If you were a fan of the pile-your-plate-high with food mentality, then chances are you visited Taybarns in Swansea at least once.
Taybarns were one of the first restaurants to open up in Swansea Enterprise Park back in July 2008, complete with its self-proclaimed tagline as being "The Ultimate Eatery".
The Swansea diner was one of seven branches around the country with the others being in Barnsley, Coventry, Gateshead, Newcastle-under-Lyme, South Shields, and Wigan.
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Taybarns customers paid for their food on arrival and ate as much as they could from a 34-metre-long food counter. Choices included soup, salad, curries, carvery, pasta, pizza, wok, grill, rotisserie and dessert stations, and it was up to you how you mixed it up.
If you fancied a mixture of burger, chicken tikka masala, roast dinner and carbonara on the same plate with a drizzle of soup, that was entirely up to you.
You could keep coming back for more as many times as you wanted within a two-hour time period - and people really did pile their plates high.
Prices varied during the day and it was cheaper in the afternoon. In 2010, it cost £5.99 until 5pm, when it rose to £7.99, and £8.49 at weekends, with children paying just £3.99 at all times.
Students got a discount and could often be seen consuming a week's worth of calories in one go to keep them going on their limited budgets.
In July 2010, the restaurant had a taste of the good ol' US of A when it celebrated its second birthday with a barn dance evening.
Manager Hayley Edwards said: “The restaurant was open as usual and we decorated it with hay to give it that authentic feel and all the staff dressed up and got involved too. All the customers who took part seemed to enjoy it as well.
"It was a great evening and we had a lot of fun and Luigi our mascot even joined in. He kept losing his hat but he had very good feet.”
In December 2010, the chain celebrated its millionth customer when Laura Jean Jones, of Mount Pleasant, received a voucher to eat free for a year.
The restaurant catered to a devoted crowd for around eight years until shutting down suddenly in 2016 and was converted into a Brewers Fayre pub by owner Whitbread. Some fans were so outraged that they launched a petition on Change.org to bring it back to no avail.
Were you a fan of Taybarns? Share your memories by commenting below.
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