Harvester

There is only so much you can probably expect from a harvester and you know what you’re getting but we still go there when you fancy it. Unfortunately this time it came up short of standards expected. It says a lot about a meal when the free salad bar is the highlight and my friends agreed. The service was embarrassing from our waiter Jiko. He couldn’t even rustle up a hello or goodbye and taking our food and drinks order was a pretty tiring task for him it seemed. The food was very bland. There are certain standards you expect from a restaurant, even a harvester and it just didn’t match up.

So I rang my boyfriend and said «There’s a Harvester deal for 20% off, let’s go» and he was like «well they also have a £9.99 deal», and either one I’m cool with, so whetever, so I get the bus and he gets the tube and we meet at North Greenwich station.
Firstly it took us forever to find it and we nearly gave up before we got to it, all the way at the end of the o2, which was a surprise as there was no indication anywhere, either on their website or in the o2, that it even existed, but that’s their own poor marketing to blame…
We walked in to the restaurant and the waiter who had been standing by the door and looking at us as we were approaching, promptly walked off and just left us there — that should’ve been my first alarm bell.
It looked pretty busy and we were like «it’s okay though, I’m there’s enough staff to handle it» because there was about two people behind the bar, two waiters, and a manager who was clearly being a full-​on waiter for the night, but let’s make it clear, only about 5 of the tables had people at them.
So eventually another waiter appeared and lazily pointed down the restaurant and said «do you wanna take a seat over there?» in the most blasé way possible, and practically threw the menus on the table when we sat down.
At this point we were starving and had gotten all excited about ribs and couldn’t face finding somewhere else to eat, and remembered how amazing their ribs are, so we stayed.
We then waited a good ¹⁰⁄₁₅ minutes to be acknowledged again before the manager finally came over, while another waiter stood nearby on his phone, casually texting for a good minute or two — later on we saw him at the other end getting his phone out every now and then, and every time we saw the manager catch him, we kept expecting one of them to do something about the situation and neither did — and hurriedly took our order before running off.
We were sat there after we ordered like «…shall we go to the salad bar now then?» and I went and grabbed a bit of everything — which wasn’t actually very much — and it all tasted like water. As I said, we were hungry, and decided to graze on it for a bit while we waited for our food.
Now, as I mentioned, there wasn’t an unusually large number of people in the restaurant, and we were sat directly in front of the hot plate of the kitchen, so we could see when our food was ready. Every order we watched going out looked burnt and just wasn’t ours, time and time again. Then our drinks arrived and the coke was flat and the lemonade tasted like dusty water. This is something, from my extensive hospitality experience, I understand is not necessarily their fault, but when my experience was already so unpleasant, it was a worse situation than usual.
Eventually, over half an hour later, our food arrived, and I ate one rib and immediately said to my boyfriend «this isn’t cooked». He made me feel a bit paranoid, said «are you sure it’s not just the marinade?», but even looking at the texture, it was burnt on the outside but 90% raw on the inside.
At this point I said to my boyfriend, who’d eaten about three of his ribs «stop eating, we’re not paying» and he replied «I’m not going to just walk out», while I, meanwhile, started to feel queasy. The waiters, the bar staff, the chefs (for some reason they weren’t in the kitchen, which might explain the food wait), and the manager, continued to mill around us for another ¹⁵⁄₂₀ minutes while we had stopped eating, actively tried to get their attention, and verbally made our grievances clear enough for them to hear us.
At NO POINT did a waiter come to ask us if things were okay. Quite a few of them walked past and saw us not eating or having an engaged conversation, yet chose to ignore us, and then I was actually a little sick.
My boyfriend is the calmest person ever, hates to create a fuss, but even at this point he was angry. I said to him «let’s just leave» and he insisted on leaving a note to say I’d been sick after we’d waited half an hour for uncooked food, as he had also started to feel sick, and we walked out.
Nobody stopped us, which proves how much attention they pay to their guests, and I would put it down as the worst «dining» experience I ever had, which even caused us to not be able to eat for the rest of the night because we now felt too ill to fulfil our hunger.