The Longhorn, Walsall

My boyfriend and I visited The Longhorn on a Sunday afternoon and the best word to describe our experience is disappointing

We ordered a roast chicken and a roast beef dinner along with two puddings at 3.10pm and by 4.40pm we had left as unsatisfied customers.

The dinners were served by a waitress who casually announced that we did not have Yorkshire puddings with our meals as the pub had "run out". Run out - on a Sunday lunchtime?

If a pub is going to allow itself to run out of key ingredients during a busy period, the least it can do is bend over backwards to keep customers happy.

It seems quite basic to me that a member of staff should have told diners this fact, preferably when they ordered their meal or at least before putting the food on the table.

Paying customers would then have had the choice to order something else or accept an offer, that was not made, of extra potatoes/peas/beans etc. It is not the Yorkshire pudding, it is the principle of good customer service.

The roast dinners were tasty, apart from the cauliflower cheese being stone cold. And we were not the only ones to notice this as I heard a couple sitting at a nearby table complain that the veg was cold.

Stu and I finished our dinners and the plates were cleared. We waited for our puddings, a vanilla panacotta and chocolate brownie, to arrive, as did diners at a neighbouring table. And we waited some more.

The couple asked twice for their desserts to be brought out and when they finally arrived the woman sent hers back as the side scoop of ice cream had melted, indicating, she told the waitress, that it must have been served and left to stand for too long before it was brought to her table.

She asked for a fresh slice of cake and scoop of ice cream and the plate was taken away.

Thinking that the staff would surely not repeat the mistakes made with our neighbours' puddings, we naively expected out sweets to appear any minute. How wrong we were. We finally got fed up waiting and left, without having eaten, or even seen, the puddings that had cost us £4.

I hope staff at The Longhorn read this and improve their service.

The Sunday roast costs £5.99 or £7.99 with a pudding.

Lyndsey Hunt

Sutton Road

Walsall

Tel: 01922 625065