Crowwood Hotel, Muirhead, Glasgow – June 2011

Where to start.

It’s summer in Scotland so of course you want to eat outdoors. We pick the Crowwood as it’s been driven past over the years and it has an outdoors seating area.

Hmm, it’s dead apart from two guys drinking beer, bad sign? By this point we were starving.

Other half goes in to find staff, comes back out, bar unattended and no one around…hmm..let’s give them another go. He goes back in, finds someone and asks for menus, but seemingly we cannot be trusted with the menus ourselves so the young chap comes out with them, hands them to us and walks away.

Eventually he comes back and takes our drinks order, walking off before we can get a word in about the food we would like to order. We really should have left but by now we were really hungry. We order a hot salmon salad and the burger.

We wait, looking around a lovely view of the nearby golf course which isspoiled by some kind of equipment gurgling away in the middle of the outdoor seating area. It could really be covered by some shrubbery at least.

We receive our dishes. Hmm again. The burger comes without cheese or bacon (even though it states this is included on the menu). When we enquire about the missing items the waitress asks “did you ask for cheese and bacon?” We asked if we could have some which the waitress went away to get but she didn’t take the burger away so it sat getting cold.

She returned a short while later with a plate of grated cheese and 2 rashers of bacon but the burger was already tepid.

Onto the salmon salad, the salmon is delish however tasteless grated cheddar cheese, two pickled eggs, pickled beetroot, a handful of silverskin pickled onions and hardly any salad leaves (and no tomato!) wasn’t really what I was looking for. Thankfully I had ordered a side order of someScottish salad (chips!) but these were tepid on arrival. She came back full of apologies but that didnt matter our dinner was cold. I left mine, far too much pickling vinegar and no taste.

(remember the chips were an additional £1.50)

The manager appeared to be very busy fussing over a bus of Dutch tourists, obviously the true bread and butter of the hotel, not locals.

We complained. “Are you staying here? Do you want dessert?” (I almost laughed). Due to not staying there or wanting a dessert, no discount. I left most of my dish as it was so poor. When paying the waitress did apologise although it was felt like an empty platitude.

Cost £28.10 for Cheese and Bacon Burger £8.95, Hot Salmon Salad £9.95, two side orders of chips £1.50 each, two lager shandies £3.10 each.

Not the cheapest place to go for what was a sub-standard pub meal.