Cafe Central — Restaurant in Scotland

Went because we read they have gluten free options. Queue was large as the other place was closed. Queued for 30 mins to get in the door and eventually decided to walk to the front and ask - turns out they “do, but they have nobody to fry it today”. So it was worth all the angry looks to realize that queuing another hour inside would have been wasted time.

Despite a refurbishment this place has been the same for the 10 years I have lived here. They only take the orders when you get to the front of the queue, so they cook everything one by one. The scuttles are never used. Anywhere else you go into will have 10 fish, 5 chicken, a few smoked sausage etc kept hot in the scuttles ready. They’ll cook 3-4 chip loads at once if it is getting busy. And it will take about 30 seconds to put a meal together and ring it up. The only delays are at quiet times when they are cooking to order.

This place is the opposite. They cook to order when it is busy despite there being 40 customers waiting. The law of averages suggests there will be 100 meals and 60 of these will be fish, so chuck a load of fish on! Or ask, asking and queuing up your orders in bulk doesn’t take long. But instead of doing these things and having two people wrapping so it takes 20-25 minutes to clear a big queue like this, this place runs each order laboriously from order to fry to packing and sauces to til and only then looks to the next person in line to find out what they could possibly want in a fish and chip shop. Then the whole process starts again….”2 fish and chips? OK we will cook just two fishes and no more. I hope the next person doesn’t want fish again.”

The whole thing is accompanied by an air of repressed anger. Not only is each order a fresh surprise (fish and chips??), but an insult to the employees family that is met with dark fury (fish and chips!!). 30 minutes to get in the door and I asked someone and they’d been an hour inside. I heard the boss lady tell someone “I can’t just pull fish out of my arse”. They had presumably been asked something along the lines of “why don’t you at least cook a load of fish now even if you’re not going to take the orders?”. So again, I just left. I’ll try again in another 10 years.

It would be quicker to drive to Haddington and get food. It would be quicker if the staff drove to Haddington to get each order one by one! Then they could probably save a lot of money by turning off the unused fryers...

Pretty awful unfortunately.. Came in with my 5 year old daughter for takeaway and was aggressively told “You’ll have to wait - we’re not serving anyone!!!” by the hostile server with very few teeth as she turned her back and walked away. Was then waiting for 10 mins as they argued amongst themselves behind the counter about someone putting the orders on when they can’t do any more ..or something…!? All really awkward to be around..! And loads of aggression between the staff! Really bizarre! The shop wasn’t busy.. there were 3 customers infront of me and a few in the restaurant. My normal chippy sometimes has about 40 people in the queue and it runs like clockwork. Anyway, at this point, I was thinking “if the food is great, I will write this off as a bit of unbelievably bad service but quite a funny story..” Unfortunately, when I got served, the bizarre rudeness continued.. aggressively asking me ‘what d’u want!?!’ and I was charged £17 for a single scampi and a medium fish supper - which seemed pretty steep. She dumped our food in front of us after wrapping it, and went on to do something else, at which point, I said, “is it ready to go?” She completely ignored me and kept doing what she was doing… anyway, I had a wee laugh to myself and my daughter and walked out loudly saying “THANK YOOOUU!!” I was still optimistically thinking along the lines I was earlier - hopefully just great food, laughably awful service 🤞🏼 Unfortunately, when we sat down to eat our dinner, the fish was probably the worst I’ve had anywhere.. they had somehow managed to have parts of the batter still raw while other parts were burnt - all of it tasted pretty gross and was as thick as a slice of bread! I completely de-battered my fish (batter straight in the bin) and ate the greasy innards, which weren’t very pleasant. My daughter and I ate a few chips which were okay - and the scampi was actually quite nice.. but just pre-bought breaded scampi.. Anyway, I’ve been here plenty of times in the past over the years and actually rated it 4 stars at some point. Unfortunately, now I would avoid and definitely drive to the next town as there’s plenty of great chippies at the top of their game...

Absolutely shocking.

The only thing to suggest why this awful place, staffed by the rudest people I have ever seen, is busy, is its location.

As new residents to Dunbar we went here for food several times while we were painting our new house. Every time, we waited up to 40 minutes only to find our order had been forgotten or mistaken. The food was terrible and the service nothing short of abusive. Often, we had to take the wrong food home or face a further wait.

Fast forward a few months, and we thought we'd ring up to place an order to save having to wait behind crowds of drunken, abusive teenagers and worse staff. We were told in no uncertain terms to "eff off" after finding out that you cannot order in advance - despite a few minutes of conversation, having been asked what we would like, been told how long it would take etc etc - it transpired they were expecting us to place an order for delivery and when we said no, we'd be happy to collect (not wishing to wait an hour for them to deliver) the "lady" on the phone turned very nasty.

Suffice to say, we have found another chip shop in Dunbar who are bend-over-backwards polite. I will not post their name here as I want people to know, this is a genuine review, not shilling on behalf of another company.

Poor tourists, poor residents, who have to put up with this sorry excuse for a business' awful food and listen to them eff and blind in front of children while they wait for their food.

In Gullane, we ordered maybe 3-4 times a month from the local chippy, for 10 years. At an average order value of £20 for a small family, thats £10,000 of business. I hope Cafe Central read this and realize that they will never get our business again and how much in real income this would cost. I will not hesitate to speak ill of them to others as they have ruined several evenings when all we wanted was to get something quick to eat when we were tired, and I wouldn't want anybody else to suffer the same way, or give them...