Harbour Kitchen, Bar & Terrace — Restaurant in England

Today myself and 3 family members strolled up to have lunch at the harbour kitchen, bar & terrace. We had seen the lunch offer of pizza & drink for £15 advertised on various social media platforms the day before.

On arrival the offer was clearly advertised at the steps to the outdoor terrace. We found a really lovely sunny spot and waited for someone to take our order. No one came out to our table so we assumed we should enquire at the bar. I went in with my uncle and asked about the lunch offer menu. Well unfortunately asking this question was the start of multiple customer service failings. The barman had to check with the kitchen and came back to tell us that the dough was still proving so pizzas were not available at that time. My uncle enquired what time the pizzas would be available and the barman disappeared to the kitchen again, on his return we were told it would be several hours and offered the standard lunch menu and apologised for the inconvenience. My uncle was less than impressed with the lack of clarity and asked if pizzas would be available at all today? this proved to be a rather challenging question again! My uncle decided to speak to the front desk and he was finally told that the pizza chef hadn’t turned up for work, another chef would be in at 3pm but wasn’t trained in cooking pizza!

As you can imagine the debacle was incredibly unprofessional and judging by the lack of customers there is a reason for that. We were offered a round of beverages for the inconvenience and were told someone would be out to take our order. We sat for 10 minutes and finally decided to leave the venue as we felt at that point we were being ignored and headed into town for a rather late lunch elsewhere.

Whilst in the bar may I add two people who were having drinks actually told us not to bother with the food as it had gone downhill, so all in all perhaps we had a lucky escape.

The things that stand out to me during this experience is the lack of professionalism and a huge lack of communication between staff. In fairness the barman did his best to be as polite as possible and apologise but he can only work with what he is given…no pizzas!

Bearing in mind the terrace was not even half full with customers the service was almost non existent when table service should be as standard at this type of venue.

If promoting and marketing a lunch offer it would be wise to advise if the offer is not available and posters replaced, and social media updated.

A very disappointing experience and unfortunately we...

Terrible service. My girlfriend and I booked a table for dinner at 19:30, arrived & checked in at the bar entrance & asked to sit outside which was fine as you can only book a table inside but can go outside if they have tables free, we were given a paper drinks menu & went to sit outside. All the tables were unfortunately clearly dirty & hadn’t been cleaned which isn’t great in these Covid times & I would put this down to lazy staff & I don’t think there’s any excuse for allowing customers to sit at dirty tables, but we sat down at a table.

A large group came down via the outdoor stair entrance and asked for a table for drinks, the staff then came over and took their drink order ignoring us even though we were there first. It was around 20 minutes before one of the guys on the bar came to take our order but by this point I wasn’t really happy with the service and the whole experience so I had booked to grab food from somewhere else, I told the staff (2 men at the bar) to cancel the table and that I wasn’t happy with the service & the staff didn’t seem too bothered with my complaint but unfortunately I couldn’t bring myself to support this business with such complacency towards its customers & instead went to support one of the brilliant...

Browsing the reviews in the bar before dinner, I thought it can’t be that bad. 3 star rating, but from appearence it looked like it should be at least 4 if not 5. Then it became apparent what the problem is, it’s the service - precisely in accordance with what I had just it been reading. The restaurant reportedly ends service at 8:30pm and was only half full. We arrived at 8:00pm to be turned away, because kitchen staff didn’t want to ‘stay on’. We had already looked at the menu in the bar and were ready to place our order right away. 8:00pm isn’t particularly late for dinner. We were really looking forward to our meal here and were planning to book a summertime stay in the hotel but I wouldn’t return based on the lackluster ‘can’t be bothered’ attitude shown towards guests, so clearly evident in previous reviews and no doubt the reason for the 3...