Beacon Fell Café — Restaurant in Preston

Visited this cafe after a long drive up to Beacon Fell over Xmas. Ordered 2 coffees which were nice and hot, plus a ham / cheese panini which was unfortunately forgotten about. About 30 mins after ordering, I chased this and panini put on grill straight away - ended up taking away, as were ready to walk around the park. The main criticism I have for this cafe though is the 'policy' and staff attitude for not allowing my young children to eat their small packed lunch in the cafe. Even though we were ordering food and drinks from the cafe, we were instructed to move outside due to the kids packed lunch. We have a 3 year old, and then an 8 year old with autism. It was a bitterly cold day, and we were told to move outside with a 3 year old! My 8 year old heard the staff talking about this policy, and therefore refused to eat his lunch at all as didn't want to break the rules (a characteristic of autism). We also had to chase up panini and leave with takeaway as my child was on verge of meltdown due to being how long we had been in cafe. Note - we offered to buy my child some lunch from cafe but he refused (which we knew he would) as he only eats the specific food we make in his packed lunch. This is the first time we have ever been spoken to in this way by staff to adhere to a policy, in all of the hundreds of small cafes we have visited with our children. And if you have any idea of how difficult it is to be a parent (especially with an autistic child), you would understand how ridiculous and unempathetic it is to enforce such a policy in this circumstance. I completely appreciate that you make money from customers ordering food from your premises, but this is what we did - we ordered food and drinks from your premises. I understand you may want to reserve inside tables for paying customers, but the cafe wasn't busy at all and we would've taken up a table for 4 regardless. I understand that you want to avoid unnecessary 'mess' but this should become responsibility of parent to either support child not to cause mess or to clean up after they've eaten. Can I suggest that you show some level of understanding and compassion in the future, to avoid putting off customers from visiting this cafe again? We left very annoyed and disappointed, and it left a sour note on what should've been lovely day. Also to add, the toilets were...

The food is lovely, I’ve never had such a great experience eating the food in the sun around nature. However, the service from the older woman with the glasses is typically horrendous, when her peace is disrupted by someone entering the cafe she out loud said ‘oh here we go’ as if we cannot hear her. It was past 3 so there was no hot food on so I don’t believe what we were asking of her was that difficult. All I wanted was 2 water cartons and she retained such attitude the entire time, she is typically unkind but this time had switched one of my nerves. I would kill for such an easy job in such a gorgeous place, but she degrades the whole experience of beacon...

Lets start with the positives: the staff are friendly, its in a beautiful location great for walking our dog and its easy to access from the car park. The ice cream in tubs is popular with my family.

The biggest negative for me is the coffee isn't great. Not even costa/Starbucks levels.

Overall this is a nice place to spend time especially on a sunny day, but if they upped their coffee game it could be one of the best places for coffee...