Game Bird — Restaurant in St Helens

Used to enjoy going to this pub for some food, but since they got a new chef the food quality seems to have gone downhill.

Took my 2 kids here for breakfast with santa on the weekend and it was overwhelmingly disappointing. Firstly we had booked for a 10am breakfast so arrived at the wacky for a play at 9am only to be told the breakfast wouldn't be served until 10.30am. My 2 children are autistic and changes to plans like this last minute can really upset them. The music in the wacky was way too loud for that time in the morning and a large group of very rambunctious children made the wacky intolerable for my children by 9.30 meaning we had to somehow burn an hour of time elsewhere.

We were welcomed by Donna, the only saving grace on this day - absolutely brilliant woman, she should be running this place! She offered us to go the pub early and offered to bring the children's breakfasts out without waiting. Myself and my husband decide to wait for the official start time for our own breakfasts of the breakfast with santa event which would turn out to be a huge mistake.

The children's breakfasts were nice. The child's full English was a good portion and my daughter enjoyed it. The toast came with rock solid butter however, which was completely unspreadable and the toast wasn't warm so the butter had zero chance to melt so thank god for jam! The waffles and crispy bacon went down a treat with my son.

It got to 10.30 when the event began, by which time myself and my husband were famished. We then watched as the entire pub were served their breakfast one by one. So from arriving in the pub at 9.30am, it was now 11.20am and we still had no adult breakfasts! Anyone else would have walked out. We asked and asked and were told 'yours is next' only to see the server take food to other tables for another 10 minutes. Then the food arrived. After waiting over 45 minutes from the event start time, and everyone else having eaten theirs. My oh my. Where do I begin? The full English was lacking sausages which we had to request as they had been forgotten, the toast was completely burnt to a crisp, rock hard butter again, uncooked snotty eggs and about 2 teaspoons of beans. Waiting so long for food so bad put a real damper on the day.

Then it was time to see Santa. Last year we came here for this event and it was brilliant but this year was a shambles. Our 5 year old said immediately upon seeing Santa "that's a man dressed up, I can see his real beard underneath". She is 5. That's how bad the costume was. I don't know who chose this guy for this role, but it seemed as though he had never met a child in his life. He didn't know what to say or how to act, and lacked any enthusiasm. The "gift" of santa was a lackluster activity book which my kids quickly discarded. Donna, who runs the wacky who was dressed as an elf was the best part of the day. She was full of life, getting the kids excited, chatting with us, trying to fix our messed up food... if it wasn't for her attentativeness we'd have left. We requested a partial refund and will not be going back unless its just for the wacky for the children. So...

Went here Sunday 3rd August 2014. The food was awful, 2 of our party had sausage and mash, the sausages were the cheapest of the cheap, considering a decent pack of sausages from Asda cost £2.99 for 6, god knows how much these must have cost about 10p each I am guessing. Usually from these pub grub type places, like Weatherspoons the burgers are really nice, so I ordered a burger, and again it was disgusting cheap cheap cheap crap, it was like the ones you get from Aldi which cost a £1 for 10. Add to that the gang of15 year old plastic gangsters from Kirby attempting to look hard who were drinking in there and looked to be arranging a drug deal in the car park, and the hoards of young children running around the place, and the obligatory screaming 18 month old baby put the tin hat on it. The staff were quite nice, the girl who was walking around our bit of the pub looked very appreciative when she seen us cleaning our table ourselves, not too sure if you are supposed to clean the table yourself but we had sat there 15 minutes and no one else seemed to be doing it. Talking of staff they must be very busy in there, because as we walked to the bar to order out meal, there was 2 members of staff having a heart to heart behind the bar, we reached the bar at the same time as another customer, so staff member number one broke off her conversation with her colleague to serve the other customer, which was commendable, staff member number 2 I assumed would take our order but decided that she had something more pressing elsewhere to do and ran away. The only reason we even gave the Game Bird a try was because there was a 20 minute wait at the Copper Pot down the East Lancs, I guess the moral here is if there is a 20 minute wait, then that should tell you something mainly that the place is rammed because the food is good, so don’t be so impatient relax and have a pint. It also should have rang alarm bells that we could get a table for 5 at 6pm on a Sunday evening, plus the fact that the last time we went to The Game Bird 3 or 4 years ago the place had been equally as bad and we had swore never to go there again, deffo sticking to my...

I'm not usually a moaner as I've worked in hospitality and know what a slog it can be.... However, I need to mention a couple of issues that arose today.

As soon as you enter the building, there's a 'wet dog' smell. This changed depending on where in the building you went. Around the toilets it was worse. The carpet was covered in stains and didn't appear to have been hoovered in weeks.

The whole place was dirty and old in appearance. The employees weren't uniformed, visible, friendly or approachable. Some tables had dirty dishes, others hadn't been wiped.

Our food took 1 hour, 40 mins to arrive. My daughter didn't eat much of her food as she said it all tasted the same. She was right as my chicken and chips tasted very similar to her fish fingers.... Old oil taste, nasty.

My friend's steak was very fatty and most of it was returned from her mouth to the plate!!

There was no 'check back' to allow us to raise or discuss our concerns.

After our meal, we went to the wacky werehouse.... This metal shed attached to the pub was also dirty and being managed by another member of staff who too, clearly didn't want to be there or care about her role.

There were adults in the play area, children without socks on and we watched a parent sit her precious child at the bottom of the slide. I'm no kill joy but if another child had used the slide and injured her child, I doubt the parent would have accepted the responsibility and no doubt your chain would receive a compo claim. If the person 'managing' it had noticed or addressed this, it would have felt like it was being dealt with/managed. It felt more like the customers were running it and the staff didn't care or want to be there.

After 20 minutes in the shed, I went back into the pub to use their toilet. Our table hadn't been cleared.

I understand that everywhere can have bad days, we're only humans running them but I think these guys needed a keg of coffee..... Just to smile!!

Sadly, we won't be returning...