The Brook Inn

First visit to The Brook. Beautiful meal, very nicely presented with good service. We will definitely be returning.

Arrived a few minutes early at 3.15pm for our 3.30pm booking. Very warm welcome from blonde waitress at bar. Very quickly seated by dark haired waitress with glasses who wasn't very friendly from the start. Pub was fairly busy on arrival but soon became pretty quiet, perhaps explaining our tail end of service poor experience. Wine list had to be chased as didn't arrive. Drinks also had to be chased. Service to actually place our order had to be chased as we were seemingly abandoned after asking for a few minutes to chose our meals after being asked for our order only a couple of minutes after arrival. Further service had to be chased from our "dead zone" later in the meal. These were details only, very annoying but par for the course these days sadly. The main and more significant issue was the quality of the roast beef. Tough to the point that you could not cut it. Also delivered not as requested in terms of cooking so lots of back and forth to get our meat cooked as we had asked. Numerous veg were cold or luke warm. Several yorkshire pudding way beyond crisp to the point of being burnt. Excessive salt on majority of veg. Manageress arrived fairly quickly and was initially responsive but the experience at this stage was already hugely spoiled. Replacement food was much better but by that stage we had been put off the whole lunch and to reflect this were offered 2 glasses of wine and a portion of custard to compliment our dessert! This place has been unreliable since the start of the Giles ownership. The family attitude to customers is poor. We asked for the manager to review the bill to reflect the poor experience and ended up being passed a phone to talk to the manager who had gone home. This some 3 hours after we entered the pub due to the awful experience we had encountered.