Restaurant review: CREAMS CAFE (Orpington)

As part of Orpington's attempt to make itself more attractive to property buyers, the town is undergoing something of a revamp. It now has a bright, shiny new Odeon (super-handy for me as I have an Odeon Unlimited card!) as well as a whole array of recently-constructed restaurants and cafés. I decided to give the Creams Café my patronage one Saturday evening, pre-Bad Moms.

I've been to one Creams Café before, in Wembley, and in terms of quality of the dessert, I'd say the north-west and south-east London venues are comparable. You get plenty of bang for your buck at Creams Café - the bubblegum sundae pictured above was only £4.95, and in addition to being delectable, was more than even I could hope for; I wasn't able to finish it all. 

And it's not just bubblegum sundaes they do, there's a wide range of dishes offered on the menu, from waffles to sundaes, with every ice cream flavour you could possibly want. Multiple kinds of chocolate flavours, some with chips in, some without, fruit sorbets, etc. When trying to decide on a dish, I felt, quite literally, like a kid in a candy store.

So purely from a food and monetary point of view, Creams Café certainly suffices. Why anything less than an A-grade rating, then? Well, I'm sorry to report that the quality of the service was just not up to scratch. My friend ordered both mine and her choices, and for her dessert, they brought the wrong order to our table. 

What had happened was that when ordering, she had pointed to her choice on the menu, and the inattentive sales assistant had keyed in another choice. After taking the wrong order away, they insisted on seeing her receipt, which made us very anxious, because they were treating us like criminals for their mistake. They finally made the dessert she had originally ordered, which was 20p more than the dish they charged her for. My friend offered to foot the difference, but the manager said 'don't worry, it's on the house'. 

It's not really 'on the house' when she paid for 97% of it, and had been delayed in receiving it due to the sheer incompetence of the sales staff who couldn't be arsed to listen in the first place, is it? So stop pretending you're doing us a massive favour pal.

Creams Café do a bomb sweet treat. This I'm not refuting. But if you go to the one in Orpington, I'd just warn you keep your eyes open and check that what you ordered is what the teenagers who work there keyed in. They don't seem to have much in the way of Quality Control at this place; you'll have to do it instead.

Grade: B