Rick Stein, Sandbanks Restaurant and Bar — Restaurant in England

Consistently terrible service levels. I live locally (5min away) so through word of mouth I know that Steins in Sandbanks has not got a good customer service reputation, but I had Australian guests staying with me and they watched Rick Stein on TV in Aus so wanted to dine at the restaurant. We went on 5th May 2025 and got there about 8.20pm, the Bar dining was empty except for 1 other group of 6, so not busy at all and 3 at the bar. We were not shown to a table and eventually after 10 mins waiting i had to walk to bar to ask for drinks. I was 'repremanded' by the waitress and told she would come to me (even though nobody had even acknowledged we were there (bear in mind the place is empty!!) 5 min later she came over and took our drinks order, 10 min later still no drinks, so i approach bar again and ask where our drinks were, the barman told me there were no drinks on order!! Then the waitress appeared and told me she would bring them down. She then took out food order as she delivered the drinks, its now nearly 9pm!!! I ordered the mussels to start and asked for bread and butter with it, which i was told it came with. The mussels and bread arrived but no butter, I asked can butter be brought, 5 min later still no butter so again I had to ask again, eventually that was brought. I then asked the male waiter (barman) if i could order more bread, which he said yes but it is £1 extra, which was OK by me, he brought the bread but no butter so i asked if i could get more butter (a simple ask) to which he turned to me and said "Why didn't you ask me for butter when you ordered the bread?, now I have to go back and get butter" I was gobsmacked by this attitude, 100% confrontational to a customer!! He also added that the butter would be £1 extra!!! I asked to speak to the manager immediately and she to be fair was good and very apologetic for the way we were treated. They removed the barman from the bar and the service area straight away. The food we had was all good as you'd expect for the price and rep of restaurant. However the service levels are just simply awful, nobody asked us if we needed more drinks, if our food was good. When we ordered desert they served us Baileys Coffee instead of Baileys that we ordered. Bear in mind the bar area was empty, our table of 3 and a group of 6, so 10% full. I see from other reviews from yesterday they all had awful service. There are so many better establishments to eat locally, South Deep, Rockwater, Flamingo Cafe, the Cliff, Dancing Moose, Brittania to name but a few. Trust the locals, DO NOT get ripped off by eating here, unbelievably they still charged a service fee, as if it was their right!! I never ever right reviews, but on the odd occasion with this bad a service i've had to. The waiters/barmans attitude was unbelievably bad. Very...

I booked a table for 5 on Friday evening 21/2/25. This was our last night of our trip to Sandbanks. We were really looking forward to our evening. We arrived at 7.50pm for our 8pm reservation. The table was ready so we were seated upstairs at a nice table. We ordered drinks promptly and a bottle of wine. The drinks arrived and we ordered our meals. Starters:- raw fish platter, Coconut prawns and scallops, we were sharing as not wanting to spoil our main meal. The sushi fish was ok, nothing special. The scallops were ok, they were tasty. The prawns were tasteless! I’d go as far as saying very tasteless, one of the worst starters I’ve ever had.

The plates were cleared and literally straight after, the mains arrived. I had the fish curry, very bland! my husband had the salmon, not very well presented, literally a piece of salmon and a few veg. My daughter had the butternut risotto (vegan) - very average, she’s had better. My son had crab linguine, just spaghetti pasta in oil with crab, again very average. My son’s girlfriend had sea bass, she said it was nice! Nothing to shout about. All in all very average meals. We left a lot of the food as we didn’t enjoy it. We weren’t checked back on our food, we didn’t complain at the time as there were other people dining, we didn’t want to cause a fuss. Literally as soon as we’d finished we were asked if we wanted deserts, I said can we wait a while we’ve just finished our meals. Another waiter then came over and just placed the desert menus in front of us all. By this time we were feeling very rushed and not enjoying our experience. We didn’t order deserts, we asked for the bill. I’m sure the whole dining experience probably lasted an hour/ hour and half tops. The waiter was pleasant. We decided to finish our drinks in the bar downstairs, we had one more drink and then left. I felt very disappointed. Just because it has the name ‘ Rick Steins’ doesn’t mean you can serve average food and get away with it. The presentation, the imagination and the taste did not meet the high standard I’m sure you’re trying to achieve. You seriously need to look at each dish, create something different, not just a meal anyone can prepare at home and probably with more taste. We visit a lot of restaurants and honestly would not visit Rick Steins...

We were gifted a £100 voucher, so we were rather forced into trying this restaurant, for which I had great expectations, but I left sadly disappointed. The frontage of the establishment gives the impression its quite small, but here’s much larger dining area is round to the back, and in all I reckon it seats 150+. Our starters of Baked Scallops were gone in 3 mouthfuls as the scallops were tiny and the size of marbles. My £85 Plateau Frites de Mer looked impressive when it arrived on the table with loads of shellfish, however it wasn’t until the following day that I recalled my ‘half lobster’ was missing! I sent an email, backed up with a photo of my dish and never received a word. So note to everyone, they don’t answer emails or address complaints, and why should they care with such a huge turnover of covers and profits? To be honest, the menu is nothing special, and its really yet another celeb chef, branching out to promote a brand. The place is too large, it is high volume food at over inflated prices and the head chef can’t even properly do a pre-service check on the most expensive dish of the house. Of course, Rick Stein is cashing in on the Sandbanks custom who’s properties and luxury motor boats front onto the most expensive real estate in Europe. So if you happen to dine here on a Saturday night, the people watching is well worth it. Small men with large wallets, come here to parade their high maintenance wives, who’ve taken about 3 hours to get ready, making the whole spectacle quite funny but sad. In all, I really didn’t rate the restaurant, the menu is very Anglicised (Fish & Chips with mushy peas etc) and it’ll never reach a Michelin star simply because it can’t focus on the detail with such high volume food, plus I didn’t realise that it delivers food and does takeaways. I would vote with you feet, jump on a ferry to France, grab a hotel, and dine in a proper seafood restaurant where the food will out match Rick Stein in both quality...