drinks, but she only offered 2 of us then walked away, so we asked another waitress. We ordered deserts and when the profiteroles came my husband jokingly said, “is this only for one as that’s £2 a profiterole”. To be fair 3 each isn’t many, but she just shot him a look of disgust and walked off. When the bill came it included £29 of tip….now to servie 1 lot of main meals, 1.5 rounds of drinks and carry over 3 deserts seems a lot! I was happy(ish) to give £20. We all chipped in for the meal and happily paid the bill + £20 tip. With that the stroppy waitress from earlier came flying over to my table started shouting something and the waitress who served us had to pull her away!!!! I was so shocked I didn’t realise how bad it was until other tables around us asked if we were ok!

On the way out I did ask our waitress if she too was okay she was also shouted at, before the stroppy waitress shot off up stairs. I have no idea what her problem was, we were not rude and paid our bill in full, with a tip!

I like Bill’s but I’m never coming back. You couldn’t have ruined what had been an amazing day for my family. That waitress has an explosive attitude and embarrassed me and the other...