BrewDog Reading — Restaurant in Reading

Avoid this place if you can! Terrible staff. Worse management.

Who is in charge of hiring the staff for this place? Have any of them ever been in customer service? I'm guessing first time bar tenders because it's amazing how rude and useless the staff are.

I used to come here quite often at the beginning of the year. Unfortunately this place has gone downhill in the last few months. All the good staff have gone. Can't say I blame them.

I'll give some examples as to why I think this place should either hire a completely new staff pool or just be avoided.

There is one guy who always stands at the end of the bar on his ipad. I'm guessing it's not always for work purposes either because I've seen him scrolling twitter/facebook before. I wouldn't mind so much if he actually was aware of his surroundings. The amount of times I've been/seen someone else get ignored is astonishing. Similarly to this, they clearly don't have a 'no phones on the bar policy' because majority of the time you'll see everyone congregated at the end of the bar on phones. Again taking insane amount of times to notice to people waiting. When you do eventually get served you don't feel like you're being welcomed. There is hardly ever any real or meaningful interaction from the staff. They're like robots. Good job I tend to go for the same beers because trying to find out about the others would be a real challenge. The management are a joke. I visited recently for food and there was a mighty long wait on food. We were told about 30-45 minutes and didn't mind this. Our food took an hour to come out to us. We had asked about why it was so long/why we weren't updated on the wait and got nothing. We weren't offered and apology or discount. Just a 'we're really sorry about this but the kitchen got backed up more than we anticipated' would've sufficed.

There are some good things about the bar:

One guy on the bar is awesome. I think his name is Ollie or Oscar. Begins with an O I'm sure. Anyway, he seems to be the only one capable of making you feel welcome. Always has time for a chat and rarely stands around doing nothing. Top lad. They have great food. Sometimes the wait can be a bit long but the food always tastes amazing. Maybe they have a better hiring/training scheme for their chefs. Beer selection is great. Especially their takeaway bottles and cans.

Unfortunately the pros do not outweigh the cons. I fear that I won't be a regular anymore until the staff are given some proper training. It's a shame because this was once a truly lovely place.

Really has all gone downhill since that new female manager took over. She doesn't seem to know what she's doing. Bring back Sean...

We pre booked for wings Wednesday. When we arrived a large group were being seated. Some of the group were running a little late so we did not order right away. When the group had arrived we tried to go to the bar to order drinks and put in our wing orders but soon realised they only had one staff member for the whole pub, she tried her best but between taking the large groups drinks and food order it meant that we had been there nearly 45 minutes before we were able to put in our wing orders. We ended up putting our drink orders in through the QR code of the table as we just couldn’t get in at the bar. Eventually we had been there for well over an hour with no drinks and no food and the staff member was struggling to get the wings out that were sat in the dumbwaiter for some time. With the realisation that no other staff members were coming to help and having waited 1.5 hours at this point we made the decision to cancel the wing and drinks orders and leave to get food elsewhere. We were quite disappointed as you have to prebook for wings Wednesday and they had their wing stock festival on at the time which again had to be pre booked, so the pub would have known they had a certain amount to cater for at minimum and still only one staff member on. I understand they may of had someone call in sick etc, but not even a manager insight to help the poor staff member that was clearly struggling to even take orders. We may consider booking again out of school holidays and when the wing stock festival isn’t on so less busy, but just really disappointed that we didn’t even end up getting our drinks let...

Went here for wing Wednesday and it was a massive disappointment even at the seemingly reasonable price point.

The service for the wings themselves was slow, but understandable. My biggest problem is the wings themselves. The coating is far too thick and the wings in general were extremely salty. Whilst eating them it became clear that the whole thing is just a cheap sham to make people buy extra beer by making the wings borderline inedible with salt, and filling with coating. I respect the hustle, but it didn't make for a pleasurable experience. Also having only one flavour of wing (buffalo) gets tiring after the first plate.

The last bit of salt in the wound (or should I say, tongue) of my wing wednesday experience was the sheer cheek of the place to charge £1 for an extra pot (about 10ml) of mayo. What a rip-off, which I didn't discover until the bill. To this day, I have never been in a restaurant that charged extra for ketchup or mayo and Brewdog became the first.

Overall Brew dog is a nice atmosphere place, with a good selection of beer, but the sheer cheap-stake-ness of the wing Wednesday left a sour (or should I say salty) taste in my mouth about the brand in general. I will be back for drinks, but I think I have been put off of trying their food for good, if this is...