Hare & Hounds

Came here last week. It is a very pleasant pub with a roaring log fire, perfect for settling into on a cold Sunday afternoon. The staff are friendly and quite young. The place was empty and did not fill up very much for lunch. We had the beef roast and the fresh crab cakes special. The beef was chewy and the vegetables overdone; the plate had clearly come out of the microwave. The crab cakes were essentially potato with flecks of crab and charged out at a tenner a time. The accompanying salad was gritty in places. I was most underwhelmed. I don’t understand why places like this can churn out this rubbish. Doesn’t the chef have any pride? The menu is lengthy and varied, with three different roasts available on a Sunday. My suggestion to the pub would be to cut down on their menu and concentrate on trying to get the remainder right. Ironically, the pub itself is really quite pleasant. They should stick to being just that.

The Macc Lads wrote a song about this place — but the title is a little on the rude side, so I can’t mention it here.
Blimey, the potential of this place — featured in Raymond Blanc’s show — is huge. Sadly, though, the current tenants have simply covered everything in shiny paint and shuffled the bar off to one corner of the pub.
Clearly with pretensions of being a restaurant, us modest drinkers have been deemed second class citizens.
After you negotiate your way to the tiny bar — via several head injuries from the low beams — you’ll be faced with an uninspiring set of beers, badly kept and over priced.
On the plus side, there is a reasonable amount of parking, and the staff are all very friendly.