Where to start. I called The Hayloft 3 times on different days to book a table for Easter Sunday lunch, but no one picked up. I resorted to using the online booking system, but that limited the table size to 6 people (I needed 8),...so I booked a table for 6 and then left a message on their answering machine telling them I needed a table for 8. I never received any kind of confirmation, and so had to call again to confirm that they had received my message. I finally got through to someone who confirmed my booking after calling a total of 8 times.
When we got there everything seemed nice. Some of us arrived a little early and so waited with a drink in the bar area. Their selection was very limited, but the lady at the front desk attributed this to a missed delivery. Then we went through to our table upstairs with the rest of our party. The first guy who took our drinks didn't know what was available, and said it was because he wasn't actually a waiter, he was a member of the kitchen staff. I think over the course of about 2 hours we had 3 completely different people serve us. We ordered our drinks, and then started to flick through the menu...
The first thing we noticed was the price hike. Online, their Sunday Lunch menu listed a "sharing roast" at £13, but the new price was £17.50. Starters had gone up from £7 to £10, and even the children’s menu had gone up from £6/£3 for main/dessert to £10/£6. Everything seemed to have had a 30-40% price increase, with no indication of why. This would have been fine if the food had been amazing...
But it was truly awful. Four of us ordered the pate and toast. What arrived was a pile of grey, wet, grainy, tasteless, sludge that looked like cat food, with one tiny slice of baguette and a sad little pile of spinach leaves. My guess is that it was spooned out from a tray that had been frozen and then thawed; it certainly didn't look fresh. The battered prawns and squid were pale, undercooked and not at all crispy, and came with a mixture of chimichurri (Argentinian), aioli (Spanish) and Nam Pla (Thai) sauces. I'm all for fusion food, but this was like the chef threw 3 darts at a map of the world and just mixed the most popular sauces from each country. The artichoke salad was average at best. We complained about the pate and they removed it from the order entirely, so we held out hope for the roast dinner at least...
But alas, there was nothing to redeem themselves. The lamb was dry, the beef was very fatty and the Yorkshire pudding was overcooked. The vegetables on the plate were average, but then came the "sharing" aspect of the roast dinner. We received one small tray of cauliflower cheese and "roast" potatoes to share between 8 of us. This consisted of a cauliflower cheese that was somehow both burnt and total mush. You could barely tell there was any cauliflower in it. The "roast" potatoes looked more like giant wedges/chips that had been done in the deep fat fryer. Even then they were still pale and undercooked. They certainly weren't roasted at any point in their life. We also ordered another round of drinks just as the roast arrived, which didn’t show up for 30 minutes, at which point we had all finished and so cancelled the order.
Obviously, we didn’t stay for dessert. We paid for the roast dinners and the drinks we actually received and left. The lady at reception was nice, but took about 15 minutes to sort out the bill. I don’t know what’s happening at The Hayloft, but management needs to sort it out as soon as possible.More
