Higher Ground Cafe & Bar — Restaurant in England

This is a difficult review to write. I’ve been to HG a few times in the past, both solo and with friends. This time my daughter and I went for Halloween brunch, and everything was great until the food arrived. First, and I have to be honest here, I’ve always thought the food a bit overpriced, but justified it by recognising that I’m paying for the atmosphere. Although I’ve had good experiences in the past, today my Turkish eggs came swimming in what looked like grease. Being ravenous, and not wanting to bring down my special brunch with my daughter, I ate most of the plate but could barely taste the yogurt sauce for all the grease. At one point a staff member passed our table and I called her over and asked if the plate always comes this way, and she explained that it wasn’t grease but chilli oil. Whatever it was - it literally drowned out the rest of the food and gave me a stomach ache, even though I tried to eat around it and left most of the oil on the plate (see photos). Anyway, this time the meal really left me feeling icky and I don’t think I’m in a hurry to go back.

Edit since the reply from HG: I read the menu description of the Turkish eggs before ordering. Regardless of what the menu says, your own staff member said “chilli oil,” and indeed, it was a big pool of oil on the plate. Even two and a half hours after eating it, my stomach is still turning from the meal and your defensive reply doesn’t help. Clearly the dish should be prepared with less oil. I’ll hazard a guess that perhaps it was sloppily made in this particular order. However the meal, and then your answer trying to explain away a bad meal (instead of acknowledging that a pool of oil on the plate is kind of gross and unhealthy) leaves me feeling worse than I did when I originally wrote this review. Maybe try to take the less than stellar reviews to heart and use them to better this establishment. It’s not a terrible place, but there is definitely room for...

Such a disappointing visit. Shockingly bad customer service and based on the reviews, we are not the only ones to have had this experience.

In support of reviews further down, if you have an issue with your food then you are 100% on your own, you will be ignored and it absolutely will NOT be resolved, meaning we paid close to £30 for one meal and two drinks based on a simple error on the menu and our replacement food not arriving within 40 minutes (turns out, it was never even prepared.)

We raised the issue immediately, the response was initially prompt but our replacement order was placed last on the checks (which is a strange thing to do, as surely they want tables served at a similar time, especially when the issue was not our fault.)

After 40 minutes, we were forced to leave and go to the till area, as it was clear by this point no one was coming back to our table to assist us. The response was, if you want to speak to the owner, you will have to wait 30 minutes, and otherwise they refused to refund us for food we had not eaten or even seen regarding the replacement meal.

The attitude of the staff was shocking, "have you ever worked in hospitality" being a partciular low point...this was such a simple issue that could have been resolved in minutes, instead it ended up 40 minutes of no food, then and extra 10 minutes of pointless back and forth at the till, all within ear shot of the owner who refused to help us and instead let their staff address the issue whilst they were trying to juggle numerous orders. It was stressful all round, completely evasive customer service (at one point they wouldn't even look at us, supposedly hoping we would dissappear?)

I would avoid this cafe completely, what a complete waste of time and money it was, look forward to the arsey response from the owner, who was too busy to help us in person but apparently never too busy to respond to deservedly bad feedback based on...

Nice little place , shame. A friend had heard good reviews , so we thought we would go and check it out for ourselves. On arrival , initial thoughts, nice layout and decor choice . We arrived around lunchtime and the menu we were offered was the Brunch menu. We both decided on the eggs Benedict which came with sourdough bread. Meal arrived, looked lovely, however we then needed to wait for the cutlery to arrive, why this wasn’t given before or even at the time of the meal arriving , I’m not so sure. Eggs were lovely, poached just how we both like them, hollandaise was tasty. Unfortunately the meal was let down by the sourdough, it was too hard to cut . I understand that this type of bread is a little tougher than your usual ,however, this became a fight to keep the meal on the plate. It just would not cut, my friends was even to tough in the middle of the slice. When asked at the end of the meal if everything was ok, we explained that weren’t happy with the bread and the response was that” it is sourdough bread” We expected the staff member to pass the message on and for someone to come back to us, however they didn’t. We decided to leave and on the way out we asked again if everything was ok, again we said it wasn’t . The response again was, “was it the sourdough?” So the issue had been mentioned but no one came to speak to us. We asked to see the manager, who clearly wasn’t able to see the problem. All they kept saying was we get it from Manchester, we can’t get it delivered from anywhere, I like the sourdough, we don’t make the bread we have it delivered from Manchester…” completely missing the point that it wasn’t how the bread was made but how it was cooked in their kitchen. Clearly we were not getting any where. We left very unhappy with the customer service and will certainly not be...