The Inn on the Quay, Goodrington Sands

This is part of the Brewers Fayre chain, and it's a nice quiet pub. They have a reasonable dress code (basically "you need to be wearing clothes rather than a swimsuit"), and a non-smoking section, so it was generally quite civilised there, and most of the clientele were elderly couples rather than groups of teenagers. However, when I went they were very slow and they messed up the food order so that my "vegetarian" meal contained meat.

Going into a bit more detail, they have a meal deal, where you can choose N courses (where N=1/2/3) for a discount, as long as you pick items from a slightly restricted menu.

I went there with a friend, and we chose what we wanted. I made a note of our table number and went off to order the food, at which point I hit the first big delay, since they had quite a slow queue. Anyway, I got that sorted out in the end, and came back to the table. After another long wait, the food arrived. (This was at about 3pm, and most of the tables were empty, so I don't know how they handle peak times.)

I'd ordered tomato/mushroom linguine, and I wasn't quite sure about some of the bits I could see, since they looked a bit meat-ish. However, this is something I tend to be a bit paranoid about, and normally I'm worried about nothing, so in this case I figured that it was just a different type of mushroom. I took a bite, and I was still a bit dubious, so I asked my friend for a second opinion - it turned out to be chicken. In retrospect, I should have also been wondering why I couldn't see any tomatoes, rather than just trying to identify what I could see.

This wasn't an ideal situation, so we got a waiter to come over - he apologised, removed the food, and said that he'd get the correct meal brought out. Considering that this is the first time I've eaten meat in 13 years, I think I was quite relaxed and accommodating about it; it wasn't the waiter's fault, I was feeling in a good mood, and I realise that people do make mistakes, so I was happy to let him fix the problem. So I waited. By the time my friend had finished her main course, there was still no sign of my replacement food turning up, and we were running out of time on our "pay and display" ticket in the car park, so I figured that it would probably be best to just tell the waiter to forget about my main course, bring out dessert for both of us, and try to get a partial refund for my meal (for the uneaten food).

To clarify the situation at this point, there were three reasons why they shouldn't have got the order wrong:
a) I'd asked for the veggie option.
b) My receipt had that printed on it, so they could/should have been able to retain a copy of this for their own records.
c) The meat option isn't included in their meal deal.

At this point, I have to defer to my friend for being far better than me at dealing with these situations - the meal deals were £6.50 each, and she got a £10 refund out of them, as well as getting my main course delivered soon afterwards. When it turned up, it was cherries and peas rather than cherries and mushrooms, but I figured that since they'd at least got two vegetables I wasn't going to be too picky. Once I'd finished that, we skipped dessert, and resumed our journey.

I'm not sure whether it's just because we were in Torbay (which is near Torquay), but this did all remind me of the "Waldorf Salad" episode of Fawlty Towers... Having said that, I do think that the pub has potential, if they can get these issues sorted out - I'd say that they are down to the staff rather than the pub itself, so extra training should be able to resolve them.

23 Jul 2006 12:33