Slug & Lettuce - Southend — Restaurant in England

Update to say we received a £5 voucher as an apology. Needless to say we won't be using it - a fiver doesn't even cover the cost of getting to the bar in the first place. Weird end to a weird experience.

This was genuinely the worst eating-out experience I have ever had. My fiancé and I came here on a Friday for what was supposed to be a chilled post-lockdown dinner. We arrived at 8pm and were told repeatedly that we had to order food if we wanted to drink and that we only had a 2 hour slot. We confirmed we planned to have dinner and even mentioned in passing that we were very hungry. We were then firmly told not to order via the app and that someone would be over to take our food and drinks order. The man on the door pointed at a table across the room and told us to sit over there. We sat looking at the menu and waited for about 15 minutes before my fiancé caught the same man as he walked past us and checked that we shouldn't be using the app to order, as no one had even acknowledged us at this point. I should mention that the bar was only about 2 thirds occupied, at most - many of the tables were empty. He just said no, don't use the app, then walked away. We continued to wait for another 30 minutes without so much as a nod from any of the staff. 2 or 3 other waiters had repeatedly served all the tables around us in this time, and one woman was bizarrely intent on cleaning empty tables despite the bar having plenty of clear tables. I caught the same man's eye probably 10 times as he stood by the door, intermittently going to serve other customers, looking at us, and continuing to ignore us. We even joked several times to each other that we must have done something wrong as we seemed to be being deliberately ignored. My fiancé eventually went and told someone behind the bar that we still hadn't so much as had a drinks order taken and eventually someone came over and took our order. The same waiter came back twice more to tell us various things we wanted weren't available, and then took our payment before we had been served anything. Almost immediately after this my food was brought out and we were told the timings on our food would be 'different'. No more information than this, and we still didn't have our drinks nearly an hour after arriving. My food wasn't even warm so my fiancé told me to just eat while he waited for his. I ate comically slowly as it became more and more ridiculous that we still had no other food and no drinks, and we were starting to get fuming that we had had to pay for such appalling service before we had even eaten, or otherwise we would have refused to pay. About 10 minutes after I had completely finished my dinner, my fiancé told the same man he spoken to previously that I had finished and he still hadn't had any food or drink and this guy just says 'we're busy'. Again, many empty tables and everyone else in the bar had food and drink. His food, my sides and our drinks were brought out at some point after this, long after I had finished. He ate, we left. No one acknowledged us again at any point, no apology for the worst service I've ever experienced, no one even looked at us apart from the few occasions we asked for someone to serve us. Truly horrible, and frankly...

We went for a standard bottemless brunch for our friends birthday and it was supposed to be around £35 per person which is absolutely fine. But on arrival the server asked us if we were signed up to the email / app and if we had gotten the code for a free bottemless brunch upgrade, and one of my friends did and showed the server it and the server said it was all okay and how perfect it is that we can upgrade, load of bs really. We arrived at the brunch at 7:12pm and we had 1 drink in 35 mins of being there, so my friend went up to the bar to ask basically what the hold up was and one of the male servers offered us a bottle of birthday Prosecco for the table for free, but then when it came to paying they said that we couldn’t have the upgrade and since we had drunk the drinks included in the upgrade we have to pay £49 each , even tho she was shown the code for the upgrade and her colleague gave us the bottle because the service was ridiculously slow. So we was made to pay and she then said she will slips us extra drinks on the sly for free to make up for it ?? And got hostile with my friend saying things like “yeah that’s not really my problem “ well actually it is because it’s all...

Walked in was put on a table in the shade asked if we could move to a table in the sun the manager told us all the other tables were booked even though rather empty, However we sat down went to order drinks via the app as we had too as instructed by the manager .Then a staff member came to take our order instead which was good . However no estrella on tap and as we ordered another two people came into the garden they asked the same manager if they could sit in the sun which he then escorted to an appropriate table IN THE SUN !!! So five minutes after this another two people came in was shown there table and then asked if they could be in the sun and then once again moved into a sunny spot , Right in front of us !!!. We had to call the manager over to complain as they had clearly not booked and we felt like we for some reason were being persecuted for some reason . Just to be clear we were not rude or abrupt in anyway . As a manager as is also my brother who was with me we found the we were treated was totally unacceptable . And i hope this will be...