Applestore Cafe

Loads of choice on menu and plenty of gluten free options. Very pleasant garden seating . Friendly staff. Not the cheapest but I thought overall was good value

I dont like giving bad reviews because sometimes businesses have a bad day, a run of bad luck, etc. But given the price of the food, the lack of service and the fact this is supposed to be a wedding venue, then im going to have to share We hadn't been in a while, but it looks like they've changed the name to the Striped Apple? Not sure why, have they changed hands? They used to make really nice chunky chips, now they make generic fries. So that was the first disappointment. The staff were pleasant enough initially. My pregnant partner made out right from the beginning when ordering that she was gluten free, but when they brought her hogless roast sandwich, she had to double check the bap was gluten free, as it looked the same as mine. The waitress went off to check, came back and took the dish away as it wasn't gluten free and whoever works the kitchen replaced the bap with some generic slices of gluten free bread, unbuttered. Her dish came back a little colder. I had the Swiss Steak Sandwich on what was supposed to be a ciabatta. It just looked and tasted like a standard bap to me. It came with a small portion of tasteless fries. At no point during our meal did anyone come to ask how things were! This is basic catering service! Several hours later, my partner now has symptoms of gluten ingestion. Call it a hunch, but we think they scraped the hogless roast from the gluten bap onto the gluten free bread, thus cross contaminating it. Both meals, by all accounts, were extremely bland. We just couldn't taste anything. I even separated out some of the ingredients to sample by themselves, but they were all texture and no flavour. So too was the hogless roast. Although it did taste like someone had squeezed some cheap bbq source into it. For the price, really poor. Ordinarily I'm a cake fiend, but given the price of the food and the lack of flavour we decided to cut our losses and leave. My bland sandwich cost the best part of £14, my partner's hogless roast sandwich was around £12. For £30 and considering this is supposed to be a wedding venue, we would have thought the food would have some flavour to it, that the staff would communicate our fairly basic dietary requirements and that the staff would check in on us at some point to make sure everything was OK. Again, this is basic catering. The coffee was good though. Just don't waste your money on the food and probably give it a miss if your have any food intolerances. Hopefully these guys don't do the wedding catering or you'll have a wedding meal to forget. A real shame, as this place used to be alright.