The Old Vol — Restaurant in Newark and Sherwood

Went last night with another couple and both said we will not be going back. The staff acted like they couldn’t care less. Ordered a drink and told them it’s taken so long to come I need to cancel it now to which one staff member just said ‘oh’ and walked off. No apology.

My main issue to which I brought up there on the night to a waitress who was lovely and she did apologise but said I needed to bring it up with the manager to which I said he couldn’t care less I already spoke to him and his attitude wasn’t great, we ordered kids brownies which came with a green crumb as it looked like biscuit crumbs. My husband was just about to give my 3 year old some ( he has a pistachio allergy ) so I checked the menu and no mention of nuts. I went and asked 2 members of staff ( one being the manager) if this was nuts, to which both said they didn’t know. The waitress then came back and confirmed it was.

We were brought a new brownie. Then I noticed it had traces of green on the top. I asked the waiter if that was pistachio still as my son has a severe allergic reaction if he eats it, he couldn’t have looked less bothered. He just said he didn’t know the pistachio came out the fridge and then walked off!! It clearly did have pistachio on still and I wonder if they’d just been brushed off the first one as there were still little specs on the top! Either way it’s very dangerous to be serving it with specs of nuts or brushing them off.

I then went inside to say how dangerous it was not stating that the brownie has nuts on. Explained it’s not about me trying to get money off, I don’t want this happening to anyone else, kept quite calm even though inside I was fuming at the incompetency, the waitress went to speak to the manager about it. Not once did he come over, and apologise. Infact we waited half an hour for someone to take the bill, he walked past the table, knew I had come twice to speak to someone about nuts and said nothing and we still got charged for the brownie.

If the manager had come over and spoken to us about it and apologised we’d have been okay about it and I wouldn’t have left a review: but the way it was handled and the way multiple members of staff were so rude and nonchalant about something so serious ourselves and the couple we were with both have said we will not be going back. The attitude with the missing drink was bad enough but when my kids life is potentially put at risk and just shrugged off and then served nuts again after stating it’s an allergy and no one comes back to speak to us, is not acceptable.

Also just to add another disappointment- the dairy free alternative margherita pizza which I found out last night is just bread and tomato sauce! That wasn’t made clear and I assumed I’d be getting a dairy free cheese alternative, but just a piece of bread. I felt that should have been made clear rather that...

Sadly we had a terrible evening here. I would say the setting is great and the kids area is fab. We chose to return for a birthday this week having celebrated an important birthday here a year ago.

Really wish we hadn’t. Not one of the servers smiled or was welcoming. We felt uncared for from start to the end of our meal. The QR code on the table didn’t work when we tried to order drinks from it. We had to go to the bar rather than be served at the table. We were not given enough cutlery. The outdoor menu is poor. It had 1 meat choice, a burger, which they had run out of at 1920, a couple of chicken salads, branded boring by the 2 who had them, a fish salad (which was reported as very good), and fish and chips with dried mushy peas and non tasty fish with the skin on and served upside down. To be fair my starter of chicken liver parfait was very tasty. The fact that we had waited almost 90mins for our second course meant the we became cold as we had booked outside at 1900 and then had to eat quickly so the food was hot. We had to prompt that we hadn’t had it!?

One of our party has an allergy which we declared and later in the evening had a reaction presumably to something in her meal.

Our empty drink glasses were never cleared so 3 rounds for 7 people started to make the table cramped.

Having finished the mains and got cold we asked if we could try a pod and kindly the server said yes. We asked if we could eat a cake we had brought for the birthday and I think there was some realisation we were not having a good time as it returned with sparklers which was great and brightened the atmosphere.

I acknowledge we were spontaneously given a discount “for the inconvenience” which was a kind gesture and perhaps stupidly we didn’t deduct the automatic service charge as there were 7 of us but really the service wasn’t worth it and I’d prefer to have had a good night celebrating a birthday and pay the full amount.

We have been before (a year ago to the day) and had a lovely time and felt very welcome, noting it was much less busy and slightly cooler. The food then was delicious and there was a huge choice outside. I think would be good to revisit this in place of the small menu which we didn’t even have full choice of.

Personally I worry this place has built itself up super quickly and hope it doesn’t deteriorate quickly cos it definitely...

Worst experience ever. Would not recommend to anyone. Firstly we drove an hour to get here expecting some delicious food with all the heavy instagram / tiktok videos we was expecting good things. Once seated and ordered drinks, they took 30 minutes to arrive with the drinks, one of my friends is pregnant and they told her after waiting 30 minutes that she needed to chose another one as they had ran out, leading us to wait again. We arrived at 1:30 and finally ate at 3pm which was horrific. We ordered two chicken salads which both came out raw and pure pink in the middle. They sent us other two out (forgetting to take bacon off one as requested) the boys had steaks which I’ll give to them was nice. We then asked if we could eat dessert out side and was told that there was no available tables (we could clearly see a variety of free tables) desert arrived and they gave us one we didn’t actually ordered. After waiting long enough to see nobody was arriving at the ‘taken’ tables we went over and sat down, got a drink at the bar as even though so much had gone wrong we was catching up with friends we hadn’t seen for a while. After around an hour they had a power cut and all of the music / card machines turned off. We finally decided to leave, when we got the bill we was greeted with the wrong receipt (how on earth this many things can go wrong is beyond me) thank god we checked as the bill was extortionate. To our humour they hadn’t taken the raw chicken salad off the bill we had to request this?? The staff at no point apologised for any of these inconvenience through out the day. After speaking to a friend who came here last week for a roast dinner she advised me again the service was horrendous and her partner neatly chocked on under cooked lamb, they gave her a free bottle of wine to compensate. My advice would be to stop posting social media videos and make sure the food you are serving is actually cooked. After looking through these reviews many others seem to think the same. Awful experience and will not...