Big Lukes — Restaurant in Gateshead

When I took my wife, kids and mother we had a good experience, there's really very little difference between here and other similar places with equivalent prices such as MacDonalds or Papa Johns. People will spend 30 quid on a takeout three times a month.

Staff were friendly, worked to seat, serve drinks and clean up plates left behind and clean tables down with sprays.

Choices I saw were from Chinese, Indian, pizza, burgers, Sunday roast, veggies, chips and, ribs, roast chicken, soup and other items along with lots of ice cream and popsicles, custard, cake slices and carrot cake etc

I had Chinese cuisine, some pizza, I tried a bit of burger and chips but skipped desert. Everyone else had dessert and they enjoyed everything. I thought the pizza was nice, Chinese was ok. Burger was ok. Temperatures were fine, quality is in line with this kind of establishment

Cons - the tables are wiped down with disinfectant and cleaned regularly from what I saw but there is food and salt etc in grooves that aren't easy to reach. The part of the chair we sat on was worn and had some tears and a fairly large hole. The restaurant could probably benefit from a deep clean more often out of hours

The pop wasn't to my taste, it's more for kids to have sodas. If I go again I'd probably not get the drinks

Overall it's absolutely fine. Food I had was nice, pizza was good, desserts decent everyone was satisfied and happy and I'd be happy take my family there again.

There's absolutely no way it's a one star, that is completely ridiculous and unreasonable.

Deep clean and sort out the worn out furniture, knock a couple of quid off the price or give a discount for more than 4 and it would be 4 stars easy, judge it for what it is, not what you expected or think...

At £10.99 for the all you can eat buffet, I thought this was very reasonable so our party of 4 took to the plunge and gave it a go. We were seated in a tight booth near one of the hot plates. This turned out to be quite uncomfortable as the heat coming from it was unbearable after about 5 mins.

The food selection was brilliant with lots to choose from, bbq grilled style food including burgers and chicken on the bone. There was a selection of chilli con carne and a Bolognese. Selection of sundries such as chips, rice and pasta. After sampling the various foods the quality was relatively poor. The meat tasted cheap. Items such as the sausages and chicken nuggets were dried out and quite hard. The pasta was was barely tepid.

We all opted for the refillable soft drinks choice of cola irn brew or orange crush, again at £2.50 we thought this was very reasonable but the quality of the drinks were cheap and nasty.

The desserts were extremely limited with only a selection of flavoured ice creams, chocolate sponge pudding and American waffles. Again the ice cream was low quality and tasted vile.

One thing to mention was that the plates were piling up on the table and they weren't cleared very quickly.

On exit the manager asked if everything had been ok to which we replied with our comments. She just brushed this off and said she's inform the chef. I asked for s reduction on the bill due to the poor experience but was flattly refused due to my complaint being down to personal preference?

Definitely wasn't as bad as a 1 star but just scraped a 2 star from me.

Overall... Very...

My daughter and some of her friends went today for one of their birthday meals and even though 2 of the friends were 11 they still charged them for adult prices RIDICULOUS!! then when they were escorted to their table they were trying to sit down and the lady who took them their kept very rudely repeating the question of ‘what drinks?!’ in a very rude tone. They then went onto starting their 3 courses they noticed that their were not many vegetarian options for one of the friends apart from pasta that was watery and made them feel rather ill. They said that the starter that they had was okay which was salad but it is pretty hard to get that wrong. After that they went onto their 2nd course which as i have already stated was pasta and the pasta was very wet and the sauce was like a liquid drink, then they had their dessert which they all had ice cream which they said was nice apart from it was a bit melted even though it came out of a freezer. When they left the restaurant they went to the arcade a few shops down and 2 of the 4 friends had to go to the toilet to be sick which they were. Also one of the friends offered to take some money of another friends payments and only that friend was willing to pay for it but they charged the other friend which i think was on purpose with the cheek in the woman’s voice who was on the till. Overall i don’t think this is a very good place to eat, i understand that it is a all you can eat buffet but your not going to eat much seeing the state of the food i personally think the place needs shutting down and popeyes...