Reviews of The Bear Hotel, Cowbridge
Review by Ann on 18th June, 2008
Add your review Date visited: 2008-06-18
Good Points: Reception staff were delightful - really friendly (whilst very professional) and so thoughtful and helpful. We stay in dozens of hotels - your staff really stood out. Absolutely charming.
Bad Points: Worse for drink members of a wedding party who left the wedding and came (rowdily) into the public bar. Our party of six had just returned from a rock concert in Cardiff and we were in high spirits - but....
General review: Lovely.........
Review by Linda Hennessy on 10th December, 2007
Add your review Date visited: Sunday 9 December 07
Having heard good reports of the food at the Bear, we stopped for a light lunch in the bar today. We had the Thai fishcakes with honey sauce and a baked potato with prawns, coconut, lime and coriander.
The fishcakes seemed completely devoid of any Thai spicing or even of basic seasoning: they were just standard salmon fishcakes. And the honey sauce was just that - honey, presumably diluted with a bit of water. No lemongrass, no chilli, no sesame or kaffir lime, no coriander - absolutely nothing to give it a bit of a zing. Imagine dipping a plain salmon fishcake in honey! No one with any sense of taste would think of doing so. Yet that's what was served.
As for the tasty-sounding prawn, coconut, coriander and lime filling for the baked potato, it was the same story. What we were served was a baked potato with a prawn mayonnaise filling. There was a very faint tang of citrus - possibly lime, but who knows? There was no sign or flavour of coconut or coriander. Couldn't see it, couldn't taste it.
We're both good cooks and both use coriander, lime and coconut in our cooking. We know what Thai food should taste like and we were looking forward to the flavours advertised. To say it was disappointing is being pretty polite.
Perhaps it was a bad day in the kitchen. The people behind us complained that their food was cold and at the next table one of the other diners was grumbling that their dish wasn't what they'd thought it would be from the description on the menu.
The Bear offers very pleasant surroundings. Shame the food's so poor.
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