Avoid!

Visited a Cattle Baron in Langebaan Mall, Mosselbay. Wow! The place is shabby, tired, dirty and has ZERO customers in it. We were the only table in the whole place blessed with at least 6 waiters. A bit weird, but we couldn't bear to move once we sat down, since we were dead tired from a gruelling hike, followed by shopping, and the mall was closing and food offering are very limited at the Langebaan Mall once they do. Even though we were told that the "restaurant" was open daily until 09h00, we were the only table in the whole place when we got there late in the afternoon on a busy payday Saturday. I was starving and ordered garlic snails as a starter, planning to have a main meal afterwards and perhaps a nice dessert. The thing came... I'm a bit of a chef myself, and it was clear as day that this abomination was prepared using stale cheap butter of questionable quality with its expiry date dating back to the Paleolithic period, unsoaked canned snails and pre-packed chopped garlic that came from a jar bought at Checkers sometime before the pandemic. Stinky, slimy, bitter-sour and cheerfully flavour-free. The sliced bread that came with this escargot-du-jour had been beautifully aged to perfection, too. Meanwhile, the "waiting staff" + "manager" were all sitting around the manager's station socialising and completely ignoring the ONE table they had in the entire place. After sitting there and waving desperately like we were on a life raft lost at sea, we finally managed to attract the attention of one kind soul that apparently was on his way to a smoke break. We asked for some sanitiser, so that we could dig into the treasures before us and he kindly brought us one that they probably had attached to a squeezy thing by the front door. The large, unmarked bottle with a curiously cloudy and foamy liquid inside was wet, dirty and impossible to even contemplate touching, while said kind soul displayed a ********** attitude towards us, obviously rather displeased with this whole situation where he was rudely interrupted on his journey to his well-deserved smoke break in the midst of all the hard work he was doing by the manager's station. Eventually, I had to get up and trek all the way to my car parked across the parking lot to get my own sanitiser. On a brighter note, salt and pepper shakers covered in loose and (thankfully) dried-on, BBQ spareribs fragments, were available inside, where we acquired them after only 12 minutes of trying to secure the attention of our very own waitress. After that we asked for the bill and were promptly issued one in a trademark BBQ spareribs-coated folder. We were told to pay at the till. We got up, paid our bill, plus a tip (just out of curiosity to see what they'll do) and then left, leaving the food on the table. No questions. The "staff", all firmly seated down throughout our brief sojourn by the till in a completely empty restaurant were clearly relieved to see us go. Why do these places exist?