Dear Harvester,
I am writing in regards to a dining holocaust provided by your staff in the Basingstoke restaurant on June 24th this year. With much excitement and anticipation I and three other friends decided on dining at the restaurant for afternoon dinner. Tempting offers including the early bird menu and free unlimited salad bar made your restaurant seem a rather attractive prospect. Indeed this did prove to be a fatal mistake and I shall explain why.
Firstly to your credit, the waitress did attend to our needs very promptly, but if anything perhaps too promptly. The menus were thrown at us at a high velocity and before I or anyone else had even batted an eyelid, our orders were rudely demanded from us. Politely, we had to request some time to oversee the menu before committing to any dishes.
When the waitress returned, we ordered, two Fish and Chips, one Simply Chicken and one Harvester Burger. We were also welcomed to visit the free salad bar to treat ourselves with a light starter. I was particularly keen to go to the salad bar as it was a different and stimulating concept that I had not seen at any other restaurants. However once there it soon became clear why other restaurants had not followed your lead. We were faced with a lacklustre display of under prepared, unappealing and limited cuisine. Unimpressed, I hoped it was simply a presentation issue, disappointingly I was wrong. You had somehow created the most bland and tasteless pasta I have ever had the misfortune of tasting. It was unbelievable how awfully dull it was. Normal tasting pasta is not a difficult thing to achieve, how you are employing someone to produce this rubbish is ludicrous, yet alone a ‘professional’ chef. It is elementary cooking at its finest and I am confident a chimp with no working knowledge of a gas hob could have prepared better pasta. This set the tone for the rest of the meal as things somehow only got worse.
Again another credit to your promptness, the meals did arrive reasonably fast to our tables. But this merit was short lived. For some strange and mysterious reason, my fish had a rather large bend on it compared to the one served up to my friend. In fact I would have equated it to a bend found on a common banana. This shameful bend made slicing the fish far more difficult and completely under minded the obvious presentation effort made with the parsley. Regardless of the presentation issues I took my first bite into the fish hoping to find some redeeming qualities.
The pasta was bland, but this fish took bland into an unknown entity of blandness, an entity off any conceivable scale imaginable to man, woman or beast. I pondered over how the fish could have been so unbelievably dire and appalling as I took more bites desperately seeking the taste of something. It never came. I ended up eating the fish out of complete accident, never before this moment (actually before the pasta) had I eaten anything quite like it. I would not wish this battered fish upon my greatest foe. I am actually now ashamed I finished it, just recounting this brings back horrific and lethargic inducing memories.
Furthermore I suggest your menu department rename the ‘Simply Chicken’ meal, to ‘Simply Awful’ and place a warning describing the tastelessness to any unsuspecting customers. How you are getting away with using adjectives like ‘succulent’ is criminal. And flame grilled? More like George Forman grilled with a measly accompanying potato as hard as the day it was plucked from the ground.
I genuinely pity the all customers who have had the horror of dining at your restaurants. I am embarrassed to have said I also once ate there too. I will only be recommending people I strongly dislike to eat there. Even then I would feel extremely guilty and would tell them to avoid the fish. The whole experience of eating out at the Harvester was one I would rather forget. I certainly have limited reservations that there is anything you can you do to rectify this disastrous occurrence.
I would advise on completely starting again. Go back to basics and make sure all the chefs have a good understanding of how to boil pasta. Then gradually train them intensively until the confidence is there to heat food correctly. I believe management has put too much emphasis on training the chefs to cook chips or ‘seasoned fries’ as you refer to them, as I shall concede, they were the only edible things on the plate. Scrap the salad bar, or at least create one comparable to the one found at the mighty Morrison’s. This is not a difficult operation and I sincerely hope this works out.
Anything you could in attempt to redeem this cataclysmic dining experience would be appreciated. And you shall find the receipt of my meal alone within this envelope as proof that I am not just making this up. Note as I was drinking tap water, my meal came to £5.49, I feel left an appropriate tip to justify the service (one pence).
Yours faithfully,
J.Finch
