Porters Bar & Restaurant

Date of visit: July 2021

I am a disabled person. I have experience of challenges around: moving around

Overall Rating

First restaurant visit since lockdown 2020 to a level access and tasty food.

Disabled Access In and Around

To enter Porters it is a door that you have to manually open yourself however, when I visited the door was open. There is then another door to the left that you also have to manually open, this was half open when I arrived so my carer held it open for me. It might be difficult for a wheelchair user to open this second door themselves as there isn’t much turning space in this entrance area. We were seated at a table near the entrance and my carer moved one of the chairs to allow me to get into the table however, my foot hit off something as I went under. At either side of the table the legs were a strange shape and I couldn’t get my wheelchair underneath. You can see this in the photo below. If I was visiting with someone else who was a wheelchair user we both wouldn’t have been able to sit at the table together as there wasn’t much space between each side of the table. There is outdoor seating available but from there photos on Instagram it looks like all the tables are outdoor picnic benches which I wouldn’t be able to get into in my wheelchair. When I walked past the outdoor area after we had our lunch though I noticed there were a couple of picnic benches though that you could move chairs away from.

Parking & Transport

There are at least 3 disabled spaces outside that I could see and plenty of standard parking spaces available too. Due to the restaurant being located at City Quay there are lots of disabled and standard parking spaces available at a little bit of a longer distance to Porters but there is a pavement going along the whole of City Quay so is accessible to get to. Porters is located in the city centre of Dundee so the train station is only about a 20 minute walk away as well as bus stops in the more town centre which travel all over Dundee and Angus.

Accessible Toilets

0

I didn’t visit the accessible toilet during my visit so cannot comment on it, but I do think they have one. The V&A is about a 15 minute walk away and there is a Changing Places toilet there.

Staff

When we arrived staff were welcoming and friendly however they did take a while to come over for our orders and we had to wait a while for our drinks which was only one tap water and two Cokes. It took about 10 minutes to take our drinks order and another 10 minutes to receive them but only about a couple of minutes before we got our drinks we got our food order taken. We waited for about 20 minutes overall and a was a little anxious as when I booked our table I got told we only had it allocated to us for 1 hour and 30 minutes. I’m also unsure who our server was as someone took our drinks order and then someone else took our food order. Once we received our food these two servers came over separately to ask us if everything was okay, which is really nice and I’m not faulting that, but with the pandemic just now I feel it should just be one server to minimise the contact. One great aspect was that the staff spoke to me and not who I was with. They looked at and spoke to me when taking my orders which doesn’t always happen elsewhere.

Additional Information

I felt Covid confident whilst visiting Porters except from what I’ve mentioned about the two different servers. I feel the tables weren’t as spaced out as I would have hoped for social distancing however, there was no one sitting at the table next to us until just before we were leaving so I felt okay during our meal. Also when we paid my carer and my friend had to go up to the bar to pay, I don't know if they were just taking a while to come over or if this is how they do it. It it is how they do it I wouldn't say it is the best as you want to minimise the amount of movement around restaurant during the pandemic. I noticed staff all wore masks when I was visiting and I liked that the menus were laminated so my carer could wipe it for me before I touched it.

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