The March Hare — Restaurant in Stockport

Living in Cheadle Hulme for nearly 19 years, I’ve visited The March Hare a few times and today really was a palpable reminder of why I’ve not been back since. After finding some very ‘interesting’ reviews online, I thought I’d take a look for myself and share my honest opinion on this place. Let’s just say, there’s a reason this pub is tucked away.

On arrival we were taken to our seats promptly but the entire set up was a little chaotic and confusing. We were taken to the corner of the restaurant area and made to wait 31 minutes before being offered a drink. After ordering our drinks, we were then told some time later that they didn’t have them in stock and the mineral gun had broken so we couldn’t order that either. When the drinks arrived my Malbec was corked but I was so thirsty I didn’t dare mention it.

Our waitress who was both charming and personable definitely struggled running such a large section and that was very evident in the state of the restaurant. Tables were covered in mess, food all over the floor and customers were frustratingly looking for her attention.

After waiting a decade for our food to arrive it turned up greasy, cold and tasteless. The fish and gammon were freezing cold, eggs burnt and I didn’t realise chips could be chewy? Just really poor, thoughtless cooking.

Two of us sent our food back and by the time it had returned to the table, the others had finished. Which I usually have no problem with, so long as the food is tasty. Shame it wasn’t.

I ordered a festive chicken burger which came to £16.50. Now, when looking at the quality of ingredients, price, overall taste and portion size.. it’s safe to say that this place is committing daylight robbery.

It supposedly came with ‘camembert cheese, maple cured bacon, cranberry sauce and a Cumberland pig in blanket’ and it came with nothing but the smallest smear of cranberry sauce, 15 chewy chips and a chicken burger that emulated Gandhi’s flip flop.

When asked whether or not we enjoyed the food we were polite and honest to our server. We didn’t go into detail because there wasn’t an opportunity to. After thinking he understood, he looked at us very offended and said “yeah not really much I can do”, told us he’ll speak to the manager and walked away. Full price bill and not a single apology.

This really is shambolic management at its finest and you can tell the stress has trickled down to all members of staff working here. This place needs to really rethink its management decisions as I have a feeling it won’t be running for much longer under its current influences.

The only reason this place is still going is due to its dog friendly environment. But to be perfectly honest, the food is probably better suited to those...

Terrible from start to finish. Waitress friendly only good thing. Drinks came, mine was wrong. No issue but I told the waitress and she apologised and said she’d go and swap it. 20 minutes later, my drink still hadn’t come back and I couldn’t see the waitress anywhere so had to go up to the bar myself to tell them and get it - not great and it didn’t seem like they were even in the process of sorting it. My husband ordered a starter - soup, which took 40 minutes to come. 45 minutes after the soup had been served (1 hour 30 minutes since arriving), our mains still hadn’t come, so we’ve now been here for an hour and a half and all we’ve had is a bowl of soup. Then a member of staff comes over and says they’ve got mixed up in the kitchen and cooked duck instead of lamb so our food is going to be longer. Not what we wanted to hear after already waiting so long - it’s now 8:45pm and we arrived at 7pm. They got us a drink but that didn’t really solve the issue. Also nobody had been over to us at all before this asking if we needed more drinks or apologising for how long we’d been waiting. Our mains arrived at 8:50pm. Almost TWO HOURS after we arrived. Really, really poor. Not only is it an obscene amount of time to wait, but we didn’t want to be eating a big meal that late. My husband’s lamb was dry and looked like it had just been thrown together and my steak was fatty and missing the roast tomatoes, which I had to get the waitresses attention to ask for. If you’re going to make us wait 2 hours, at least make sure it’s right when it comes out. If we weren’t absolutely starving, we’d have complained about the food, not that anyone came over to ask if we were ok anyway. We would normally get a pudding when out but we just wanted to get out of there. Nobody came over to check how our food was or take our plates, so we had to go up to the bar ourselves to sort the bill out. As I said the waitress was friendly but not very present (looked like she was the only person serving all the tables so not her fault), but it really didn’t make up for the general service and how long we had to wait for a bowl of soup and 2 mains. Also the 2 tables next to us left about 8pm and their dirty plates were just left there for the remainder of time we were there (over 1 hour). Not the nicest thing to look at. This was 1 week ago, I filled in their online survey that they send out asking for feedback. I filled this in and ticked the box that said I wanted to be contacted regarding this experience, but have heard nothing from them so will see if they see this review instead. Another example of the terrible...

Me and my girlfriend are fairly new to the area and this is our closest pub, our local essentially, so it's a shame I can't recommend it. We've been a few times since we've moved and have had mixed experiences, including a previous occasion where an offer on the app wasn't accepted, so if you're thinking of using that I wouldn't bother.

Our last visit was part of a present for my girlfriend's grandparents 80th, and we'd booked in advance as we knew it was always busy on a Sunday when even the 2 of us hadn't been able to get a table on the day on another occasion. We had a table booked for 2pm but weren't seated until 2:45. The table near the bar we were temporarily sat at was taken when we were told our table was ready at 2:35ish by another group. Whilst we were served drinks no effort was made to take our order before we were sat down, and once our table was finally ready we were told we would be made a priority, but again we had to chase down someone to order our food (3 members of staff in total). Once we were finally served the food took an hour, including 25 minutes for some halloumi fries I ordered to come as soon as they were ready.

What I can't understand is why we weren't just given another table and another group of 4 given our table later. I saw plenty of available tables whilst we were waiting and saw other groups were seated before us. As I said it's a shame as the food is nice but there are plenty of other places in the area where we've never had a bad experience so we...