The Thai House

I came with my family for my Dad's birthday. We have been to the Thai House many times over the years and always loved it. But this was honestly the worst service I have ever experienced, and the food quality has gone down significantly since my last visit. We arrived at 8pm, the time we had booked the table. No one took our order until 8:30pm, after I had to raise my voice to even get a member of staff to notice us, and even then, they decided to take the order from a table opposite us first, who had arrived after us. The appetisers did not arrive until 9:30pm - 90 minutes after our arrival! To be fair, when they arrived, it was very tasty, but we were so hungry by this point we would have eaten anything. The soups arrived shortly after, but then after asking for a 5 minute wait in between the soup and the main course, we did not receive the main courses for another 40 minutes, at 10:30! We arrived at 8pm, and did not get a main course, for two and a half hours. By this point, my dad and brother were so tired that their hunger had disappeared, and they were unable to eat any of the food that was brought at this time. I too was able to eat very little. The others members of my family who ate some of the food said it was bland, the meat was incredibly dry, and was generally very disappointing. At the same time, we could see tables next to us receiving food that they hadn't ordered, and being dismissed by the waitresses. Eventually someone came and asked us if everything was ok, at which point my Dad explained that the entire experience had been dreadful, because it felt like we had spent the whole evening waiting. Unbelievably, the waitress then said 'well you asked for a five minute break for your main course…' - well how does she explain the 30 minute wait to order, the hour wait for appetisers, and the 40 minute break before the main? She said she would bring the assistant manager, who ironically took her sweet time to come and see if we were ok. When she came, we explained the problem, said that we no longer wanted any of the food, nor the desert that was included in the set menu we had ordered, and we just wanted to go home. She was very apologetic, but not very helpful. She spoke to managers, who were not present on site, and was only able to offer us a 20% discount. Given that we ate less than 50% of the food ordered, this really took the biscuit. We argued over this for a while. We explained that we had been coming for years, that we generally really loved the restaurant, and that the whole experience had ruined my Dad's birthday meal, but she didn't seem to care, and was very dismissive of us. I told her that it was very simple, that after years of coming to this restaurant, we just wouldn't come again, we would leave terrible reviews, and let other people know how terrible the service had been. Again, she didn't seem to care. We have taken the details of the management and will be in touch to take this complaint further. Apparently the restaurant hasn't changed hands in 30 years (our experience was so bad that we did question the manager on this) - but it is nowhere near as good as it once was. My advice - find another one of the millions of thai restaurants to go to. This one will ruin your appetite.

We booked a table for 6 for an early evening dinner – unsurprisingly the restaurant was very quiet and so had very little atmosphere. My biggest gripe is when it came to selecting from the wine list. We wanted a dry white and a bottle of rose. From the list there was no rose available at all and only a £29.50 bottle of Sancerre or the house house from the white selection. The excuse given was that they were changing suppliers! I asked the manager if, due to the very limited choice available he would be willing to discount the Sancerre slightly? Absolutely not was the response. Could we try the house white before deciding? This proved very difficult, like pulling hens' teeth, and it was clear that he expected us to buy a glass to try! Eventually he relented and brought a thimble sized glass of the house white for us to try. It was mediocre to say the least, but by this stage we were all very unhappy with the attitude of the manager and the staff that we didn't want to give them the satisfaction of having sold several bottles of Sancerre, so we opted for the house white. Not a great start to our evening, which was made even worse by the total lack of interest of the waitress when she was asked questions about the food menu (looking around elsewhere and not paying any attention to us). The quality of the food when it arrived was nothing to write home about and several dishes were only luke-warm. All in all it was a very disappointing experience and one which we won't be repeating.