Beautiful Pub - Expensive - Horrible Restaurant Service
On Monday 1 November 2010 I went with a group of friends to St John's Tavern for a birthday dinner. This is an excellently decorated pub with a big dining room, high ceilings and gorgeous fresh flowers. The menu is varied, although the range of vegetarian meals could be easily widened there was just one vegetarian main course in the menu.
The food they served was well prepared but our evening was darkened by the service we received from the management personnel. Forget about politeness, kindness or any smile. They are very slow at cooking and serving you, not letting you know in advance how long it takes for certain things, such as desserts, to be prepared.
They brought our coffee orders before pudding was ready and when some friends asked if they could have some cocoa powder on their cappuccinos they rudely and arrogantly replied that they did not serve them that way, not offering any other option and not even apologising for not doing so. Some people had already finished their coffees and our desserts hadn't still arrived so we approached the manager and asked her if she knew how long would it take for our orders to be ready and explained that our coffee had already been served. She bluntly replied that sometimes it took up to 20 minutes to prepare some puddings and gave no further explanation. A little bit later she came back to our table with our desserts and she told us that she had already reprehended the waitress that took our orders for the coffee incident and that we didn't have to pay the service charge if we weren't satisfied with the service. All this happened without any kind of cordiality, kindness, apology or even a smile.
We did pay our service charge, since this was for our waitress, who didn't have anything to do with these incidents, and all understood that the problem this place has is its horrible management, who don't have any clue of how to deal with customer service. read more