The Horseman's Cafe

Rating: 1

We ate lunch here in May 2026.

Banana smoothie
Macchiato (?)
Chicken and spinach filo
Stuffed kumara
Citrus tart
Melting moment

Horseman cafe is a Shannon institution, with The Fee-Rex remembering visiting 15 years ago. They continue to be popular, running a steady Sunday lunch trade which the kitchen seemed to be struggling with. “It’ll be 20 minutes for cooked food” they said. While we don’t mind a time warning, actually we appreciate it and adjusted our order accordingly, her tone was clear: “Don’t order any cooked food, I’m overwhelmed”.

Our cabinet fare came out erratically. We were given the biscuit at the counter. Pause. Next came the two heated savoury items. Pause. Later came a matcha. Yes, a matcha, not the macchiato we had ordered. More pause. Out comes the banana smoothie, and we finally question where our tart ended up. Turns out it had been forgotten, but does show up less than a minute after we enquired.

The only thing worth eating was the melting moment. It wasn’t groundbreaking, we’ve absolutely had better, but it was alright and we wouldn’t be sad to eat it again. The filo wasn’t overly enjoyable, the spinach was a bit fibrous, the capsicum chutney inside was over-sweet and the beetroot relish wasn’t a great accompaniment. The filo was a meh.

The other three things we ordered (and we’re not including the random matcha in this) were all bad. The stuffed kumara contained huge chunks of unmashed boiled kumara, the other contents were nondescript, and you had to seriously ration the paltry blobs of sour cream provided.

This was our first banana smoothie in a while, and it was a sad return for this BAATFR classic. The most obvious flaw was that this this beverage did not appear to contain any actual banana, which in our book means it does not meet the definition of a banana smoothie at all. There were sickly slicks of banana syrup decoratively cascaded down the inside of the cheap plastic cup. Bros, come on. We’re not huge fans of that technique at the best of times when honey is used, as it doesn’t actually add anything to the flavour of the drink. Doing this with your cheap nasty banana syrup is just offensive. Speaking of offensive, put your smoothie in a glass you lazy monkeys! This drink was served in one of those compostable “plastic” takeaway cold drink containers, sans straw. Out of a glass we don’t mind no straw, but today this was a problem because 1) you had to deal with the lip feel of this naff plastic, and 2) this thing was a foamy baby. The first mouthful was just bubbles, and the next few weren’t much better. As a final insult, she hadn’t even passed the temperature test, the whole thing was a tepid mess.

Finally we had the citrus tart. This looked alright in the cabinet, and a nice citrus tart is one of the world’s finest things. They’d even made their own pastry. Unfortunately, the pastry was not good at all. It was too thick and had a rubbery, cardboardy texture. They would have been better off purchasing a pre-made tart casing, at least then it would have been crisp. Lemon curd within a citrus tart should be citrusy and tart - it’s in the name! This was lacking in both departments, with the desired tang being replaced with a glum, sweet, lemon-adjacent goop.

The nicest thing we can say about The Horseman’s Cafe was that they had Country Life magazines available for customers. This is something different, and what a great read. As of 2025 there was a Scottish castle for sale, 20 bedroom, accessible only by ferry, and boy was it a fixer upper. But it was only 750,000 quid! Maybe we’ll take the profits from the immense commercial success of this restaurant review site and try our hand at castle restoration. Something to think about…