KBC

But that’s part of being in hospitality - you need to pick & choose your holiday time carefully and if you choose to be closed on a major public holiday when people are out and about looking to spend their money, don’t be surprised if people are disappointed.

All our local hospitality places around here in Herne Bay have a super-busy pre-Christmas period but then it goes completely dead in January because so many people exit the city for the hols - so most of them are closed for 2-4 weeks and that’s when they all do their big holidays and reopen when their customers return to the city in late Jan.

In contrast the places in the holiday hot spots need to be open in Jan and could close at other times.

I've been trying to find out about the cafe at Mansion House (at least I was before Easter).
All the who-haa about KBC, you can still get icecreams and a few other key things at Mansion House.

Something I didnt ask. Went through the Mansion House,cost now $10 per adult, Only went due to boy buying a with a grabone voucher $107 ferry return with bbq lunch for 2. Otherwise probaly wouldnt of thought of doing it. Weather was OK east around 25knts no rain.

Wouldnt mind taking a trip to Tiri though,summer and snorkel eastern side of tiri.

And for completeness here are the latest membership deals:

Had lunch there today too. Been quite a few years but seemed better.

Hah! Maybe we overlapped without knowing it.

Or maybe you knew but avoided us (I’d probably avoid us too)! 😊

We went last Sunday for a family meal. Was a complete shambles.
I'm keen to support these guys, but far out they made it hard.

I'd been in earlier to suss the menu - and get some ice, which they actually had, but no chest freezer of icecreams - they did sell us mini tubs of vanilla icecreams. (any flavour you want, as long as its vanilla).

Anyway, menu says they do a gluten free option for the beef burger, so yes, I need GF and therefore we could plan a family meal there.

Get in, get a table, everyone chooses what they want and I go up to order:

Waitress at the till is like "Are you aware of the food situation?" Manager is like "don't say it like that..." to her. Told they have no fish and no buns. Clarify that they don't even have kids fish for the kids fish and chips. Not even that.

OK, not worried about the lack of buns as I'm GF and say so. Then, they say, oh, the burger patties have gluten in them. Despite advertising GF and charging an extra $6 for the privilege (it's typically $2 for the GF option). The manager is trying to man-splain that the burger patties are made with breadcrumb, "but it's ok cause its not a lot" (clearly has zero comprehension of what gluten free means).

Given he's already said they have no fish, I'm kind of fucked for dinner. They only have two items on the menu. Missus and kids are hungry and have high expectations.
Then he says he's found a piece of fish and I can have that (OK, but I was actually wanting the GF beef burger you advertised). So I order the one piece of mystery fish and get a burger for the missus. Missus is like "why did you get me the burger...etc (she wanted a fish burger)".
Then, the burger turns up with a bun, despite them saying they had no buns.

The chips and the kids chicken nuggets were over-cooked to nuked. Food took a lot longer to arrive than they said, had to go and follow up on where it was. The burger was fairly good, but the fish was lacking.

I was still hungry when we got back to the boat and had to have a serving of cereal, always a sign your dinner out was shit.

Then the table next to us tried ordering and they were out of beef burgers (as well as fish burgers, all fish and buns), so they all went hungry. 8 adults so would have been a not insignificants spend.

The kids used to really enjoy the kids playroom area, which is now just a stark white space with a couple of plastic dining tables in it. Really miss the shop area and chest freezers for icecreams. Going and getting icecreams was a really neat thing to do. Noting this was all on the 6th Jan so it's not clear how much impact the power outage from NY's eve had on what was going on. They didn't say what reason they were out of everything, just called it "the food situation".

Friends staying in a batch were grizzling they only had Speights and Macs gold for beer options.

I'm hoping the above is just teething issues for the new operators, and they get things sorted out. But it is a complete minefield deciding to go there for a family meal and then not have any food available, on top of the gluten free meals that contain, err, gluten.