The Curry Garden Restaurant & Takeaway — Restaurant in New Forest

Appalling Customer Service. We won't go back, and would recommend avoiding.

We ordered takeaway through Just Eat (where they are listed as 'Curry 2 Go'). Our order included a Chicken Tikka starter (just the dry chicken) at £5.25. We also ordered a Chicken Tikka Mossala main course (chicken tikka in a Mossala sauce) at £10.45. We were delivered two portions of the starter.

I submitted a refund claim on Just Eat for the main course, and a few minutes later got a call from a very helpful person at the restaurant who after a bit of back and forth to understand what was wrong refunded the difference of £5.20. A good customer service experience, redeeming the situation, and I was ready to leave them a glowing review, and would have ordered again.

5 minutes later I got another call, this time from the owner. He wanted to know how many pieces of chicken were in each portion. I had already explained in the first phone call that both dishes had arrived in the small starter-sized foil trays, and that both looked to be the same size. I had also explained that the dish was missing the sauce.

I'm not entirely sure what the point of this second phone call was, but I can tell you the result it had - a terrible experience, leading to a 1-star review and no repeat business.

So, Curry Garden, here's the lesson: with the initial mistake you would have gotten a 4 star review. The way you dealt with the problem on the first phone call redeemed all of that, and took it up to a 5 star review again. I would have ordered again, I would have recommended you to friends. Then you BLEW IT with the second phone call, plummeting you all the way to a 1-star review, and guaranteeing that we'll never order again, and the only thing I'll tell my friends is...

Unfortunately we didn't seem have the best experience, we now know it was due to them being short staffed, however we only found this out after another member of the party left a review also. If they had told us at the beginning they were short staffed and there was going to be a long wait for food it would have helped us manage our expectations. We had a good 5 minutes wait at door before we were seated, we had a reservation but it seems they didn't realise this. We were sat by the back door which kept being left open so it was cold. When we were seated, they offered us poppudoms straight away, but no menus or drinks. It wasn't until we reminded the waitress that these were given/ ordered. The waitress at was friendly and polite and took our order pretty quickly before a large party got thier order in. However it was then a long wait for our food. About an hour. We had to keep reminding them about our drinks order and about water glasses. Overall the food was good and tasty but not very warm. Our table was booked for 7.30pm however we didn't get to eat till 9pm. The restaurant was very popular which is a great sign however this was also to there detriment. My only advice to them is in future they need to communicate with thier...

The restaurant is a bit hidden away so we missed it when we went past it the first time. We had to double back on ourselves to make sure we had the right location. The food itself was a change from the usual indian we order from. It was not greasy or oily at all. The staff were welcoming and friendly. We were served an unexpected amount of poppadoms (we weren't asked how many we wanted) with a large amount of chutneys, they were delicious and well made. The curries/mains that we ordered had spice levels that were expected, the chicken and lamb was moist and well stewed. The curries had volume and thickness was appropriate. Everything was perfect albeit the slightly high pricing - but I imagine that that is mostly out of the owner's control, especially post covid. Otherwise,...