Cafe Central

Went because we read they have gluten free options. Queue was large as the other place was closed. Queued for 30 mins to get in the door and eventually decided to walk to the front and ask - turns out they “do, but they have nobody to fry it today”. So it was worth all the angry looks to realize that queuing another hour inside would have been wasted time. Despite a refurbishment this place has been the same for the 10 years I have lived here. They only take the orders when you get to the front of the queue, so they cook everything one by one. The scuttles are never used. Anywhere else you go into will have 10 fish, 5 chicken, a few smoked sausage etc kept hot in the scuttles ready. They’ll cook 3-4 chip loads at once if it is getting busy. And it will take about 30 seconds to put a meal together and ring it up. The only delays are at quiet times when they are cooking to order. This place is the opposite. They cook to order when it is busy despite there being 40 customers waiting. The law of averages suggests there will be 100 meals and 60 of these will be fish, so chuck a load of fish on! Or ask, asking and queuing up your orders in bulk doesn’t take long. But instead of doing these things and having two people wrapping so it takes 20-25 minutes to clear a big queue like this, this place runs each order laboriously from order to fry to packing and sauces to til and only then looks to the next person in line to find out what they could possibly want in a fish and chip shop. Then the whole process starts again….”2 fish and chips? OK we will cook just two fishes and no more. I hope the next person doesn’t want fish again.” The whole thing is accompanied by an air of repressed anger. Not only is each order a fresh surprise (fish and chips??), but an insult to the employees family that is met with dark fury (fish and chips!!). 30 minutes to get in the door and I asked someone and they’d been an hour inside. I heard the boss lady tell someone “I can’t just pull fish out of my arse”. They had presumably been asked something along the lines of “why don’t you at least cook a load of fish now even if you’re not going to take the orders?”. So again, I just left. I’ll try again in another 10 years. It would be quicker to drive to Haddington and get food. It would be quicker if the staff drove to Haddington to get each order one by one! Then they could probably save a lot of money by turning off the unused fryers and scuttles.

Gluten free fish and chips really nice