THE ALEXANDER BAIN — Restaurant in Scotland

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ – A Near-Death Dining Experience… But in a Good Way

I popped in for food today fully expecting the usual — sticky menus, suspicious stains, and maybe a light stabbing for dessert. But holy hell, someone’s clearly kidnapped the old staff and replaced them with actual professionals.

First shocker: we were greeted at the door. By a human. They even showed us to our seat without swearing at us. Second shocker: the floor was clean. I mean, actually clean. No blood. No sorry Wickers lying drunk in the corner. I almost left to double-check I was in the right building.

Menus arrived without bite marks. Drinks order taken without a grunt. We ordered haggis balls and tattie skins, which turned up hot, fresh, and on clean plates. At this point I started scanning for hidden cameras.

Then came the main: a steak that was, against all odds, a real steak. No mystery meat, no weird sauce pretending to hide the truth. Just steak, chips, and joy. It tasted great, we demolished our plates, and I even paid without crying. Cheap as chips (literally).

Three hours later and I’m still alive, upright, and not bargaining with God from the bathroom floor. Whoever’s running this place now — chef, manager, or culinary wizard — keep doing whatever you’re doing.

This is the first time in 15 years I’ve left here without food poisoning or a police...

Possibly the weirdest, most diabolically run pub restaurant I've been to and I travel the uk extensively. I'm usually in Wick once or twice a month and each time we pop in for a nice lunch and a drink or 2. This time we walked in and you have to be seated (which is new), was seated fairly quickly and then ignored for sometime so we left. This is not the type of establishment which should be run as a "table service" restaurant, the dining area is too big, the staff numbers are too small (hence some diners audibly feeling ignored), the food is not good enough for the wait and its quite something when so many drinks and items of food are out of stock. Tourists feel its a let down and locals are baffled by the tone deaf change. It's the equivalent of have table service at a weatherspoons...infact what brings in so much revenue into weatherspoons is being able to order via the app or just order & pay at the bar in your own time.

Management clearly either have very limited experience in running a restaurant, dont understand their locality or just dont care about this part of their portfolio. The staff to their credit are trying their best but this place lacks real leadership (notice I said leadership and not dictatorship)....

DO NOT GO HERE!

If I could give less than one star, I would. We arrived and overlooked a sign saying they would show us to a table. We sat down ourselves, as all the tables were empty and there was no staff. Then we heard a waitress ask if she should go to us, but the manager told her and the staff to ignore us because we had already sat down. We then waited for a good half hour and were ignored by the entire staff. They all stood around doing nothing. Finally, we went to the bar ourselves to ask if we could order. We were told in an irritated tone that they hadn't acknowledged us and were deliberately ignoring us because we hadn't waited....