Etto — Restaurant in England

First time visit today and it’ll definitely be the last. We walked out after having nothing but an awful customer service experience.

It did start off so well. We fancied a drink and a sit down (me, wife, 3 kids) so we decided to try Etto instead of Costa, you know, support local and all that.

In we walked, very busy (of course it was, Saturday and a market day) but one of the staff greeted us and helped us get one of the last tables and he got us a 5th seat, great start, well done that lad.

I went over to have a look at the menu on the wall, the older two kids (11 & 12) love an iced coffee but I couldn’t see them so I thought I’d ask someone. I approached a member of staff and proceeded to have the weirdest most judgemental and awful customer experience!!

She said they do do iced coffees. Excellent I thought, so I asked for a menu “for the kids”. I was then berated for allowing the kids iced coffees “because it’s illegal to sell coffee to under 16’s”.

Now to my knowledge it is certainly not illegal, those daft energy drinks might be, but coffee not. And every other coffee shop we frequent doesn’t have a problem. Unless Etto have a policy of their own, but that’s their policy, not actual law, and perhaps this needs to be displayed.

I told her the kids get iced coffees all the time and she did kind of back down in an ‘I don’t care anyway’ kind of vibe, and I said it’s not like they’re vaping or smoking!! At this point I just thought stay calm and leave, we don’t need a dramatic scene. So we left, and I mentioned it to the nice lad on the way out.

So we’ll just stick to Costa, or Bakers & Baristas, or any other coffee shop we frequent who are happy to serve us those illegal drinks for us despicable parents to give our kids.

With customer service like this, you’ll stay small and independent and then likely go out of business. And everyone just keeps going to Costa.

Or was she just having a bad day, don’t we all? Whatever it was, in customer facing roles, the game face needs to go on, smile through it. Don’t be all Judgie McJudge Face.

So I can’t make any comment about the coffee, the food, the ice cream, etc. it could be marvellous but we’ll never know and won’t be back to find out....

To start with we ordered two pots of tea. The tea pots were dirty and very stained inside and out. We were going to complain but only had a short time before we had to leave and the staff were rushing around and too busy to talk to us. Secondly because we had to wait so long for our order and we had to leave, we had to request to have our food boxed to go. I wished we had looked in the boxes because when we opened them whilst in the car we couldn’t believe the completely unacceptable and poor standard of presentation and quality of the food itself. We ordered a chicken wrap with sweet chilli sauce, cheese and peppers, it came flattened into a half crispy, half soggy piece of toasted cardboard instead of a fresh wrap and had only two pieces of watery ‘chicken’ each less than an inch in size, two thin slices of pepper and curdled melted cheese. The fries were hot but some not thoroughly cooked so were hard and ‘gritty’. The other order was a toasted bacon sandwich with was basically two pieces of dry bread with one and a half slices of bacon hanging out. No butter, just horrible, dry toast and hard bacon. We paid £20.00 in total for this, poor service, terrible food and really questionable so-called ‘chicken’, it was completely inedible. I have tried to contact the management to demand a refund but not able to so far, hence this review. The ‘food’ had to be thrown in the rubbish where...

We had lunch at Etto the week before Christmas. A fairly simple order of two jacket potatoes. 45 minutes after ordering the food hadn't appeared so I went to enquire where it was. The person on the till explained that hot food orders hadn't been going through to the kitchen due to a technology issue. If they knew this then it would've been courteous to let the few of us waiting for hot food know. The jacket potatoes eventually arrived almost an hour after ordering. We heard the people beside us mentioning that they'd waited half an hour for food - and their waitress offered them free drinks. We got nowt for waiting for an hour. 2 stars as the jacket potatoes were actually nice when they arrived, and the place is pleasantly decorated...