"Chelsea Flower Show week and we are staying just around the corner and amongst us are serious meat eaters and a gluten avoider, so Cast Iron was a selected favourite. Two of us arrive to do a recce and arrive at 8:55pm to a lovely ambiance with a relaxed atmosphere and casual dining feel, staff were friendly faced and smiley giving us a very warm welcome. We were presented with a beautiful and thoughtful menu, appealing to a variety of dietary requirements and a wide range to please everyone within an affordable price range. The wine list was varied with excellence and clearly a lot of thought had gone into selecting wines to accompany the variety of dishes available on the menu with recommendations which were a delightful extra touch. Sadly, it kind of stopped there with an abrupt halt! It took us over 10 minutes to be offered drinks, so much so we had to ask twice! We eventually ordered and to start we had Brisket in a Yorkshire and a small Caesar Salad, followed by 2 Rumps, our drinks eventually arrived and we awaited our scrummy starters… 15 minutes pass and then another 15 minutes encouraging us to enquire about the delay, and we are assured they are on the way! We wait another long 15 minutes and again query to the whereabouts of our simple starters, by this point it’s obviously the staff are feeling awkward about the slow service and seemingly ‘refuse’ to return to our table, resulting in us being seen to by a selection of staff members. We are eventually presented with an excuse that there was some confusion with our order and instead of starters followed by mains, the order has gone through as ‘everything to be sent out together’ arrangement, however, to be quite frank I wouldn’t expect to wait that long for the entire order either!! After an hour our starters have finally arrived, the brisket Yorkshire full of scrumptious slow cooked beef with the Caesar, whilst being tasty, consisting almost entirely of iceberg stalk disappointingly. Within moments of ‘finishing’ our plates are cleared and almost immediately our steaks arrive surprisingly, beautifully cooked and presented. We had 20% taken off our bill which we were grateful for but overall a very slow service for a very quiet restaurant, the staff, whilst initially being very delightful, avoided us thereafter and one starter was below average. We would have visited 2, 3 maybe 4 times during the week but obviously didn’t return."
