M&s Cafe - Basingstoke and Deane

Perfectly ok food and drink but ruined by a bizarre requirement to use their overcomplicated food ordering machines instead of just telling someone what you want.

First and last time we will be using this cafe. Uninspiring and soulless. Also noisy and dirty. Takes forever to order on the ridiculous electronic menu and order panel. Would be great to have a paper menu to browse. Food took 20 minutes to arrive, dried up looking fish in batter and a tepid jacket potato with a salad. Unsure why the salad had a sickly sweet dressing on it. Zero human interaction, the serving person didn't even make eye contact when she dumped our try of food at our table.

Lovely menu helpful staff . I ordered a wrap and after finding out after it was cooked it had sweet corn in it that wasent listed in the ingredients they swapped it with no problem for a different wrap . Great spot for people watching over festival place

The watermelon and papaya smoothie I had was fairly good, the chocolate twist was also nice. I initially wanted the Cucumber and Avocado one, but they had ran out. Additionally, there was no hot food due to a technical fault, seems commonplace by some of the other reviews here. There were very few cakes left. Effectively, all they had was hot drinks, two smoothies, pastries, and pre-packaged sandwiches on offer. Quite poor.The woman behind the counter was quite friendly and the drink was brought to the table. The place provided good value, due to the sparks card being well promoted and originally low prices.The atmosphere was modern but depressing to sit in ... I was the only customer and all I could hear was the staff members from behind the counter talking to each other about how they don't like working in retail. No background music or anything of the sort. While plates were cleared quickly by staff members the tables were not wiped leading to many having crumbs and there was also some crumbs on the floor. The cafe had an untidy feel due to the amount of untucked chairs. The toilets were a bit grotty ... why are there 4 ladies toilets but only 1 mens toilet?I wasn't thanked on the way out.Would I return: well I did get a lot of work done, scene as it was so quiet. But there is a lot of competition in the area, so possibly not.

Went to have lunch with my daughter today. Looked in the cafe which had been refurbished since we were last there, there was a huge notice board outside cafe with lots of lovely food listed. I queued to be served but the man 'roy ' who served me honestly appeared to be trying not to sell anything. The first 5 things I ordered he replied with 'no, you can 't have that ', they were out of stock it appeared of most things. I asked if there were any salads left. 'No ' he said again, 'only pasta '.... Mmm not great for a diabetic trying to avoid carbs. Very unhelpful and not very 'marks and Spencer 's ' if you know what I mean? I then gave him my charge card and guess what he said, 'no you can 't use that '. Thankful we (and the growing queue) were rescued by someone else, but Roy really needs to learn some customer service skills.