Pros
The people you work with are lovely and will help you through working there. If you survive here you will survive in any job anywhere. Even though I enjoyed sometimes working there and have nothing against my venue Managers (who were all gems) or other staff members I had to at least tell future possible members my experience there.
Cons
I was with the company a few years and had a lot of hardships throughout and only a small amount was with customers (and I survived working nightshifts in Burger King for half a year). I had to deal with lots of problems throughout working there that slowly degraded my mental health and now I don't think I can be confident enough to work in a bar again which I was doing for almost 5 years prior. Starting off with treatment of staff, lots of bar businesses on the seafront of Brighton is hard (I'm throwing shoosh into the equation) but nothing is as bad as OhSo. There was a case of employees getting sexually harrased by customers and in some cases staff which will never get addressed by upper management (higher than people at the venue), one case in particular was but never went anywhere after being investigated (not my place to talk about this more). The breaks are 20 mins yes that's true, but if you were a smoker than your smoke time wouldn't be deducted from your original break time (good news for smokers) but whenever I tried to balance things out by letting others have a 5min sit down during non-busy periods which was then not allowed (luckily there was a blind spot in the cameras so I was able to carry on doing it). The hours when you clocked in and out were done every 15mins and the times were wrong on tills so if you were directly on time and clocked in, it would mark you up as late and round you up to the next 15mins meaning you would loose 15mins of payment (luckily it was changed during my time there by a beautiful human being of a GM but I believe the times on the till system is still inaccurate). The pay itself is as minimal as they can get away with, one case in particular was a supervisor who was over the age of 25 was getting a wage of £9 an hour which at that time was roughly only 20p more than minimum wage. It was a struggle to get a pay rise which ended with threatening to demote himself just to get the payrise (luckily it went to every supervisor). The service charge was a joke (can't say anything about it now because I don't know but) not all of it goes to the staff members, a percentage of it went to expenses (which wasn't the problem) and the owner would find ways of exceeding that percentage by looking for extra things to spend the money on (like sauce pots and expanding the terrace which happened at the end of summer so never really got utilised or made a profit that year) and not many people know this but the owner would get a cut of the service charge too despite ever being there to help out the venue (only times I saw him there was to look around that's it). The venue itself was falling a part, normally venues would have wear and tear but with this place the benches and chairs outside would always break, the umbrellas would always be up so it wouldn't take long for them to be unstable from the wind to the point they would be unsafe, the till systems would go down at times just because of a stupidly placed wire would get kicked, stockroom has a hole that you could bury a couple bodies in as well as flood oh and that time when all the sinks in the venue flooded and the owner told us to carry on serving and stay open despite the sewage water coming out of each drain (we had an ice bucket floating in a sewage filled ice well). Nights would be a mess and will only have one manager (most of the time it was a supervisor) and as little amount of staff as possible (one time being one chef one bar one management staff on a weekend) just to keep costs low. And finally after if you go through all of that and the business isn't making enough money during the end of summer, they will start mass firing floor staff so that they will save on money. With all this said and the thing that annoys me off the most, during 2020 I heard the owner complaining about not being able to go on holiday and prior to that he would go on holiday twice a year and would pay for friends to go on holiday with his family. This last comment is petty and not really to do with how the business is run but helps understand what the owner is like (fyi he owns the dorset Arms and the chain Trading Post as well as being an investor in other businesses).