We really wanted to love The Broomgate, but ended up frustrated and disappointed!
The café/restaurant is extremely popular, and was super busy. The food and drinks were nice, and I really appreciated the extensive gluten free menu. It was cool to see the kitchen staff at work, but it was also roasting and we left stinking of chip fat.
The main negative to bring our review from 5 stars to 3 was the slowness of the service. We were a table of two adults who arrived when every other table had finished ordering or was empty. There were about 5 waiting staff. We waited for ages to order drinks, one arrived, and the other arrived 10 minutes later. We ordered food, the fries from the order were missing. We didn’t manage to attract attention from the waiting staff so we just ate the food we had. No one asked if the food was okay (it was really nice!). When they took our plates away we asked for another drink and the bill. We didn’t receive the drink or the bill!
Despite our best efforts to flag down the waiting staff (they congregate in the kitchen area, where they can’t see anyone - they should just actually look at the customers and most of their problems would be solved!) we only got our bill when the man next to us told the waitress we were still waiting when she brought his food. It was frustrating bordering on comical. We had one course and were there for an hour and a half.
I was so delighted to finally receive the bill that I paid as fast as I could and forgot to read it over. Turns out they charged us for the drink and fries we never got - my mistake, I should have checked and said.
This could be a really great place: the gluten free menu was good, the service was friendly when we got it and the food was nice - but the service was comically slow (although they had enough staff) and ruined the meal! The reviewer who said that The Broomgate is trying to run a restaurant out of a cafe set-up hit the nail on the head.