Author: Kat32

I very rarely write bad reviews of places, however this evening I left Toby's feeling disappointed and embarrassed. I've been to this pub before and usually have a great time and have previously overlooked terrible service, such as having no table service so walking up...to the bar myself (being English I don't mind this) but what I do mind, is when I get to the bar, the bartender is texting away on his phone and doesn't even acknowledge me, but I let that slide as I had so much fun on that particular evening....fast forward to this evening, two weeks later. It's Saturday night and I head straight from work to meet my friends for my birthday drinks, one friend is already sat down with a couple sharing their table, she has a drink in front of her, we realise that we can't all sit in the same booth so we head upstairs, the waitress yells to my friend across a pub full of people "where are you going? You haven't paid" to which my friend explains that she's heading upstairs to find a table that we can all sit at, I wasn't there for the rest of the conversation but from what I've been told it was basically a telling off about how she can't go upstairs in the same pub without paying for her drink and how she should "already know that". After walking around upstairs we come back to my friend who still hasn't managed to get away from the waitress to tell her that there aren't any tables, the couple at this booth mention that they are just doing a shot, using the washroom and then leaving so we could sit down, whilst this conversation is happening the waitress tells us that we can't stand where we are as we are "in her way", so as advised by the couple at the booth, we sit down, the waitress sees this, comes over to us and tells us that we can't sit there (so now we can't stand or sit?), I explain to her that the couple have said we can have this table and she said "there's a lot of you (there's 4 of us), you can't just sit with these people", again I say that the people at the booth said we could sit down. The couple leave and the waitress sends over her Manager to ask us to leave, he said we have been rude to the waitress, again I go through the motions of explaining everything that was said and he says "that's not the version I heard" so I ask who's version he heard, did he ask the couple if they minded? No he did not, he tells me the version he heard was of his waitress and he's going to take her word over ours. My friend still has her soda to drink so we are waiting for her to finish up and the waitress storms back over to tell us that if we want to stay then we will have to go to the bar ourselves, I tell her that we don't want to stay and she says "well I don't know what you're doing" so I pointed out that my friend had paid for her drink so she was drinking it. Honestly the whole situation was embarrassing and could have so easily been avoided, it felt like the waitress clearly didn't want us there from the start, didn't even ask the couple in the booth if they were ok with us taking their table when they left, if she had then she would have realised that she was being completely out of order, if this was a place where you had to wait to be seated then fine, but it's not and when it's busy and there's nowhere to sit then it's ok to share a table with people if you ask and they are happy for you to, we did absolutely nothing wrong, we were certainly not rude, because if this I will never return, they lost a lot of business form us this evening which we took to a bar that was much more welcoming with fantastic customer service.