The Bus Café — Restaurant in Thanet

Sunday Morning Breakfast. We booked a table for a family breakfast (2 adults 1 child) as despite living in Thanet we'd still not gotten around to visiting The Bus Cafe, and it's very popular. I was really looking forward to it and had high expectations. The menu is great and caters well for vegetarians and vegans. My husband had the "Vegan Hangover" breakfast and our daughter had a children's vegan sausage bap - I went for the "posh" breakfast (salmon and poached egg). Food seemed rather expensive (£11.50 for a breakfast) but again, we had high expectations. Both adult meals were beautifully presented and looked great, but really lacked substance. It seems you're paying for a pretty plate of food, but there isn't enough of it to fill you up. The menu states that both of the above meals are served with toasted sourdough, however, they both came out on a potato rosti. When we queried this we were informed that there is no toast on weekends and the meals are served with a rosti instead. This isn't mentioned anywhere on the menu nor did anyone mention it to us when we ordered - I don't mind a potato rosti (though these could have done with more seasoning) but the breakfast would really benefit from some toast - and this isn't ideal for allergy sufferers who wouldn't be able to consider this when deciding what to eat. Our daughter's sausage bap was one sausage in a standard white burger bun. For £4 this was very unimpressive, and again, not really enough to be considered a meal in its own right. Drinks were fine, though the drinks menu is quite small (but it's a bus, there is minimal room to be able to provide an extensive drinks menu, I get it). I guess the fact that the cafe is a bus is a bit quirky and unusual, but it's worth baring in mind that anyone over 5"7' will have to bend down upstairs as they'll be touching the ceiling. The seats are really difficult to get into. It's a proper squeeze. I'm a size 14 and felt like I had to contort myself to squeeze between the table and bench seat, if you're big, you'd really struggle to sit down comfortably and if you're 6 foot plus I don't know how you'd get your legs under the table at all, especially if there were four of you squashed in. Whenever anyone is walking about upstairs or coming up or down the stairs the bus shakes, which is just the reality of the cafe being an old bus but not something I'd considered and it did make it difficult to enjoy breakfast during a busy morning service. It's also pretty cold on board, people were eating in their jackets. I assumed it would be heated. Overall, pretty disappointed. I couldn't complain about the food, which was tasty and well cooked, but for the price it's really lacking, especially when competing with so many other breakfast spots in Margate. The venue itself just makes for a pretty uncomfortable experience, and I know "it's a bus, what do you expect?" - but I don't think the quirkiness of being on a bus wins out over being able to eat comfortably. We...

This was an okay breakfast, sounds like we caught it on a not great day or something. I've made some edits to this review in light of the reply from the business below who I think raise some fair points.

First edit/thing to underline: it wasn't awful. Never said it was.

Just said the focaccia was. Which it was. It didn't taste fresh and it felt stale. The bread is dense and uniform, where Focaccia should have a bubble and a crunch to a salted crust).

That's why it's 3/5.

We went on a quiet and very hot weekday. Super view. Had high hopes, especially after our bnb had recommended it. But this just wasn't as very good as we expected. Really nice staff, although we had to ask twice for sugar for our hot drinks.

Had the posh veggie and the big meat breakfast. They were okay.

The focaccia was awful, we stand by that. We wrote 'it's not really focaccia, i think. Just some cold loaf (looked like a cheap supermarket mini baguette, halved) that sits underneath a small scatter of bacon and mushroom bits'. If it is fresh, then ... I don't know what's going on there.

Worth mentioning as the menu makes a bit of a feature about it, but...nope. The mumbled eggs are fine. The sausage was nice. The spinach leaves felt like a strange addition, and didn't really compliment the rest - we saw a friend of the staff drive up and give a supermarket bag of spinach leaves as they'd run short (can't begrudge them that, smart move in a pinch - but this is part of why we assumed some of the stuff on the plate wasn't fresh).

The coffee isn't good.

This feels like a friendly, nice place that charges high end/London prices and it used to be very very good. But maybe it's slipped a bit. Or we caught a bad day or something.

Two further edits here:

1. Point taken re: London prices in the reply from the business below. Things cost a lot, I didn't mean to sound snarky there. If £14.50 is the going rate for the biggest breakfast I don't think that's an unreasonable price to charge if it's delicious. This wasn't.

2. i initially this review said 'used to be very very good anecdotally' - because we'd been told by our airbnb owner how amazing it was a couple of years back: hence 'anecdotally'.

But the response below takes issue with that word and i see why - so as well as anecdotally, I'm editing this to clarify that it's more than anecdotal, it's won awards in 2019 and 2021, that's a fair point.

Still. They need a more serious approach to the cooking and the ingredients if they're to continue charging what they do.

We'd give Cliffs of Margate an identical review. Coincidentally we ended up there, and they share extremely similar menus (crumpet sliders etc). It was equally Nice People But Not As Good As We Hoped and Kind of Expect for that Price....

For the purpose of this review, I am Iremia's boyfriend and was with her at the time of service. If you are willing to make a bold claim that your breakfast is the UKs 3rd best, surely you have to expect to receive feedback of a critique nature... The way something tastes is down to everyone's own personal opinion, and in my girlfriends opinion, she had tasted better.. However, what is not down to personal opinion is the quality of service.... to wait 40 minutes for a breakfast, is poor especially as you were not particularly busy... should my girlfriend need to mention the food was late? Or should you guys not have apologised irrespectively for the wait? Also your tone is unjust.... Iremia has every right to leave a review... how is that helping others if she only spoke to yourselves there. Furthermore, she even made positive comments on the cafe and the quality of the bacon sarnie. Even if she did, and you apologised, the food would still have been late! Perhaps spend less time leaving silly petulant comments to people who are trying to provide people with fair constructive reviews and spend more time focusing on how you can improve theefficiency of...