The Oak Inn, Lyndhurst

I visited The Oak Inn at Bank a couple of weeks ago with three friends and my two year old god-daughter - but what I had hoped to be a relaxing, post-walk meal, turned out to be the worst and rudest service I have ever encountered in a pub or restaurant! When we arrived I have to say we were greeted warmly by the bar staff who were very friendly and helpful, we ordered our starters and mains and settled down to soak up the cosy atmosphere. Within a staggering five minutes of being seated two of our main courses arrived. I politely explained that we had ordered starters and could we please have these first. The waitress apologised and returned to the kitchen. To my bewilderment, moments later however, our main courses were returned along with our starters by a scond lady who I later discovered to be the landlady. She started putting the starter and mains on the table and I again politely explained that there had been a mistake and that we had expected our starters and mains seperately. She replied in the most surly of manners, that as we hadn't specifed that we wanted our starters and mains seperately, we had to have them at the same time. Here I have to ask - isn't it obvious that when you order an item from the starter menu and an item from the main courses, that unless SPECIFIED you would like them to arrive SEPERATELY, and preferably in the correct order!? Apparently not. When asked if she could please take our mains back to the kitchen to keep warm while we ate our also warm starters- she became extremely agitated and shouted 'NO YOU CAN'T' at the same time as quite literally shoving our food before us. I cannot tell you how shocked I was! And partly due to this shock and partly because I didn't wish to cause a scene in front of my god-daughter, my friend and I started to eat our meals. Meanwhile, my other two equally flabberghasted friends along with the extremelly patient two year old, waited for their own starters to arrive for a further 20 minutes (we had already finished our food)and no apology or explanation provided. Somewhat ironically, these were then followed SEPERATELY by their main courses. We ate our meals in virtual silence, seething and yet not wishing to cause a scene - in hindsight I wish I had. I couldn't even tell you if the food was any good as I had quite lost my apetite following the way we had been treated. I have been a resident of the forest (Brockenhurst) my whole life and had wanted to take my non-resident friends for a nice meal to show off how lovely the area is. Instead we were met with the most horrendously discourteous service, which was humiliating, wholly unprovoked and unwarranted. As a reasonable person I can quite accept a confusion over an order - an apology and the reheating of my main course would have sufficed. But being spoken to with such contempt for expecting the absolute basics of customer service is beyond belief! The Oak Inn at Bank is a lovely pub - the kind of place that is perfect for encouraging the much needed tourists and other visitors to the forest, whose custom is needed to keep these areas thriving. Unfortunately however, it is one establishment I would never recommend anyone to visit - quite simply on the grounds that I wouldn't wish anyone to think that this kind of behaviour was par for the course in The New Forest.

29 Mar 2006 17:53