Cafe 1899 Gedling Country Park — Restaurant in Gedling

Being quite local I had high hopes when this cafe was first completed, and first visits at opening seemed positive, but the positives seem to have become steadily outweighed.

Starting with the layout, with this having been built for the purpose, should be excellent; but unfortunately unless the queue is only a couple of people deep, ends up somewhat filling the space. The queue itself seems to be pretty long at your typical popular points - and never moves in a hurry.

The ordering system ends up being somewhat fragmented too. If you order food, you're given a numbered spoon, and then you wait just after the till while any hot drinks are made. When your food is ready it's then brought to this same place and your number shouted over the cafe. As someone ordering this then means you're away from your party while queuing, ordering and waiting for drinks. Then after you've waited and taken the drinks back, you have to march back up to get your food. And when I say waiting for drinks - don't think Costa/Starbucks, more restaurant time.

Onto the food, one big area of frustration is not being able to get the kids pack up deal until midday. If your kid is hungry at 11.30, sorry but no. The worst bit about this is that you don't even get to choose the remaining contents of the bag, just the main sandwich. Makes it seem like the bags are pre made up, and until midday no one is allowed to put the right sandwich in and give you the bag. You've then also got to ferret through to see what you've been given and if your kid would eat it. We tried toasties today, and the ingredients are properly basic (feels like supermarket value ham/cheese/bread etc.). Toasties had been rushed to the point that the cheese wasnt even really melted, and the side salad was literally iceberg lettuce with a couple of slices of tomato and cucumber. Not great for nearly a fiver a pop.

The drinks are ok. Nothing special but not bad in any way.

I think the food served needs a rethink. Toasties are good if you can nail them, but when they're not it just seems cheap. Why not have soup in a mug with a bread roll, or pies you can just reheat and add chips etc. Or even a venice style slice of pizza outlet (would be great from the window).

Essentially this probably should have been a local copy of rufford's coach house cafe, but misses the mark. It's a shame as it's really well used and in a...

Potential to be lovely, however lots of problems. I know it's recently opened, and it's school holidays so a lot of people and potentially the busiest they've been, however today's experience was not good.

Got on the queue at 12:10pm... 3 people in front of me. I waited 10 minutes to order. The woman serving me looked and sounded so miserable to be there that I actually felt awkward giving my order! I asked about the fruit that comes with the kids meal and she just disappeared without saying where she was going, she reappeared with the fruit, but it would have been nice to actually know where she was going. It probably took about 5 minutes to give my order. The kids plates, which had the fruit and sausage roll on were taken away into the kitchen, I assumed to add the sandwiches.

The food eventually came out at 13:10... so we waited 45mins after I had eventually ordered for it to arrive. By this time the kids were really hungry and tired (they are 3 and 17 months) and didn't actually want to sit and eat their lunch. They wanted to go home to sleep. I was not happy about this at all after paying so much for the food. I ended up having to ask for take away boxes to take all of our food home in. Not good when mine was a hot sandwich, so was a soggy mess by the time I actually got to eat it.

The chips, which I paid extra for, were not nice at all. They were so soggy and greasy.

The cappuccino was tiny to say I paid £2.10 for it... I would go with a latte as you get much more for your money. Though that wasn't full either.

I would suggest: prepared sandwiches for kids ready made up so they can be taken straight to table for the kids to dig in. As everyone knows when kids are hubby. The sausage rolls not to have pickle in as most kids probably would eat them. the sweet snack to be something like a 2 finger KitKat or a biscuit maybe but not half a giant scone as it'll just be wasted. (One got half a gigantic scone and the other got a small bit of flapjack).

The food, other than the chips, looked nice and my hot sandwich was ok.

I do think it has a lot of potential to be a nice place to go, but it does need a...

When this cafe first opened, I would have given it 5 stars easily - the food was great, the prices were reasonable, and the service was very good. Unfortunately, on each subsequent visit, everything has got steadily worse. Most of the menu has vanished; the excellent snap tins are gone, and the cake "selection" now consists of a couple of choices (if you're lucky).

I can forgive all this, because the food is actually decent when you get it. What I cannot forgive however, is the atrocious service. The staff are all lovely, but the organisation - or lack there of - is a joke. First of all, they've done away with menus, which means if you want a sandwich, you have to queue up, get the poor member of staff to explain the choices, then make your decision. This holds up the queue MASSIVELY. I've asked for granary bread sandwiches 3 times, but only ever received white bread. Twice, my order has been forgotten about, and I've had to go and ask the staff about it (kudos on the free coffee though!). The day the card machine went down, instead of putting a sign on the door, or near the end of the queue, or even getting the staff to inform the customers before they placed an order, they happily took orders, then pointed to the tiny note on the till saying "cash only". Great, that's 20 minutes of queuing wasted. They stop serving breakfast at 12, I started to queue at 11:15. I finally got to place my order at 11:50 (over half an hour wait), and I basically had to beg for them to serve me breakfast because "it's nearly time to stop serving". What?! There's a cafe till, and a kiosk till; it just took me 20 minutes to buy water because people have worked out that if you go to the outside kiosk, you can jump the massive queue inside because it's hard to keep track of two queues when there's only one member of staff serving.

All in all, I've probably spent more of my time queuing at Gedling Country Park, than actually enjoying the fantastic scenery. It's a huge shame because the complete lack of organization (and seemingly perpetual lack of staff) could be so easily resolved, making the whole experience a lot...