The Shepherd's Arms Hotel

Rating: 1

We ate dinner here in June 2023.

Beef fillet with mushroom sauce, potatoes and salad
Pan fried gurnard with potatoes, cherry tomatoes, and broccoli

Let’s talk about wait service. We appreciate that hospitality is a hard industry. The pay sucks, the hours suck, there’s high turnover, and it’s hard to get staff. Excellent service is a rarity, and we don’t expect it. But we do hope for service to meet certain basic standards. To be offered another drink when an empty glass is cleared (don’t they know that’s where the restaurant makes their money?) To be offered dessert at the end of the meal. To be given a steak knife with your steak. For the server to know what is on the menu. For the server to accurately convey your order to the kitchen. Unfortunately, the service at The Shepherds Arms Hotel met none of these hopes.

The steak was the best part of the meal. It was a nice piece of meat, well cooked, with a tasty mushroom sauce. The potatoes that came out were roasted, not mashed like we had ordered. That said, they were pretty good, crispy on the outside but slightly underdone. The salad was bad. It was just lettuce and spinach, and the “vinaigrette” was pure oil with a few mustard seeds thrown in. To make matters worse, it wasn’t mixed through the leaves adequately so it was all in an oily pool at the bottom.

The fish was pretty sad. It was certainly not $36 worth, and it was dry on the outside, although inner moisture was adequate. The hollandaise was flavourless and there wasn’t much of it. The broccoli wasn’t hot, although we did appreciate it had some char on both sides. It came with a slice of lemon that was at least three years old, bone dry on both cut surfaces. What?! Just cut the edges off you idiots, we would never have known! The whole experience came off as pretty careless.