Kelburn Village Pub
Reviews · · · ·Rating: 2
We ate dinner here in June 2025.
Korean fried chicken
Onion bhaji
Pan fried fish tacos
It’s always exciting for us to return to a previously reviewed restaurant. How will they stack up? We’ve had some upgrades, and we’ve had some downgrades. This is the latter. Interestingly when we reread the old review it became apparent that Kelburn Village Pub was a patchy performer who was lucky to have sat at a 3 for the last few years. Those days are behind you now. Welcome to the ‘meh’ tier.
The food wasn’t very good. We wanted the fried chicken to be a lot more crisp, but at least it had acceptable flavour. The onion bhaji was passable, although the dipping sauce was very thin and what even was it? The tacos were the worst of the bunch. In what world do you put a huge piece of flat fried fish on top of a little weenie tortilla? How is that going in someone’s mouth? It was a corn tortilla open fish sandwich really. Field surgery was required to get any fold. And the only flavour was coming from the pineapple - the Fee-Rex ate all the pineapple on the first bite then it was blandsville from there. Also watch out for your hands, drippies of purple cabbage juice are coming for your white shirts.
The food wasn’t the worst of it though. At first they wouldn’t leave us alone, non stop hassles asking if we were ready to order. No, we aren’t ready. We are talking and the menus are in an untouched pile in the middle of the table. They asked us at least 4 times in fairly quick succession if we were ready. Then we get ready, and they vanish. Well, that’s not fair, they were still there, it was more like we had vanished. They were working hard on other tables but never looked our way. We even tried to signal them to no avail. Eventually we managed to snare one and ask them if we could order. And he didn’t even grovel when he realised we had been ignored for well over 20 minutes. Frankly, it felt spiteful. Were we being punished for rebuffing their service advances earlier? We’ll never know, because we ain’t going back. So take that.