Eight of us rolled in for dinner on a last minute, unplanned visit, and it has been a long while…read moresince we've been. The menu choices hadn't changed very much but the prices have sure increased by 20% 30% in most cases and I'm cynical enough to think that it's not wholly justifiable. I do understand some costs have risen but suspect some price gouging too. We had a range of food: beef and chicken burgers, steaks and a vegetarian. Now pasta and vegetables have not risen 30%. Nor have spuds. The food was excellent, with one annoying exception - the baked Alaska. It was far too granular sugar loaded, the ice cream was mean and poor tasting, there was very little raspberry coulis, the sponge wasn't spongy and still worse it had frozen sliced strawberries within. Clearly the dessert was in the freezer to go to the hot oven in its iron skillet and it woulda worked but for the science. Baked Alaska works as the meringue insulates the ice cream to keep it frozen while the outside browns. So the frozen sliced strawberries benefit from the insulation and also stay frozen. Just stop putting strawberries into a dessert to be pre frozen and add to the dessert post cooking. I won't knock a star for this as it's easily remedied. The service was tip top and the servers were real attentive. One of the attractions of places like this was that you got a bargain so you also went more often but those days are gone and now with prices coming much closer to the top notch places like Fitzpatricks while the food offerings aren't commensurately better just more money it's more likely that folks will go there so price gouging can be counter productive.

A group of us came here for a pre-booked meal one Saturday…read more One server came and took our drinks, followed soon after by another to take the food. This seemed efficient and fairly up-to-speed. Everything was going ok until the food started to arrive out. Cutlery was thrown in the middle of our very long table in a pile. They must have been thinking "help yourselves, because you're not worth us giving table service?". I'd trust this wouldn't happen with tables of 4 or 2, so if you're a larger group, forget about expecting the basics of table service. Grab them yourselves. Food arrived out and very few of us were wowed. I had seafood tagliatelle which consisted of tiny chunks of salmon, a few prawns and 2 crab claws - over-drowned in a thick, sickening creamy sauce. That's what ruined it for me. At just shy of £16 I would have been expecting a)everything to be perfectly cooked in the dish and rationed accordingly, and b) to at least have mussels and maybe even a few clams or a substitute seafood. A friend remarked that his salt & chilli squid was like something from Iceland and the accompanying sauce was horrible. Dessert time, and the menu came framed in an oversized box frame?! Don't get it. A lot of ordered desserts and/or drinks. Again, spoons fired in the middle of the table. They were nice. Drinks never arrived for a lot of us, I reordered mine and then a second one was about to come out (I told the waiter that I wasn't ordering a second, I just never got the first.) They tried to charge for both on the bill which says to me the staff aren't communicating effectively and aren't amending the bills correctly. Overall we were unimpressed and have definitely ruled out going back for any other staff night out we might have. Christmas isn't too far away!

I rarely go into banks and I've never knowingly met a bank manager either socially or…read moreprofessionally. And I see no reason to break the habit of a lifetime. In fact as I think about it I've never withdrawn money from a hole in the wall using a credit card either. I'd heard that this town centre place has a coin counting machine so if you've accumulated a lot of coins you push a few buttons chuck in all your coins and it counts impressively quickly and gives you a print out credit note. Then you need to have an account or a relative with same. For me it's the latter as they must lodge the money on the credit note and withdraw it to avoid money laundering legislation. Well that's the theory. It didn't quite work out that way as the machine was already full of coins so it only counted a small part of what I'd accumulated at home and on screen it froze and said go get an assistant. The assistant didn't keep me waiting any time at all but it became tedious with her repeatedly pushing on screen buttons, opening and closing the machine and restarting the machine only for it to count very few coins and stop again. So after 10 minutes of this unsatisfactory process we each became fed up. When told the machine was full and they had to wait for Securicor to arrive to empty and re set which mightn't be today I said I'd try again next week. That'll have me in a bank twice in a week or about the number of times I've been in a bank in the last 10 or more years. I'd say the machine counted the coins that it did count in well under a minute but had I to sort and count it would have taken me many hours. The staff are all mega helpful and a cheery bunch. Oh and a word about our stupid politicians who devise stupid legislation that even if you only get five pounds via coin lodgement it still must be lodged into an account to be paid out meanwhile real criminals can money launder tens of millions of pounds undetected. I mean about two years ago here one of the biggest money laundering scams - a dodgy exchange bureau- that had gone on for years was right next door to a police station. Ya couldn't make it up.