TL;DR - Reasonable food, so-so service.
I was staying here with colleagues from work and there are two restaurants in the hotel - this one, and a steak house. The menu is Italian cuisine and has a reasonable set menu (£25 for a starter, main, dessert and a drink). Weirdly, we were asked to choose desserts before we'd started our meal.
Starters came and were nice, but the water we requested didn't. We chased it up and they brought us bottled for free because they didn't have any tap water? Very odd! The mains were nice - two of us had cannelloni, one had pizza and two had calzones. It was all very nice, but the calzones were about 90% filled with cheese and left people feeling very bloated.
And then began the wait. It was probably an hour until we managed to get our desserts. We spent ages trying to get someone's attention but they just seemed oblivious to us. Finally someone came, we told him we were waiting for desserts and he vanished, only to reappear some time later with our bill. We pointed out we'd not had our desserts and he vanished again. Another very long wait and finally dessert came. We were a bit shocked when they added 10% service charge to our bill!
If you're stuck at Stansted this is probably some of the best food going. But the service is slow and the price is high for what you get - but I guess with a lack of competition there isn't any real incentive for the place to improve things. read more