The Black Sheep Tea Room

Apr 20th, 2023

Food : 5/5 | Service : 5/5 | Atmosphere : 5/5 More
Apr 10th, 2023

Food : 5/5 | Service : 5/5 | Atmosphere : 5/5 More
Apr 3rd, 2023

Food : 2/5 | Service : 3/5 | Atmosphere : 3/5 More
Mar 31st, 2023

My family and I turned up at this cafe in the middle of the week in February at 3.30pm. I understand it wasn't in "tourist" season. They advertised closing time at 4.30pm on Google and also on the actual front door area. At first, it wasn't obvious to find it at the street level because they were hidden behind some shops. We had to walk through some alley way between some shops to get to their stairs. When we walked through the alleyway, I noticed there were some A-frame cafe signs in the alleyway which you would normally see out on the pavement to increase the visibility as you could walk past that stretch of the street without realising and we did walk past at first even with Google navigation. It looked like they kinda closed up shop. That's why they put their cafe arrow signs away. When we got to the upstairs area of the cafe, they said they had stopped serving food, only cakes and drinks available. For a cafe, in my mind/experience, they'd stop serving food maybe half an hour before closing, not an hour beforehand. Just serving drinks and limited choice of cakes for an hour from 3.30-4.30, really? If they can't be bothered for the last hour (maybe not much footfall), then why not shut at 4pm. It seems pointless to me. When we sat down, I noticed a lot of dirty plates (used/food leftovers sort of things) lying about on most tables. Of course we chose a table without dirty plates on! It seemed to me for the last hour of operation, they couldn't be bothered to tidy up until after they closed up. It wasn't like there were any other customers the entire time we were there. They were just "busy" with iPad or doing some calculations/figures or something. We dared not stay much til after 4pm, even though half an hour remaining. Just in case, they showed us a bad look or stopping them closing up shop early! Quite disappointed really, especially seeing high rating feedbacks on Google Maps. Maybe they work better when it's not close to closing time/an hour before closing. I don't know. From my experience of British culture, a lot of English people don't have very good work ethics, just counting hours when they work. An hour before home time, they'd rather not do any work. I've been to Hong Kong, Thailand, Taiwan, they work their socks off just before they shut up shop. Even if customers walk in 5 minutes before shutting, they'd still serve them because for small businesses, it means they make money of another meal but English people don't care about your money, especially the ones who work for a minimum wage for someone else's pocket.
Apr 1st, 2023