Absolutely dreadful experience here. The purchased food from the shop was absolutely fine but the service and attitude was terrible. They offer a service where you buy the food in the shop and they then serve it on platters with bread and pickles at table for an extra charge. We did this buying a range of cheese, cold meats, 2 sandwiches and some drinks to be served picnic style outside. As we were a party of 8 adults we paid in couples. This was chaos. The young girls did not know how to work a debit card machine and could not receipt us although the transactions went through. Service was incredibly slow, food came out with great pauses between items and one hot sandwich never came at all. We were there for ages. The waitress had only started that day and we put it down to that. Finally we gave up on the hot sandwich when the older woman who worked in the kitchen revealed she'd never received the order. We asked for a refund and this was given although not in good spirit. She wanted us to wait while she made us the sandwich but frankly we'd already been there ages and we wanted to get on with our day. We could hear her shouting at the staff. We paid up for everything and walked to the cars. My daughter took a piece of uneaten cheese and the jar of pate she'd bought in the shop. It wasn't pate that was being served café style, it was a jar of pate she'd bought in the shop just like if she'd bought it in tescos. The young waitress then appeared with our sandwich which she said was FOC to make up for the trouble. We got into the car. The older lady then appeared at the car and said we had missed paying for a piece of cheese. We pointed out that we had paid everything on the bill and she shrugged, still moody. We paid her the £3.50 without quibble and drove off. As far as we were concerned we had not enjoyed the experience but put it down to the inexperienced and untrained staff.
Imagine our surprise a month later when both car drivers received a letter from the Sussex police saying that the Smokery had alleged that we had left without paying for food and that our daughter had stolen a kilner jar from the table.They had supplied the police with cctv showing my daughter entering the car with her jar of shop bought, half eaten pate!!!! What food we had "stolen" was unspecified. Luckily we could provide bank account prints showing money going to the Smokery and the police accepted our explanations and declined to pursue the matter. It was a totally awful experience based on groundless and baseless charges with no evidence other than we happened to be there. We are furious that having - we presume - found some sort of till discrepancy they involved the police and made baseless allegations rather than conduct a thorough review of their own systems and staff practices. And why us or did they report everyone who'd been in the car park that day??? We have never received an apology or an explanation. If you are going to go here or do business with the Weald Smokery make absolutely certain that you have rocksolid paperwork and receipts or you could be in for a nasty shock. Not nice people. Not any sort of customer service ethic that I recognise. Avoid. read more
