Brown & Green Life — Restaurant in London

I visited the café on Wednesday 4th November. My comments and opinions apply only to the experience of visiting the café in its take-away, Covid-19 compliant offering; I can’t comment on the interiors of what from the outside looked like an attractive building, with some cheerful outdoor fairy lighting brightening up the outdoor seating area.

Overall the impression I left with was that it’s an OK café, with the potential to be much better. It feels like the common case of a park café which, due to its location and lack of competition, could be complacent about maintaining high standards of quality and attention to detail.

Pros:

• Polite, helpful and friendly staff.

• Having a Café in the park which can stay open for takeaway during lockdown adds to how great Crystal Palace Park is.

• The café serves food and also do draught beer - on this visit I only had a hot chocolate so can’t comment on the quality of these.

Cons:

• The hot chocolate was bad: under-filled, the milk had not been steamed hot enough (I’ve worked in cafés and I understand that milk shouldn’t be burnt to ‘extra hot’ levels, but this was warm milk) and it was weak-tasting. Maybe it was Cadbury’s drinking chocolate powder, as this had the same sweet but unsatisfying lack of chocolatey strength. In case you’re reading this Café manager/team, please try using Grumpy Mule Hot Chocolate powder - it’s got a much richer taste!

• Plastic cutlery - I realise it may be ‘compostable’ veg ware cutlery, but this is in practice only compostable when sent to a commercial or industrial facility. Wooden cutlery would avoid plastic use in the first place?

• The park bins around the outdoor seating area were overflowing with cups, lids and other waste. If these can’t be emptied by the café staff because they’re park bins, alternative bins should be provided. It...

Quite frustrated by my recent experience here, went with the family to order a few coffees, a hot chocolate and a hotdog, at 3:45 before the kitchen closes at 4, the lady at the till asked my daughter if she wanted ketchup with her hotdog and I even said I might order too and confirmed the kitchen was closing soon so I better come back if I do want something, and laughed, paid by card, and sat outside, the coofees and hot choc came, 5 mins later at 4pm now I went inside to ask about the hot dog, a waiter man came out with the hot dog and insisted I didn't pay, I assured him I did, he said it's not on the ticket, so I wasn't charged, I confirmed with my daughter we did order it, then he said I didn't pay and will bring out the card machine, I said to him I ordered it let ilus speak to the last at the till, his instant response despite me ordering only 10 mins before and having what I thought would be a memorable conversation was "she won't remember" very aggravating" as she could have simply said yes you know what you did order and I forgot to put it on I'm sorry about this, and then everyone is clear, I pay the remainder. 3 problems here and I recommend you sort them out in future, 1. No apology given, sorry we didn't put your order through, and you had to come before the kitchen closed to verify it 2. I do not want to be double charged, I got told to check my banking app, but it does not appear straight away and sometimes not on weekends 2. If I didn't tell you the food would not have come. And actually lastly and most annoying how big of a scene this caused to make me look as if I was causing an issue and looking to everyone that I didn't pay or am trying not to pay. Left a bad taste of what would have been an...

Like a war zone. Both times I've been here it's been filthy, poorly staffed, cold and slow - 20 mins for a cup of tea. I'm writing this in the hope someone sees it and can improve it. I sympathise that running a café next to a kid's play area isn't going to be relaxed but imagine how customers feel - you walk in and every table is covered in crumbs, mashed up food, milk all over the floor, mud caked into seats, grossly dirty toilets (which, from the wall chart, hadn't been looked at in 5 hours yesterday).

From observing the chaos yesterday at 4pm it seems to come down to bad management. When you have 5 staff in a small cafe, it should be enough. But it was clear that nobody knew what task they were meant to be on. Half-hearted swipes with a cloth at a table once every half hour isn't enough. Don't put someone on the coffee machine if they can't use it. Don't put someone on cake duties if they don't know the difference between a sponge cake and a flapjack. Don't patronisingly sneer at mums who are innocently asking where their kids hot chocolate is after 15 mins of waiting that "there are other people ahead and it's very busy." Don't let staff crowd round the kitchen door to roll their eyes at how hard it is when you have a queue of 8 people and 3 more tables that didn't get the right order. You need to give each staff member a specific task and they concentrate only on that for, say 60 minutes then rotate. Systems, systems, systems. Each time I've been here it's a shambles, with staff bumping into each other, looking fed up, being SO slow, and fed up customers. I realise there's worse things happening in the world, of course, but come on - it's easy...