The Highdown — Restaurant in Worthing

The more stunning the location, the worse the service.

I will do my best to make this review balanced and fair. The restaurant wasn’t overly busy, there were lots of empty tables in the restaurant.

So, we have visited 3 Brunning & Price restaurants; The Fox Revived, The Bolney Stage & here, The Highdown.

We had promising expectations, based upon our previous experiences at the previous 2 places I have mentioned. I have to say, The Highdown location, venue and accommodation is beautiful. Such a hidden beauty, and we decided to stay the night with our dogs.

The service in the restaurant; We entered the restaurant and informed a staff member, “Hello, we have a reservation booked for 6:45pm”, he looked at me blank and confused, and continued with, “Sorry, I thought that was going to go somewhere” he then got his tablet screen and asked for my name. We was taken to our table. - A very awkward and confusing initial encounter/ welcome.

The waiter came over, we ordered our wine and it was served within good time. We then waited a fair amount of time to order the starters/mains. Eventually we was asked what we would like and we ordered.

Please know, I am not a fussy customer, but there was just no care or attentiveness to the service what so ever. If anything I felt like a slight inconvenience for being there.

The food was DELICIOUS, it was served quickly and there was nothing negative to say as far as the food was concerned.

AT NO POINT was we asked how our meals were, or if we was enjoying the food. In my experience at other Brunning and Price restaurants this is common practice.

The plates were removed, (without asking if we had enjoyed our meal) and desert menus were placed on our table without a single word, without even asking if we actually wanted dessert.

We flagged the waiter down to ask for the bill. We was prompted with a machine and asked if we would like to leave a tip, (I did not feel a tip was appropriate for the service we had received so I politely declined)

We paid the bill, and left to return to our room. as I stated at the top of this review - it seems to be a common theme, the more stunning the location, the service seems compromised. Almost as if it isn’t necessary.

Such a shame. We had such high hopes for this beautiful, secluded, unique restaurant. Will we return? - Not in a hurry.

REVIEW UPDATE:

At breakfast the next morning (which was delicious) we was approached by the general manager Jon, and wanted to address the review I had written. After we had finished eating Jon showed me around the stunning building some more and wanted to discuss my points raised. He was so attentive and at no point defensive. I really felt my points raised had been listened to, and Jon has offered us a voucher and invited us back to the restaurant to dine again. My dogs even got a little box of treats. I feel that this has been dealt with very well, and I am looking forward to giving The Highdown restaurant the second chance that hopefully...

The wife and I, plus a Staffie stayed here for four days and we all had a great time. It is extremely dog friendly with thoughtful facilities and additional touches, located in a dog walking paradise right outside the door is a real bonus. There are three elements to the Highdown, the pub, hotel, plus a tea room. All are dog friendly and it is hard to fault any. Parking is not a problem either but obviously I can't speak for other times of the year. A slightly bigger room would have been useful and is my only thought. All was nice and warm with log fires all day. We thought the hotel stay was good value. The breakfasts and evening meals we had were consistently excellent. Real ale and decent wine nicely topped everything off. The pictures speak for themselves, and we found the service friendly and attentive. It does appear to have more of a pub emphasis over the hotel side but this wasn't an issue. One of the very few places that we would be more than happy to return to. And we did some 15 months later. We had another great vacation but in all honesty it wasn't as good as the first. There were a few relatively minor issues but they were noticeable. The room was a bit warm so we decided to use the fan provided, until we realised how dusty it was. Coincidentally so was the extract fan in the bathroom. Breakfast wasn't great. We ordered exactly the same on three mornings and received three different versions. The sausages aren't nice, we never had a runny fried egg, they ran out of tomato, yoghurt, and jam for the toast. The self service buffet bar was also very poor by any measure, again the picture speaks for itself. A lot more attention to detail is required. The service wasn't great either but conversely everyone there was very friendly and more...

We booked a table for 3 people for Sunday, 21st July.

I mentioned in my booking about a severe onion allergy, and also actively rang ahead. When I spoke to the girl on the phone I mentioned it was specifically an onion allergy, and that as a previous chef myself, I wanted to let the chefs know about us coming in.

As Hiighdown appeared to be an independent pub/restaurant. I hoped the chefs would be able to make accommodations for this in advance as they had been given notice.

I think what actually happened is the young girl put down the phone after our conversation and did not follow up on my request whatsoever. When we arrived on Sunday, the server only very recently was made aware of the allergy. We had to specifically ask that they take the menu to the kitchen so that the chefs could circle what dishes could be eaten. The options were the fish and chips, the burger made plain, or a plain steak.

These are the options produced by a restaurant with cooks, not chefs. The options that my mother is sick to death of, as it's practically the only dishes that low-tier food outlets will offer when the cooks are there to reheat prepackaged, microwave in the bag food or have no care over making adjustments to any basic menu item (e.g. a pan fried fish dish) to suit somebody with a severe allergy.

We had to make the decision that none of us would eat at the restaurant.

We drove an hour each way to visit The Highdown. I personally chose the restaurant and was honestly quite excited to try there. However, we left completely deflated after finishing our pre-food ordered drink and went home hungry.

We rang in advance, no adjustments could be made. A terrible show for a restaurant that looks so...