The Vic Tavern at the Village Inn — Restaurant in Woodstock

I can honestly say I had one of the worst hospitality experiences of my life at the Vic Tavern. It would be zero stars for service if this was available.

EDIT: I have to say I had an excellent chuckle at the wildly delusional and made up response from the restaurant.

I love 'We tried to help you'. Not sure how you 'help' with fixing your own incompetence such as understanding how a reservation system works, or how to run a restaurant, and or how to balance the needs of those with bookings and those staying at the inn. As mentioned, none of the things in the response below happened, and we received only rudeness and hostility from the staff during the entire saga. As I said originally, if they just explained to us why things were late and admitted their failings (never happened) or taken responsibility for poor planning (we had to seek out info), or even acknowledged and apologised (this never happened) for being so late I probably wouldn't have written this review.

My party had a 6.30 pm reservation. This reservation was made 8 weeks earlier because we knew it would be a busy weekend.

We arrival at at 6.10pm, that the party on our table was finishing up and we headed to get some cocktails. At 6.35, one of our party checked on the timing, and was told ‘'your table' has JUST received its food so it shouldn’t be long.’ Keep in mind this was 5 minutes after our booking time, when we’d been told that the table was finishing up 30 minutes earlier. The wait staff also said ‘there is nothing we can do about how long tables take.’ Now, as someone who was worked in hospitality and events, the entire point of a booking and reservation system is to be able to plan table availability. We were a bit shocked at this response, which also included no apology.

At 6.45, I returned to speak to the waitstaff, and asked how much longer the table would be, to which the response was ’10-15’ minutes, and I said, ‘well we had a 6.30 reservation’ and the response I got was then ‘we can’t control the tables’. At this point, I was really shocked and disappointed, and returned to the bar. At no point was there any apology or communication from any staff, we had to seek out staff to find out what was happening.

The manager then came to speak to us in the bar and said ‘I hear you are anxious about your table’, which was the most rude, insulting and patronising thing to possibly say. I think it also says a lot about how little this business cares about customers. We clearly explained we were not anxious, we were unhappy that we had a 6.30 reservation, and were sitting in the bar at 6.45 with no communication about how long our table would be or what was happening. He was unbelievably rude, and said ‘it’s fine if you want to leave and not wait’ – again, no apology or recognition of poor service or lack of communication, or any responsibility taken.

At 6.55, we were told by a waitress that the table that was ‘ours’ had just been served their desserts, 25 minutes after they should have vacated the table. We then decided to leave, as clearly the Vic Tavern doesn’t care at all about guests and has no interest in running a reservation system, or honouring those reservations, or taking responsibility when things go wrong, or even communicating.

I still fail to understand how a table that is booked for another party at 6.30pm has a previous party on it who is only being served main courses at 6.30pm and desserts at 6.55pm without serious incompetence by the management and staff. This illustrates a management and staff issue, not a 'customers taking too long' issue.

I would warn anyone who is thinking of booking the Vic Tavern to be prepared for poor hospitality, rude staff and a total disregard for any bookings and reservations made. I have never been treated so poorly by an establishment and I suggest others think before they book...

I have mixed feelings about writing this review. I have a lot of respect for people who are in the hospitality industry and put so much time and effort into owning an inn and restaurant. It’s more than a full time job and requires enormous dedication. Having said that, we were disappointed in our experience here. We ate here on a Monday night in September. We were not guests at the inn. We were told at first that they didn’t have room for us but then after several different people got involved we were told they could seat us. We had the front window table. The dining room is lovely. The tables are close together so we struck up a conversation with the guests at the neighboring table. They were guests at the inn. It was the best part of the evening talking to them. Our server Jackson was friendly but apparently he was too busy to keep up with all his tables. The menu was so limited that it was difficult for us to figure out what to order. The South African chicken dish and ramen dish didn’t appeal to us and we didn’t want macaroni and cheese. My husband had the tequila lime pasta. It was served in a bowl and was a fairly small portion with little steak. The flavor was good but it wasn’t served with anything else, not even a little bit of bread. I ordered the seared tuna appetizer. It was also good. I really wanted to add a salad but couldn’t justify the price tag of $14 for a salad with no protein. I wish we had visited on a night where the menu was different as I had seen some very tasty sounding options on previous menus. We shared one glass of wine and didn’t get dessert. We waited at least 15 minutes after finishing our meal to try to get our server’s attention but he was not available. I ended up going to the bar and asking the owner/bartender if I could pay the check. There was another customer asking the same thing so I think they were just too busy that night to provide good service. We were not being impatient, we had been waiting longer than is customary and the people at the table next to us felt the same way. We left feeling like we did not get good value for our money. We eat out on a regular basis at many different restaurants and we understand that sometimes things don’t go perfectly. In hindsight I wish we had previewed the menu before being seated but didn’t get the...

In summary: do not rely on a reservation here because they will give it away, and then require you to just...wait (we waited 45mins then left). There isn't any waiting area either - we relied on seated customers actively offering to shuffle tables mid-drink. Nothing was proactively offered - we had to ask for an apology, ask for complimentary drinks, ask for information, ask to have a seat at the bar. Seems like the same thing happened with other reviews across Yelp etc.

Edit: Owner has produced a somewhat wild accusation "grabbing one of our servers by the arm and not releasing them" so legal representations have been sought. Double Edit: Talking to the staff later, they confirmed the person “felt they couldn’t leave” the discussion, which the owner has seemingly embellished to this...