The Magic Garden — Restaurant in Nottingham

We booked the Retro Lounge for our wedding reception, and the experience left a lot to be desired. Whilst guests did enjoy the atmosphere and the selection of drinks available, the staff lack the communication and experience to host an event worthy of a couple's special day.

If you chose to host your reception here, be advised that the venue's welcome drink policy involves leaving buckets of subpar Prosecco lying around with flutes for guests to help themselves. None of this was communicated in advance or to guests on the night, leading to confusion as to whether guests COULD help themselves and an extremely cold welcome for arriving guests. Staff were informed on the night by myself and other guests, but ultimately seemed confused as to what they should have been doing.

The food was adequate, but it is my opinion that low ticket items were served at the expense of high ticket items, leading to a very uneven spread which lacked variety. The venue claims otherwise. In addition, despite being agreed upon ahead of time, food was not labelled to indicate allergy, dietary or religious requirements, which is simply unacceptable. This was rectified on the night after complaining to staff, but not something I should have been doing on my wedding day.

Whilst I have been in correspondence with the venue to address these issues, I am not 100% satisfied with their response. The function was not managed to the standard I expected and issues of miscommunication plagued the entire evening. This kept it from being something truly special, and I regret not doing more research in advance. I urge others to book...

Terrible experience. Our food was late coming out so we had bottomless brunch extended with set amount of drinks, so some of us went without. We were also told we could finish what drinks we had left in the beer garden when time was up.

When in the beer garden we were then told we were not allowed to have our drinks by the manager despite her colleague telling us we could numerous times. We explained to her and she said well if my colleague has said you can I'm not going to argue. Next thing we knew we were told by the manager she had spoken to her colleague and she had said she didn't say we could go into the beer garden, despite telling us numerous times we could. We asked if we could finish what we had and she said yes and walked off. We then had security harass half of our party telling them to leave. They even put the heat light on on the table in the boiling hot weather to get us to go. The main manager then came out and said you can't drink in the garden because of the bottomless brunch he will lose his licence and we had to leave regardless of what drinks we had.

Food was terrible as well as being late. Only one waitress would talk to my party, the other two barmen ignored us despite us asking for assistance. Rude waiter who served the food.

Overall ruined what started out to be a good day. We will not be returning due to the bullying we had to endure at the hands of their management team and turning the heat light on above our table was just unreal. Better bottomless brunches in Nottingham, don't waste your money.

Highlight only was...

It was a balmy, sunny, lookwarm (in the sun) spring Friday afternoon/early evening visit with people from work. The place was really nice, I had been here before when in its previous life it was called Jamie's. The interior is OK, not 100 percent to my liking but we were there for drinks and company so I didn't pay much attention. Initially I resisted to like the fake candles, but after the third large glass of wine I found them really practical and safe. We didn't order any food, but saw (and smelled) what others were having, they all looked and smelled appetising. The garden is lovely, and on a hot summer day is probably the second best place to sit and drink lazily after your own garden/terrace. I know we have just left a pandemic behind (sort of, or trying to live with it) but I really wanted to pay cash and that was not an option - in fact, there are no options, pay card, end of. The service was somewhat slow, on second thoughts considering the place was far from busy it was really slow. Either that or we didn't time our next drinks order right, we should have ordered before our drinking vessels became empty. Or maybe everyone is just getting used to ordering through an app and on the other side getting used to checking the incoming orders more frequently in order to speed things up for the customers. I mean don't get me wrong I thoroughly enjoyed my time in The Magic Garden and despite the slowness of service I gave...