Mash And Barrel - East Devon

Came here for dinner. the staff was friendly and we sat and the orders were taken off in time. there is a lot of means of life to choose and the food we had was nice. my one-year-old was given an activity package to keep him occupied while we waited for dinner.

Soou being honest I had not expected a good service or eating after reading reviews, but after eating almost food for 4 days (most restaurants are closed because it is not busy season) I needed to eat right, even if it would be bad. it was great. we sat right away, our order was perhaps taken 5 minutes after sitting, our drinks maybe came 4 minutes after. our food came after about 10/15 minutes after. our food was hot and beautiful. I had the rib-eye steak, my man, the mixed grill, my children had jäger huhn, hotdog and the little people färger. there were no problems that the personal was beautiful and really prompt. I would definitely go back

After 6 yrs of coming here this is by far the worst we've ever experienced. Not only was there hardly any food available on the lunch time menu and some meals were bland. Ordered of the evening menu Thai green chicken curry to receive what can only be described as green bean soup! Malaysian style noodles a vegetable dish and the only veg in it was mushrooms, kitchen had ran out of any other veg but didn't tell us. Children enjoyed their meals. Service as polite as the staff are was slow and even had to be asked to clear the table before serving pudding. Real shame it's gone so down hill as it once was a favorite of ours.

Decided to eat here on the last night of our holiday and we were very disappointed. Service was absolutely shocking. We’d been seated for 30 minutes and still no one had approached our table to take our order. I ended up walking around and finding a staff member and asking if we could order as the kids were getting very hungry. They were obviously short staffed but at one point they had two servers delivering drinks to a table of 4 not a good use of time. We ordered for 2 adults and 3 kids. One of the adults and two of the kids meals were fine (pasta/nuggets). The kids popcorn chicken was not good, the chicken pieces were way overdone and shrivelled to nearly nothing. The mixed grill was awful. The chicken and gammon were extremely dry and almost hard, and some of the meat was missing. If they’d told us they’d run out of certain items we could have reordered, or even if they’d substituted an item we wouldn’t have minded but there was no mention at all. We told the waitress about our issues and she was very lovely. Sounded like she’d had a bit of a night of it with everyone complaining and she even said herself the complaints were mostly warranted and she agreed that the kitchen were sending out some bad food. We all agreed that if we visit Devon cliffs again we’ll be giving Mash Barrel a miss. Plenty of nice places to eat off site.

Came for a Sunday dinner with family 9 of us as part of our stay at Haggerston castle. Overall our visit to this restaurant was poor and disappointing. Not all of the party wanted a carvery so ordered or the normal menu given, nothing they wanted was available, got told the lady in front of us got the last one for one of the meals. All ended up getting carvery’s, on the menu it states you can add on extra pigs in blankets yorkshires etc onto a standard carvery, asked to do this and was told by the staff member they ‘ didn’t know ‘ how to do it as it’s greyed out on her screen, so she told us to ask at the carvery station. We did this and was told by the staff at the carvery station that this wasn’t how it was done and would need to be ordered at the bar, I explained we had been told to order here after waiting 20 minutes in the que already we were told we’d have to go back to the bar to upgrade our carvery's to get the extras we wanted. Again, we went back to the bar and paid extra to upgrade, not sure what differance this would have made to add on upgrade as same food was dished out. Given this was a carvery station and never had been for asked if we just helped ourselves after the meat, to be responded as ‘certainly not’ arrogantly and abrupt. Finally sat down with our meals, meat full of fat, Yorkshire’s obviously fake etc. Tasted like a ready made frozen Sunday dinner. Kids ordered pizzas from the kids menu and more than 100% certain these are small frozen pizzas from the likes of Asda. All in all the staff were so slow, took us 30 mins at the bar and then 20 at the carvery station, they didn’t exactly have good knowledge of the what was going on, rude and more interested in chatting. The prices are not reasonable neither. Defiantly would not return when at Haggerston castle. Feel like I’ve just chucked money in the bin. Needs improvement such as training the staff for customer skills, prices looked at and the food quality to be improved or just not frozen meals