The Gate — Restaurant in London

This experience was terrible. After all these years of attending every boxing day, I am sad to say I will never attend again. I come to the gate every year on Boxing day with Family who live far away. There are usually at least 10people attending. It’s our yearly chance to catch up and it means a lot to us. This year I was very unwell and I booked online without checking the menu. We come every year so why would we need to check the menu right? So I went ahead, paid the £100 deposit and confirmed the time slot of 4pm-6pm and was told the pub would close at 10.30pm so we would have lots of time with family to sit in the bar and chat after the meal. For some extremely strange reason the Turkey dinner had been removed from the boxing day menu! We literally only go out for dinner to have the Turkey dinner because we do not cook Christmas dinner at home. I have multiple health conditions and am registered disabled so cooking something like a roast dinner is impossible for me. We were so upset about this but had no time to organise anything else and so we went ahead. When we came for our meal the food quality was absolutely awful, a lot of what we got was inedible. Everything was over cooked, dry and just generally very poor. The price increase this year was approximately £8 more per person! We would not expect a decline in the food quality with a price increase like this! When we were eating our final course, staff began to stare at us, looking at their watches, walking around us and trying to take glasses and plates when we had not finished with them. My dad went to the bar and asked for coffee and was told there was no more coffee and that the coffee machine was switched off and wouldn't be switched back on again. I asked why everybody was acting like they wanted us to leave when the manager had told me it was at 10.30pm close and I had booked a 2hour 4-6pm slot. The staff told me that they had changed the opening times and had closed at 5.30pm. I checked the website and it still said 10.30pm closing as specifically said ‘boxing day hours’. Our whole Christmas experience was ruined, family travelled hundreds of miles to see us for a dry, over cooked meal which was not their menu choice, no coffee and to be thrown out and sent home cutting valuable time in half with important family members. I am so upset about this entire experience,...

Have given 2 stars but in reality it should be 1 at best. Arrived to a note on the door citing staff shortages for the reason they weren't accepting walk ins. That's OK I thought, mum's booked. One large table of maybe 10/12 on the left of restaurant, 3 tables of 2/3 people on the right. Rest of place empty. Alarm bells started ringing, being as it's last weekend before Christmas!

Ordered our meals, 3 roast 1 child meal. The roasts were cold, the potatoes may have been introduced to the oven but that's about it. I walked up to the empty bar, completely ignored by a scruffy looking man who was filling a teapot.. then a girl walked past me in towards the kitchen area. Only 10 feet away so I loudly called excuse me, only for her to ignore me too. I again loudly said oh she's going to ignore me too is she, charming! The scruffy one then called her back, she looked at me as I was saying excuse me, her response was an aggressive WHAT. To which point I very loudly said "WHAT? I'M A CUSTOMER YOU KNOW"!! Told her the roast dinners were cold and the potatoes hard and uncooked. Thought best to walk away at this point. She walked to our table and tried to backtrack saying that she had said WITH WHAT, not just WHAT. This is not true, I was only 10 feet away from her, I heard clearly what she said!! The scruffy one came up to the table a few minutes later and claimed that "the potatoes are like that"!! I suggested that maybe they may need longer in the oven?!!!!!! So all in all, what was supposed to have been a happy family meal for my step mum, who used to go to the gate weekly with my dad before he passed away, was an utter disaster. The staff couldn't give two hoots, they've got to be there was the attitude and my husband said he even saw all members of staff including what looked like a manager standing together, but nobody made any attempt to make right this sorry situation. I wish we'd got meal deals from tesco, would've been nicer and no staff who don't want to be there to...

I visited here recently on a Sunday at around 2pm for lunch with the family. Nice interior and exterior with decent enough parking. The staff were pleasant, and the food was very reasonably priced. The menu was designed well, with lots of variety – they also have a decent sized vegetarian & vegan menu, which was nice to see. The issues I had with my experience were as follows: Lack of menu in stock: The family and I went through most of the items on the menu just to be told that they were out of stock. Bit of a shame and unexpected thing to see. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a restaurant with as many items “out of stock” as this place. Waiting time: We were told we’d be waiting between an hour and 1.5 hours for our food. Out of curiosity, I timed it and our food arrived after 1hr 47 minutes. Not good enough. Lastly, the portion sizes: After being told I couldn’t have half the menu, I settled for the 10oz sirloin steak. The steak itself was much smaller than a typical 10oz steak. It came with a bowl of chips (14 to be precise, they were average size), 2 and half onion rings and a singular Mushroom (not a big one either). The food itself was decent quality (steak was overcooked even though I requested medium rare). It’s clear to see the above issues are completely down to poor management/budgeting. Lack of stock = Bad preparation. Could be resolved by estimating your weekly usage of items and purchase enough. It’s always better to have more than less. Waiting time = Lack of staff & bad preparation. Could be resolved by hiring more staff. Small portion sizes = To save money. On the face of it, the pricing seems very reasonable, however, the portion sizes are very small in comparison to most restaurants of the same price bracket. These issues completely ruined our experience at The Gate and for that I can only...