Grand Heritage Hotel - A mixed bag

This is a fairly recently opened hotel on the other side of the Aspire Park. It is easy to park your car there (for free of course) or you could do like we did and park your car by Villaggio and take a very pleasant stroll on the pathway round the football pitches.

We had a fantastic time at the Blue restaurant. We had taken the stroll route to get there and sat under a canopy outside on a lovely January day. I had the best Caesar salad I have ever had while my wife tucked into tomato and garlic soup with some chips. She enjoyed this too. The service was impeccable, we were given an Ipad as the menu (this was good fun) and we had a great time. The bill (including two small waters) was 158 Riyals.

Having had this good experience and chatted to the waiters, we decided to head on over there a couple of days later for brunch, this time in the restaurant called Flavours. Breakfast there is 135 Riyals and the hotel boasts 5 stars.

When we arrived there was no one to greet us so we just wandered in. The tables that were free (the restauarant seemed a bit small) were nearlyall dirty - there were other people's breakfast things on the tables. We wanted to sit at one table, the waitress ushered us elsewhere rather than clean the table. My wife called the waitress by her name tag only to be told that it was not her name tag. When we came to sit down at the "clean" table the chairs were dirty, covered in crumbs.

There only seemed to be the one waitress, although there were plenty of staff milling around reception. After this bad start, and only seeing one waitress, we decided to cut our losses and left. We took our business elsewhere.

Not to sure what to do now, Blue was fantastic but the breakfast experience was awful.