"After reading great reviews about this place since new management took over I was excited about having lunch here, it was awful in the past. What a letdown! Unfortunately, it seems like nothing has changed. I guess the recent reviews are by staff or their family. It’s a lovely clean (apart from the filthy curled up menus on the tables) airy pub/restaurant, plenty of seating, hardly surprising it’s empty though. It’s a dog friendly place, but even though they have 2 water bowls out for dogs nobody obviously cares, as they were both bone dry. We ordered our food at the bar, the barman/waiter asked if I wanted our starters before our main course, I should have realised how bad service would be then and there. I asked if the child’s hunter’s chicken was exactly the same as the adult version, just a smaller portion, he said ‘it’s all the same just much smaller than the adult version’. A simple yes would have sufficed. Our starters arrived, fortunately a waitress had spotted we hadn’t been given cutlery, and she gave us some just a few seconds before we had our starters. The black pudding was very nice, the prawns were good, but the coating was overwhelming in pepper flavour. No idea why our starters arrived in a small dish, on a napkin and on a plate, the napkin and small dish were pointless. It seems new management like wasting money. The main courses arrived in reasonable time, but we then had to wait (while our food was getting cold) as we had to ask for cutlery, salt, and ketchup. The clueless waiter hadn’t brought anything to our table after taking our starter dishes away. I tried to salt my chips, only to discover he had given me an empty salt pot! The skin on chips weren’t very nice, lots of rotten black bits in them and green ones, they were very thin too, so quite a few were like twigs. The hunter’s chicken wasn’t nice, the chicken was really dry, the cheese was revolting, like melted plastic. The bacon was ok, nice bbq sauce fortunately. Unfortunately, even though I had checked with the waiter prior to ordering what the dish would contain, it just had some sliced lettuce with lots of chopped peppers in it, certainly not a dressed salad! I asked the waiter for salad dressing, he went to get some, then he told me the salad hadn’t been dressed as it was a children’s dish, peculiar, as before he had confirmed, twice, it was the same as the adult dish just smaller. I have no idea why the cook would think a child wouldn’t eat a dressed salad but wanted lots of chopped peppers! Not even cucumber in the salad, radishes, carrot, beetroot or tomatoes. Fortunately the lasagne and garlic bread were nice. Again, we had no check back, pity, as we wanted more drinks. At 1pm, an hour after lunches started to be served I saw the barman/waiter preparing the condiment containers for each table, that should have been done a completed before they opened for lunch. No wonder he gave me an empty salt pot! All in all, clueless staff (in desperate need of training), plus a cook who can’t even manage to make a salad, or cook a plain piece of chicken correctly didn’t enthral. We won’t be back. Probably ok to drink here, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend bothering with the food."
