"I would love for this review to be a 5 but unfortunately, I am unable to do that. Upon booking the table over a week before our visit I was told that the table would be ours for the evening because we were a large group. We were asked to pay a £10 deposit per person this was absolutely fine and we all paid well in advance. The table was booked for a hen/birthday party so we were all looking forward to a nice meal before heading out for the rest of the night. Unfortunately though, this didn’t happen. I had originally booked the table for 7:30pm, however on the day of the booking it was obvious to us that getting there for that time was going to be a struggle so I rang the restaurant and ask if it was okay for us to arrive for 8pm instead. The woman on the phone said this was absolutely fine and actually thanked me for letting them know well in advance. We all arrived just after 8pm (11 of us in total and were seated quickly. This is where everything began to go downhill… it was at least 10 20 minutes before our drinks order was taken and then a further 20 minutes before the waitress took our food order. A couple of people in our party ordered 2 4 1 cocktails and after waiting a further 20 minutes after everyone else’s drinks arrived the waitress came to tell us that they were waiting for the ingredients as the cocktails were coming from the bar next door. So by this time it’s about 9pm and the cocktails still haven’t arrived. So we asked the waitress where the drinks were and shortly after the cocktails arrived We did complain about this and was told that because of the long wait, the price of the cocktails would be taken off of the bill. I don’t think this would’ve happened though if we hadn’t made a fuss about how long it took. That was just the start… Finally after around 75 minutes of waiting, our starters finally arrive which tasted lovely. We then waited a further 30 minutes before we had to ask where our mains were and the waitress went to check. It’s now 10pm and we’ve been in the restaurant 2 hours! The waitress comes back and says it’ll be another 10 minutes. We all then collectively decided that we were going to leave it as we’d already missed another reservation we had and we were on a Hen Do! We were meant to be having dinner and going on a night out we’d had enough! A few minutes later, the waitress comes out and tells us (conveniently our food was ready; But by this time we were fed up and had decided to leave. Shortly after we told the waitress, “sorry, no thank you, we’re fed up” the owner(? comes out from the kitchen and demands we stay to eat the food. We apologise and explain that we’ve been waiting over two hours and we have decided we want to leave and as we had previously explained to the waitress that we had other plans for the evening. The woman then starts shouting at us and accusing us of being over an hour late to our reservation and demands the waitress gets the order receipt to prove herself right! When we said that this doesn’t prove anything because the waitress took ages to even take our order and that I had called to tell them we wanted to move our reservation to 8pm, she then says that we hadn’t paid our deposit and we couldn’t leave! She then was just arguing with different members of our party until we all just got up and left. We wasn’t rude to anyone and we just wanted a nice meal that wasn’t going to take an entire evening to arrive. They knew it was a hen party and that we were planning to be out afterwards and they just took the mick. Throughout the two hours there, we were polite and respectful the restaurant was so deadly quiet I don’t think anyone wanted to disturb anyone. The atmosphere was completely dead and felt awkward. So we all left the restaurant, hungry, disappointed and annoyed at the treatment we had received. It ruined the beginning of a night we had planned for 9 months and it’s just not okay. To be honest, if they had apologised and treated us differently, we probably would’ve stayed and enjoyed the food. If the restaurant cannot handle large bookings, they shouldn’t accept them. The Lek Thai lost a lot of money that night."
Mussaman Curry
