Hen & Chickens Derby — Restaurant in England

As I am from Birmingham and I have tried their sister restaurant (lovely food), I thought I would give this a try with some friends.

Venue - amazing!! I was really impressed with the overall appearance and it's definitely a step up from some of the other places I have been to. Love the lay out and if I am honest, felt like I was a little underdressed and instinctively took my baseball cap off.

Staff - very friendly even though we had to repeat ourselves a few times before they got the order correct. Only a personal thing but the lady who was assigned to our table kept calling everyone at the table 'darling' which I thought was a little too overly-friendly.

Food - Let's start off with the starters. We ordered a large mixed grill and some plain/masala fries. The fries were as described, no issues with those, although the portion was a little on the small side.

The grill was not bad but again, for a large, it was on the small side compared to other places (especially with what you are paying for it). It came out on what looked like a kilo of sizzling onions (not sure if this was on purpose to make the grill look bigger!). Wings were tender and had bags of flavour. Chicken tikka had pretty much no flavour. What I think was malai chicken was lovely, very tender and the pieces were a decent size. Chops were nice. Fish pakoras were more batter than actual fish but still tasty. There were only two small kebabs which again only reinforces my comment that the grill was on the small side for a large.

Now the mains - we ordered a butter chicken, desi punjabi lamb, an assortment of plain and garlic naans and keema rice.

The butter chicken was not nice. The meat was over cooked and was hard to separate with the naan so had to resort to the edge of my fork which I still found difficult. The sauce was waaay to watery and needed to be thicker. It was overly sweet and didn't leave a nice taste in your mouth.

The lamb was better. Pieces were tender and the sauce, glossy and thick. The right amount of chilli without being overly powerful and knocking out the other flavours.

The naans were like cardboard unfortunately. Tearing through them was like snapping poppadoms. Butter was applied sparingly which didn't help and I got little or no actual taste of garlic from the garlic ones, just little chunks of garlic randomly sprinkled over them. I would suggest making your own garlic butter and spreading that over the naans once they come out of the tandoor, bags more flavour and would keep the naans moist.

Overall - I can see why this place was busy. It feels more like a fancy restaurant than a mixed grill pub (table service for both food and drinks) and believe me, that's not a bad thing.

The food, however, needs improvement. It may have just been that we came on a bad night and will visit again to test that theory.

I can really see the appeal of this place and mixed grill pubs are definitely expanding out of the Birmingham bubble but I think in this case, it's style over substance with Hen and...

Warning ⚠ They are "buying" good reviews (They are offering customers money off for leaving good reviews).

5 of us dining on a Saturday night. Three of us turned up first and were seated at a table by the door. Unfortunately there was a cold draft each time someone entered or left. We asked if we can be relocated but told there no other tables free.

We then pointed out that the table was only for 4 people and our party was 5, the waitress then proceeded to get a chair and set a place at the end of the table. With Indian cuisine you have multiple plates/bowls per person (in our case 4 per person), so trying to seat 5 people at a 4 person table is not ideal.

We ordered poppadoms and pickles, when the pickle tray arrived there was literally a teaspoons worth in each of pot, no where enough for 5 of us (there was barely enough for 2 people - you would think it was leftovers from another table!). We raised this with the waitress who brought us another tray (which we got charged for).

Before we finished the poppadoms, our starters arrived. I'm happy to report the starters were good. We had dosa, garlic mushrooms, paneer salad and lamb chops (I think it was lamb chops).

For the main course we ordered a chicken balti, but a special balti was brought out instead. The Desi Punjabi chicken was ok. I wasn't too keen on the pilau rice (but everyone is different). One of the the party ordered the chicken biryani. Unfortunately it was too fragrant/floral, none of us in the party could eat the rice. There was too much rose water.

Then the waitresses started to take away the plates/bowls before everyone had finished eating.

The worst part of the evening was at the end when we asked for the bill. The waitress offered us a £10 discount if we gave them a 4-5 star review!

Not sure if this was genuine, one of the party gave them a 4 star review. The waitress came back and said she had seen it posted online and said we'd get £5 off the total. When we enquired about the £10 discount, we were told 4 of us would have to make sperate reviews - We didn't!

This is so unprofessional and I would suggest you ignore most of the positive...

The food was excellent, and our waitress was faultless.

Unfortunately, the atmosphere completely overshadowed our evening. My wife and I had chosen this restaurant to celebrate our anniversary, but it clearly isn’t designed for smaller, more intimate tables. The layout seems to cater more towards larger, rowdier parties. Perhaps we were unlucky with our table location, positioned centrally in the main thoroughfare, where we were constantly brushed past by staff - but predominantly other diners.

What was most surprising, however, were a couple of tables that appeared to have connections to the staff. One large group had young children running wild throughout the restaurant—going in and out of the kitchen and behind the bar without any consideration for other diners or staff. I was amazed that the staff managed to avoid dropping any food, given how often they were bumped into or ran Infront of.

To our side, a group of extremely loud women were swearing, making disruptive video calls, and behaving overly familiar with a staff member, loudly discussing how they were being "hooked up." It wasn’t just us who were taken aback—there were a few other couples dining near us, and we all exchanged glances saying how chaotic the environment was.

There’s so much more I could mention, but in short, the experience was overwhelming. The atmosphere was anything but relaxing, and  unless you were happy to complete with the noise you couldn't have a reasonable conversation. What should have been a special evening was completely spoiled by the noise...