"We arrived at the restaurant eager to try the Chips we had seen on a previous visit where we were seated about 2 minutes too late and could only order cakes and cold snacks. This time we arrived with plenty of time and the restaurant...was busy. It took about 5 minutes to get seated and there was no queue to enter. We were seated next to a small hedge on a table for two, near the Tills and route to the exit. We were given menus, then within about 2 minutes we were asked what we wanted to order, which seemed a little rushed. As we already knew roughly what we wanted we ordered drinks and Some of the rustic chips we had gone there for, and I had a Spinach, cheese and Pesto toastie. We chatted for a bit, watching others come and go, and noticed other people were arriving, and getting served their drinks and their food before us. We had been seated for about 20 minutes before our drinks came, with no apology for the wait, about 10 minutes later the food arrived. The chips were excellent but my Toastie was extremely thin. The staff member asked us if we needed condiments about a minute later. We noticed other people who had arrived after us had eaten their meals and began to queue up as we were starting ours. The queue was located immediately next to our table on the other side of a small artificial hedge. I could see the lady at the tills was busy, there were two tills but only one in use. The queue got quite large and it took about 30-40 minutes for it to fully die down. During which period we had people less than 2 feet from our table, standing, coughing, sneezing, on us and making eye contact with my friend who was facing the queue. Had we known this prior to being seated we would have asked for another table. At one point we even had a person sitting on the hedge with his backside practically on our table. We couldn't talk because it felt like people were listening. We also had dogs watching us eat as their owner queued. When the queue had dissipated somewhat we tried to attract the attention of a staff member to make a complaint. It took ages, eventually I had to stand and shout over to a person called Nick, we identified him as the only person who had been friendly or upbeat during the whole of the service. We told him that we weren't happy that no one had been attentive, once we were seated, being left for 20-30 minutes without a drink is not acceptable, at this point we could have walked out, and we have seen people do it before, at the very least a drink means we have to wait for our food. We told him we had witnessed a lady served fish and chips and then not given a fork, and when she tried to attract attention she was ignored, even when making eye contact with the lady at the till, she ended up having to queue to get cutlery whilst her food got cold. We also told him about the queueing situation. He basically advised us that there was no process to deal with the complaint that day, and we would have to submit feedback via their website. We told him we were not trying to get a refund, discount or a voucher just for someone to acknowledge that our visit had not been satisfactory, so that our feedback could be used constructively. In the end we could see we were not going to achieve anything. What rounded our visit off was the completely neutral handling of our payment, no pleasantries, just an instruction to check and insert my card. On this basis I would not recommend the restaurant. I appreciate we probably sound stuck up, but we are quite young and after so long not being able to go out, this experience was not what we were looking forward to."
