The Ember Lounge — Restaurant in Stoke-on-Trent

The Ember Lounge is a pivotal location on the Staffordshire University College Road campus. During my first year of study, it was the place to be on campus to have a social life or grab a bite to eat between classes.

During the lockdown, it appears that anyone with any clue how to run a hospitality venue left, and the people left behind have just kind of winged it for what they're supposed to be doing.

The staff are unprofessional and lazy, multiple staff members will stand behind the bar and just stare at you while you wait to be served. The long waits would be expected if the venue had an atmosphere, but the footfall is low and the environment feels cold and unwelcoming.

The venue used to also boast one of the most popular events on campus, a weekly karaoke where students would drink the night away and sing merrily to notable cheesy tunes and popular classics. This fantastic event has turned into the same 20-30 students screaming songs from anime's and cartoons or absolutely butchering other songs that you've never heard of. This would be kind of tolerable if you could hold a conversation with someone at your table while you tried to enjoy your drinks, but the music is at such an unbelievably loud level it can probably be heard from the Leek Road side of campus. The LRV has made conscious efforts to control the noise level of their events, but no regard is taken for that at Karaoke and if it wasn't so far onto the campus I'd expect noise complaints from the neighbours.

Finally the pièce de résistance of The Ember Lounge; the food.

I'm without words for how far the standards in the kitchen have slipped. The food at Ember used to be a staple of the Staffs Student diet, grabbing a bite to eat between lectures or having a nice lunch on the weekend you'd see many students dropping in throughout the day to refuel and catch up with their friends.

What comes out of that kitchen now you can barely call food. The service is slow and staff seem offended when you ask to place a food order. The photos I've uploaded with this review just show you what they class as a "Pizza" which tends to be a burnt to a crisp cardboard base drowned in sauce and cheese hoping you forget you wasted £5.90 on this insult to food, even after sending it back they struggle to make an...

Foods ok, shame about the speed of service ! They even have a thing in the menu that says if food takes more than 30 minutes to arrive you get your meal for free. Unfortunately they will argue about this fact in practice. My meal was literally 30 minutes till it reached my table, I enquired if I could get my money back or a voucher, but was told it was exactly 30 minutes so didn't apply !? In reality it was 30 minutes and 40 something seconds so technically 'over 30 minutes' . But still, it took 30 minutes for my turkey burger to arrive, while other make ordered after mine were coming out in good time. And it wasn't...

Waited over an hour for food, which we only got because we went up and asked, just to be told "there was no one at the table" when there was 3 of us sat there, subsequently, the food was dry as it had been under a heat lamp for so long, and the plates were very hot which we weren't warned about, and my friend burnt her hand. If we weren't so hungry after waiting for so long we would've left it. Other people around us had the same issues. This place used to be really nice,...