"Where do I start! My husband and I were looking forward to afternoon tea at the Orangery restaurant, after perusing the menu online beforehand it sounded quite nice. When we arrived we were greeted and shown to our table, the place was almost empty, with only one more couple there. We were asked if we’d like tea or coffee, this came out after 5 minutes. The wobbly cake stand with the very sparse amount of sandwiches and selection of cakes came out much later and our teapot was nice and empty by this time! We weren’t offered a refill and tried in vain to get the attention of the waitress who was extremely busy chatting to the other couple about house prices for about 10 minutes. She noticed my husband waving his arms in desperation to get her attention and completely ignored him 4 times! Eventually she managed to fetch us another pot then took the rest of our milk away whilst she refilled it in the kitchen. I thought we were going to die of thirst! The sandwiches we received were not the ones advertised online. We were given plain ham, cheese and pickle, egg mayonnaise and salmon. Where were the watercress, horseradish, cress etc and the coronation chicken? 4 small fingers of basic sandwiches each…. Not enough and I could have made these at home! The scones weren’t warmed and the cakes bore no resemblance to the menu whatsoever! Where were the mango tarts, Victoria sandwiches, pistachio macarons? We received, very dry coffee and lemon cake, chocolate cake and chocolate macaron. Not very inspiring at all for the hefty £21.95 per head price tag! We couldn’t eat a lot of it as it was that rubbish! We did think we might get chance to take the rest home for the kids, but after waiting another 15 minutes to get any attention we gave up and left. As we stepped out of the door the waitress shouted across the room to us to see if we wanted to take the rest home. We said we would have if she had bothered to ask us 15 minutes earlier. Overall a dreadful experience, zero customer service, very inattentive staff, please don’t waste your hard earned cash on this place. Whilst we were there we looked at reviews on trip advisor and see that many people have complained. Short replies have been added by the Orangery saying that they have taken note of the comments, yet absolutely nothing has been done about any of it! We won’t be returning!"
