Harlequin’s — Restaurant in Worthing

My daughter chose to dine here for her birthday meal. We reserved one of the bird cage tables near the entrance. That was my daughter’s choice too! Upon arrival we saw that our table had a reservation placard, sweets, crayons, sauces and was fully prepared and clean. Very good start indeed. Then Natasha approached us confirming if we were the party whom the table was for. I liked the fact she came over to confirm this then she took it from there.

We took a while deciding what meals and drinks to order. Natasha kindly came to our table to take our orders. Even though the usual policy is to order and pay at the bar. Thank you for that Natasha. She put my daughter’s drink in one of the trendy Watermelon cups and our bottle of Prosecco was perfectly chilled!

Food wise - my daughter chose the Macaroni cheese with garlic bread. It was a generous portion, perfectly cooked pasta and brilliant cheesy sauce. She enjoyed it and managed to eat half of it! It was served with two slices of garlic bread. My daughter to her credit tried the garlic bread but was not keen which was due to her preference rather than the garlic bread itself! Her dad and I ordered the steak meals. I was very impressed when my meal arrived and I do not say such things lightly. I noticed the portions were generous and well arranged. The steak was big, juicy and cooked to my liking which was medium rare, the chips were crispy and hot served in a small tin, there were lots of little juicy delicately flavoured mushrooms (much better in my view than one of those shrivelled up Portobello mushrooms!), the tomatoes were tasty and a jug of peppercorn sauce was included. I was impressed because in other places we have eaten steak, the diner has to pay £1-2 extra for a small portion of peppercorn sauce!

Natasha was attentive - regularly asked us if our meal was okay or we needed anything. She was also efficient, friendly, patient, presentable, sweet, knowledgable, professional and coherent. She even took photos of us at the end. I felt she went the extra mile for our family. She is the ideal person to be working in this type of industry and I can see her progressing all the way to the top within the company if that is what she wants to do!. Her colleague Katy was equally as hard working and attentive and so was the other person (forget his name sorry). All three staff that day worked hard to make our family feel welcome and valued. I’d assumed several people were working but it was just tree which shows just how much work they were doing!

The venue itself is large, clean, tidy and has various seating depending on what suits you and how many people are in your party. There is also a god size beer garden at the back. There is a very good selection of food and drinks. We visited the ladies toilets which were pristine. We noticed small details such as my daughter being able to reach the taps and soap dispenser.

Lastly, the following feedback is to do with the company not the staff. If I had the chance to improve one aspect it would be to include air conditioning as the area we were sitting in was very hot. This made me somewhat sluggish. If there was air conditioning I would have given 5 instead of 4 stars! Also it would be good if the Macaroni cheese meal was included as one of the choices in the children's meals. This would be cheaper and less wasteful than having to order the adults portion of Macaroni and cheese and order a separate drink too. Lots of children do eat Macaroni cheese so this would make sense!

Thank you. We will certainly be coming back here for a meal in the future or for drinks...

Unfortunately NOT the same experience 2nd time round, last time was lovely.

But our most recent experience for bottomless brunch was nothing but disappointing. x1 processoco top up (last time was constant) we were told quite bluntly they are only given if they are behind on orders, which was a lie as we got the first top up and the place was practically empty.

We then found out by our next lovely server that the man that was blunt to us was actually the MANAGER! (Craig) We politely let her know the situation for him to then return to our table to say quite bluntly AGAIN "so what's the problem" we let him know unfortunately we were disappointed by the lack of procecco and the slow drinks, he told us that "we only have 3 people working and everyone else seems to be understanding of this" implying that we were out of order for even pointing this out.

He then continued to be rather confrontational with us, I had to tell him that I wasn't looking for an argument, just wanted to let him know on the service we had received and we had received a totally different service from last time.

By the end, I had stop the conversion as it was starting to ruin my fiancée's birthday.

We can only reccomend people to come in peak bottomless times as anything after this you do not receive the same level of service.

My partner then asked the table behind us about thier experience was like, they managed to have so many rounds of drinks as well as CONSTANTLY topped up procecco! Who they told us they got served all night by the CRAIG the MANAGER, cannot understand the difference in service. Total double standards.

We belive he understood his mistake, and instead of apologising decided 15mins after our end time to let us know "this is our final order" and when they delivered them we got x2 what we ordered.

All the staff bar the supposed manager gave us...

We came as a party of 5 for bottomless brunch for the 6 o’clock reservation. There were three servers on shift and our experience with other staff was great, however our experience with Craig the ‘’manager on shift” (26.01.24) was awful.

Immediately he was very confrontational and defensive as we had asked him to top up our Prosecco with our cocktails (previous experience was constant) but was apparently company policy that we couldn’t have Prosecco with a cocktail. However, speaking to two separate groups of 2 girls, they were constantly topped up with Prosecco and received many cocktails in their window, whereas we only had 4 drinks in 2 hours.

I have never been sober in a bottomless brunch, unfortunately this was my first experience and was meant as a birthday celebration.

When we kindly brought it up with a staff member, Craig immediately came to us asking “what our problem was”. He wouldn’t hear our side and said they had been on top of cocktails which wasn’t true. Speaking from my own experience in hospitality, I have never in my career encountered a “manager” so rude and unprofessional from the get go.

This was specifically booked in advance under the provisor it was for a birthday...