It seems that the main problem at AV8 is that the service is "variable". It doesn't seem to occur to anyone that the service is only slow when the restaurant is extremely busy. AV8 is staffed by a small number of people, and they all do the best that they can. On less busy days, the staff have time to concentrate on the customers and on the busier days, they only have time to serve food and drinks as quickly as they possibly can and the kitchen staff can only get food out as quickly as it cooks.
Management need to staff the restaurant properly with enough people to cover what is a large venue. The problem is that the young students, who usually do part time bar work in pubs, etc, tend not to have transport, which makes it difficult to find staff at AV8, as it is not accessible by public transport and taxis are expensive in this area.
I work for one of the companies on the airfield, and am a regular visitor to AV8 and realise how much pressure the staff are under. They work a lot of hours and they work hard and posts like this are just totally demoralising for them. How about some constructive criticism, instead of just trying to run the place down? Comments like:
I must say the service was pretty slow, even though all I ordered was 3 cappuccinos (the foreign lass claimed she was unable to make them, and had to get one of the other staff to do it)
are not helpful. This was a new member of staff (English, not foreign), who had not been trained on the cappuccino machine, due to the fact that it was too busy to train her.
Other comments, such as:
The waitress/ barmaid lost all control of the situation when impatient customers walked behind the bar to pour their own pints!
are untrue. I was there and the "impatient customers" were just helping out the staff by serving drinks and clearing tables, as there was too much for one person to cope with - I was one of them. The girl out the front (there was only one, and who knows how many customers) was having to take orders, serve drinks, serve the food, clear the tables and load the dishes and glasses into the washer - she is not the bionic woman!
As for this comment - it's absolute bulls@@t:
I always tend to find about 7 firemen standing around drinking cappuccinos staring at people as they arrive. It can be very off-putting especially for women (my wife told me).
There are never more than 3 firemen on duty at a time, unless there is a big event on and none of them drink cappuccinos. If you have a problem, no matter how big or small, those guys will be there to deal with it - and they will deal with it professionally and I'm sure your wife wouldn't complain if they had just pulled her out of a burning aircraft and were staring at her to see if she was breathing.
There are a lot of comments on the fact that the manager is foreign and does not have a good command of English. She probably has a better command of English than most English people, but speaks with an accent.
As a non-flyer, I always thought pilots were broad minded people with a lot more common sense than most, but it seems that they are actually as narrow-minded as the rest of the bigots out there. Give AV8 a break - maybe some of you could try helping out behind the bar until they find some more staff, like my colleagues and I did on Friday?