Loch Fyne Restaurants Ltd
12 Walmgate
York
North Yorkshire
YO1 9TJ
Contact Numbers
Reviews
Avoid
It always amazes me that this place is fairly busy.It does make for a good atmosphere.I only wonder if they actually rent their customers.There is a difference between a Loch Fyne restaurant and Mcdonalds-The latter serves relatively good value meals that are actually enjoyable to a degree.Loch Fyne charges too much for poorly cooked food.
A User - 04/06/2009 | report this review
Disappointing
Called in one sunday for a late lunch. It took several minutes for the staff to acknowledge our presence in to building and ask if they could help then did that really irritating thing of looking round a 2/3 empty restaurant and saying that they would just check to see if a table for 2 was available. We ordered wine and had to ask for it twice, some of the items on the menu were not available and this was not indicated until you tried to order. The food was bland, a smoked haddock chowder that looked like it was made out of leftover vegetables, a reasonable fish pate, a green salad that was hugely overpriced at over £3, disappointing piece of fish. A la Carte was very expensive. Set lunch at £11 (which they added on to the bill twice)was limited in choice and unmemorable in delivery. Almost impossible to catch the eye of any of the staff when we wanted the bill. Service was unfocussed and whilst the staff were perfectly pleasant they were not efficient.Shame that such a lovely historic building has such a slipshod business in it.
A User - 05/09/2008 | report this review
What a "Fyne" time
I've eaten at Loch Fyne restaurants up and down the country; Cambridge, Woburn, Elton, York, Milton Keynes and Nottingham. All of which proved to me that there is still a company capable of giving great customer service. In a time of automated phone messages and script written responses that call centre employees will not deviate from, Loch Fyne was a breath of fresh air. The food was full of flavour and well presented, with a menu suited to all tastes, including non fish eaters and children. When it came to the service, nothing was too much trouble, including changing the way the dish was presented - sauce in a separate ramekin if you were not sure of your own tastes! Children were made welcome and in all restaurants the manager was clearly visible and made a point of coming to the table to check that all was well, again a rarity in this day and age. I've since learned that there are 40 restaurants around the country and I only hope that the standard will be uniform. For a good value lunch of two courses for £11 or a romantic dinner for two in the evening, you'll go a long way to beat the standard that Loch Fyne has set. It's highly recommended.
A User - 12/08/2008 | report this review
DISSAPOINTING
Mediocre overpriced meal. The non-disabled Barman spent 10 minutes in the disability toilet while we waited in the wet corridor to it with the overfilled slop bucket! Cancelled our works dinner there immediately which lost them 20 customers. Received a pathetic response from the Management(local and Regional).
A User - 03/07/2008 | report this review
Most certainly not fine..!!
To call the Loch Fyne chain the McDonalds of fish restaurants is actually to insult the aforesaid American purveyor of gastronomic sewage. Hard to fathom I know, but the point I'm making is that at least you know what you're getting at McD's and make allowances for the contents of a nappy in a bap, served with assorted undergrowth to mask the taste. Loch Fyne are guilty of that most heinous of crimes - raising your expectations with the promise of "fabulous food" (so says their website) and delivering so little that you wouldn't be as upset if you had found out that David Attenborough ran a business selling kids pets to Chinese takeaways. The surroundings even manage play their part in the disingenuity: a lovely converted victorian hardware store where up until only a few years ago men in brown overalls would search small boxes labelled in handwritten copperplate for that particular screw (singular) that you needed to complete your latest DIY apocolypse. Loch Fyne must have been doing inappropriate things to themselves when this building came up for sale (due to the proliferation of the B&Q über warehouses) such is the scale of the building. I once went in there and after a couple of hours was convinced I was in Narnia, such was the vastness of the place with farflung lofts and basements, I bumped into a Dodo on the way out 4 years later. The space is so fine and handsome that foolishly you expect the food to follow suit and that brings me back to the McD's analogy I started with - you just don't expect the all-prevailing mediocrity that grinds you down to a weeping, gently rocking mess. There wasn't a single dish that you couldn't have bought from M&S and got a better gustatory experience. The verbosity of the menu should have forewarned me, I almost wish that the author of that had cooked my food - he had more imagination. The Salmon starter was apparently "smoked over wood chips from old whisky casks", I wouldn't have minded if it had been smoked on the arse of a whisky sodden tramp if it had possessed any taste. The fish pie had the consistency of snot in a bowl with a topping of cheddar flavour verruca-clippings. Of the other dishes served to our party the lemon sole should have had "ar" as a prefix and may well have been better utilised by a cobbler so underdone it was, and the Salmon fishcakes had the texture of chipboard, but not all the flavour. The poor guy on an adjacent table was attempting to digest a steak but looked as though he needed Olympic teeth to complete the job successfully!!All this was presided over by a waitress that had a mouth that resembled a cats backside and possessed all the charm of a fart in a crowded lift. We questioned whether the cheese selection had been lifted half eaten from another table so parsimonious was the serving. This was met with disdain and we also duly charged for extra bread as there were less rolls than people !!A salutory example of style over content in an age where people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. There's something immoral about calculating mediocrity - and that's Loch Fyne's watchword. Expensive refurbishments, cooking by numbers, mean portions may ensure that profits are good but what about the raison d'etre - FOOD.If I had the power I would put a compulsory purchase order on the building and give it as a gift to J Bakers across the road. Now there's an establishment the owners of Loch Fyne should visit several times to learn how to deliver flavours that they could only dream of and probably never knew existed.
A User - 11/06/2008 | report this review
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