Heatherlea Bakery — Restaurant in Northern Ireland

Not a great experience

Let me start with the positives.

The staff is nice and smiling. They're helpful.

Now the negatives:

they lack basic hygiene training. The utensils are thrown on the bare table, and aren't clean. The knife we got had visible leftover grease on. At least after noticing they changed (or wiped?) the knife.

lack of food preparation practices. Chicken pie and curry parcel are both originally baked food with pastry. They threw both into the microwave, which then made the pastry soggy at parts and hard at others. These items would need to be heated up with dry heat (an oven), rather than microwave.

the price of pastry and pie was about £3 each on display. We ended up paying 6 or 7 pounds each. We had no idea why and was embarrassed to ask later on. The guess is: they sell it as a meal-deal when you sit in. Which is fine, but nobody told us this fact before we were charged.

the taste of the food was very generic and you could see that nothing was made on premises (they probably only bake the food there). The curry in the parcel was generic jar-curry, the pie was average too. (this however is a subjective opinion)

In a nutshell, a disappointing, expensive experience. We'll not be back until management changes practices and...

Always loved their bakery products but went to the cafe for the first time today and was very disappointed. The staff didn't seem to know what they were doing and I had to give my order to three different people. Then we got the food, the chips were roasting and the honey chilli chicken was lukewarm. We went back to the till to ask for a glass for the lemonade and got given a dirty one and when we said to the older woman about it she disputed it and said it was the dishwasher - how hard is it to just get another glass? Very disappointed with the attitude of some of the staff - considering the price of the food too . Not to mention the bakery staff handling money and lifting bread with their bare hands. No excuse...

Thumbs down for value / price - 1x vanilla slice, 1x lemon slice & 1x eclair to go (in a paper bag to save the cardboard) =£5.50!!

Walked past today (23/8/2024) and thought I’d grab a few things as the usual was closed. Tapped the card machine before I digested the price.

If calculated correctly, that was daylight robbery. Your prices really need to be shown on the name cards in the display!! Even just to enable customers to tally up in their head the cost.

Vanilla slice jam was overly sweet. Other 2 were items were reasonable. Would be of the opinion that the experience did not present sufficient value to return when compared to another...