The Applecart Beefeater — Restaurant in Vale of White Horse

Cor blimey had breakfast here was absolutely cracking excellent value for money for £9 you can have a full English (you get to pick exactly what you want) as much Toast as you like. The toast machine is my fave thing I love it but it only does one side so you get to do it twice yay!!! Little things!🤩 2 pastries Croissants, pain au chocolate, and a yoghurt, cereal as much coffee/Tea/Juice as you like, and the staff are so good here like I said in a previous review nothing is too much trouble. My only negatives are I wish you had a choice of smoked or non smoked bacon. I love smoked but they dont do this ☹ and shock horror who knew you cant use your Taste Card at Beefeater any more 😯

3/10/22 5pm Note to self dont go at this time again! Demon child sat next to us put me on my last nerve with all the screaming!! They have a really good offer on until the end of November 40% off mains. And at 5pm all cocktails are a fiver, thoroughly recommend the zombie we had 2 each they were fabulous. For starters 2 of us had the salt & pepper calamari, I thought it was going to be spicy as chilli was mentioned so plumped for the prawn cocktail with granary bread which was toasted with 1 rock hard tiny square of butter, would have preferred it not toasted and a few more packets of butter. But the prawn cocktail was very nice. Turned out the calamari wasnt spicy at all so I will defo have that next time. 2 of us had the steak sampler for our mains supposed to be rump, sirloin & fillet hard to figure out which is which but in terms of flavour they were lovely, but lord knows where they get there fillet steak from all the fillets I've ever had from here always have sinew in them! Chips tomatoes onion rings were lovely, I think there was supposed to be a mushroom on there, but looks like it was replaced with another half of tomato, it comes with a peppercorn sauce in a little jug. So if you dont like that sauce you can order a different one for an extra cost. Which I did I had the bearnaise which was lovely. My sister had the extra peppercorn sauce so she was over the moon! My niece had the chargrilled king prawns with garlic and parsley they were massive and she thoroughly enjoyed them. We had a side order of mac and cheese and it was lush, for dessert 2 of us had the banoffee waffle sundae, the waffles were supposed to be warm but they were cold almost frozen and tasted stale totally ruined it. My niece had the cookie dough and ice cream she said it was really nice. We had 3 americanos and asked for a couple of jugs of warm milk. Massive spider came running towards our table thankfully my hero niece saved us from the approaching monster!! Service was excellent really good team there, was extremely busy lots of people staying at the premier inn hotel next door. I wish people would keep a closer eye on their kids though, was an adorable little girl walking around asking where the toilet was no parent in sight and way to young to be going by herself considering you have to leave the restaurant through some doors to get to them. She could have used the disabled toilets which were closer to her parents. I know children are not the staffs responsibility, but rather than direct them through the doors I would perhaps take them back to their parents and advise them their child needs the loo and...

Myself & my partner walked in with our two young kids on a Saturday lunch time and made immediate eye contact with a waitress who was taking a payment from another table. We waited at the "please wait to be seated" sign, assuming the waitress who saw us would come and seat us once she'd finished with the table she was at. Instead, she disappeared in to the back somewhere. She did come back out a couple of minutes later and made eye contact again, but still no smile or welcome. We waited for about 3-4 minutes with various staff members continuing to ignore us, before I approached the bar. The "manager" behind the bar was busy making, what looked like a couple of coffees, and continued to ignore us.

Having worked in the industry myself, a quick "be with you in a minute", or "apologies for the wait" would have gone a long way - but to be completely ignored as customers is not on. At this point, the kids needed a wee, so they disappeared to the toilet with my partner. I asked the manager if anyone was serving or if someone could take us to a table. I was pretty rudely told "I'm busy right now" and left standing at the bar.

I gave up at that point. Just before the kids came back from the toilet, the manager finally came over and asked if we wanted a seat (we'd been stood there approaching 10 minutes at this point) but I'd given up by now and said we'd go somewhere else. I just got a tut as she walked off, muttering something under her breath.

Appalling customer service and really rude.

We literally live 2 minutes from the place, too - so with young kids and the Harvester shutting down over the road, there was real potential for this place to be our "go to" local restaurant for whenever we can't be bothered to cook ourselves; but we won't...

After going to the Beefeater twice, I've found the service to be quite odd. They can be rather stand offish like rushing you to your table (even when the place isn't overally busy), practically runs away from putting your meal on the table (so no opportunity to ask for condiments), not doing check backs on the meal and just a general vibe of "I don't want to be here". We often like condiments when eating out (e.g. mayo) but on both times it was a pain to ask/get any as they run away when they plate your meal before you can even ask for any, and they practically go out of their way to avoid eye contact. I literally had to queue up at the bar for 5 mins to get someone's attention.

Food was okay, not great, especially for the price. It might literally just a taste thing mostly, but our special Christmas chicken burger was literally devoid of taste, swimming quite literally in a pool of grease. We rarely make a complaint about food (but how we love to moan to ourselves about things 😄), but in this example it was necessary. The waitress was rather blarzay about it and just said that's normal. It wasn't until we showed them their own promo picture of the burger (ours was black - promo was golden brown and different texture) that we got the manager involved. In all fairness, the manager (this time) was great and actually seemed to be change their tune and was lovely. Seeming to genuinely apologies for the bad meal and was nice enough to offer us consolidation.

Despite the great outcome from the manager, it's unlikely I'll be eating at Beefeater again for...