"Awful experience and would not recommend to anyone this used to be a nice pub but after the treatment we experienced the other night, we will not return. My partner and I (local to Elham) came for a meal on Saturday night and the restaurant was fairly busy, but there was only one person serving, as well as occassionally working on the bar. We were very understanding of this when it took a long time to get our food, even though there was no real acknowledgement of how understaffed they clearly were. After finishing our main we waited patiently to have our empty plates removed and order our desserts in this time another table received their food, had it taken away and had their bill brought over and settled. After our patience wore out, we were trying to catch the employee’s attention and it felt like we were being deliberately ignored we ended up being the last table left in the restaurant and were still waiting to get our dessert menus! I had to go over to the bar to find help and to place our dessert orders, at which point I was bluntly told that the kitchen had closed. This seemed like a sudden change when all night we had been very polite and friendly to eachother, and we were simply trying to be understanding that the staff were busy and would get to us. When I questioned why we were not informed of this, as we were ready to order long ago and she could see we were waiting, there was no real response. We were forced to come up to the bar and pay, where again there was no communication or actual apology. Not only is it poor service and tainted a rare night out for us, it makes no business sense either why we were essentially refused business with no warning. We will not be coming back and would like to warn anyone else who may be treated in the same way. Additional negatives we found were the rowdy bar which not only affected the atmosphere of the dining experience, but also felt intimidating and meant we didn’t complain to the extent we wanted to at the time and the fact that later adding up the bill we realised that we were overcharged. If this was a service charge added without even showing us a receipt, when the whole issue was that we had no service, it would really round off this ridiculous experience!!!"
