Friends invited us here for Sunday lunch last week; they themselves also recently having been recommended this place Easy to find if you know where it is and don't rely on a satnav that takes you round in a circle! Its to the left of the green as you look at it Anyway, 3 of us had the Sunday roast beef, the 4th, the roast pork (which had great looking crackling). Yorkshire pud (giant), roast potatoes plus assorted veg already on the plate and a side dish of other veggies, Followed by 2 x Eton mess and I had the cheese - yum with some very peppery thin biccies All in all, excellent choice of location and food...a good welcoming waiter (Ben?) and an excellent waitress (Lauren?) who was very attentive - they deserved the tip! Also she realised that there was a serious wind outside so she took it upon herself to ensure the door to the patio was kept closed, since most outside seemed to be oblivious of the gale inside when they left it open! (grrr) Anyway - a great meal, friendly service - will definitely return when around that way. Apparently the beef at least comes from the little butcher round the corner - he also apparently does excellent sausages Good value - recommended read more

Excellent. Wednesday lunchtime and the car park was full which is very reassuring. The staff were lovely, very attentive and professional. I would recommend this pub to anyone. Very reasonably priced. It was raining today but the garden looked really nice and I will try and get back on a sunny day to have lunch by the river underneath the lovely Weeping Willow trees. The side order of bread was very generous. Symond's cider on tap but sad to see magners as the only bottled cider. I had the scampi followed by the lamb, both of which were extremely high quality and absolutely delicious. If you are looking for somewhere to eat in the area then you must try here. read more

Belgian Arms - The Belgian Arms - Pubs Near Me - Berkshire, WNM

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Great pub.. nice atmosphere... love the fish and chips..!! so nice go get back to England and have good fish and chips!! very light and tasty batter..... great !! and what a lovely location... . by a lake with ducks.. lunch underneath the trees..perfect... !! read more

Always excellent, cosy pub, great service and the venison dish with that sticky, deep morish sauce sublime. read more

Belgian Arms - Pubs Near Me - Berkshire, WNM

Came here on a cold Thursday night and was heartened by the very pretty tree outside the pub bedecked with lights; it boded well for the evening. Sadly that tree was the most impressive part of the night. We were led to our table quickly and efficiently. I had the ham hock scotch egg to start which was okay, nothing spectacular followed by the fillet steak which was frankly boring and unremarkable in every way. The chips were dry and overcooked. Others in the group had the monkfish and hake and were similarly disappointed. Part of the deal was if you ordered two steaks you got a free bottle of house wine. The house was was frankly undrinkable and tasted disgusting. We spoke to our server who could not have been less interested. We therefore ordered a £41 bottle of Bordeaux to get us through, which amazingly was tasteless and clearly overpriced. Didn't try the puddings; the meal did not make me want to spend any more time or money at this pub. Verdict: mediocre food and wine, with staff who really don't give a toss. Avoid. read more

Good food and atmosphere. Open on a Monday when The George across the green is closed. Fun music performances in the summer.

IFS & BUTTIES Whoever likes a public house that is open all day, every day, serves 'Oxford Gold' (a favourite tipple of mine), stages 'comedy nights', hosts barbecues (see website) and has a delightful location in the country will not be disappointed here. The Belgian Arms is on the A330 in the village of Holyport, which is not even 10 minutes drive from Maidenhead and has no connection with any of the diverse attributes of Belgium such as mussels, chocolate, lace or kamikaze motorists. Once called 'The Eagle', its name was changed when, during the First World War, German prisoners of war were often marched past the pub and would salute the sign of the black eagle (possibly because it reminded so many of them the 'Gasthaus zum Adler' back home). Because of this, the pub changed names to the Belgian Arms, largely due to the amount of our soldiers who were serving and fighting in Belgium. The front is very pretty and the garden with its sweeping vista through wafting weeping willows over the village green is almost more Cambridgeshire than Berkshire. Certainly an enchanting setting for a drink on a summer's day (or as we experienced it, during the Indian summer of October 2011). I would imagine that the garden does get a little overrun at weekends, but it was certainly fine on a Tuesday. The staff are polite, friendly, indeed delightful and the place seemed to be eminently proud of its cuisine, which sounded encouraging. Since it was lunchtime, we just opted for sandwiches, which proved to be an error. If I order a cheese sandwich in a pub, I expect to be confronted with some variation on a theme of two wadges of bread, a fulsome lump of cheese and maybe a few extras such as salad bits etc. I ordered the 'Oak Smoked Mature Cheddar' representative of the sandwich genre and was extremely disappointed. It consisted of one slice of bread which was nominally larger than an iPhone. This was covered with salad, possibly to conceal its net taxable acreage, and covered with the aforementioned cheese. In fairness, I must confess to not being familiar with smoked Cheddar: all I can say is that in terms of its consistency, it seemed very much like Dutch cheese. As for its taste, the meagre generosity of the portion frustrated a balanced opinion, as it should really have been advertised as 'carpaccio of cheese'. This all came with a portion of chips to provide bulk/roughage and here it was that the last conceivable connection with Belgium the legendary 'pommes frites' terminally went up in smoke. These were foul and viciously over-fried strips of potato that were so stiff you could hear them crack like the smoky rattling echoes of WW1 gunfire over the muddied trenches of Ypres. Checking on the Net following our spontaneous visit, I notoice that several other comments about the food here have lacked enthusiasm. I shall certainly return for a drink, but happily delegate the dining experience to the more discerning palate. read more

This place was recommended to us by the concierge at our hotel. The food was excellent. I was only slightly disappointed that my apple and walnut pie didn't have more apples. But, otherwise, the food was excellent. They change specials everyday. We enjoyed mussels, pork rump and a beef ale pie. :) very cozy place. I would also recommend calling ahead. read more

This is a very nice pub/restaurant in Holyport. It has been refursbished in the last 2 years and now has a lovely restaurant area as well as the conservatory and bar area. The garden is lovely too in the summer. The food is good - we ate from the bar menu and the food was good. Real ale too! read more

Not a patch on how it used to be in the good old days of this pub. What used to be the best watering hole for miles around - with proper characters on both sides of the bar - is now an identikit village gastropub with as much charm as a cold kebab. The real ale mentioned in another review is kept in a cellar that is WAY too cold and on the occasion I visited, and brought this point up with the manager, he seemed unaware of the fact that different beers require different cellar temperatures. Serving quality bitter at the same temperature as Guinness Extra Cold is unforgiveable - but he said that's how his customers like it! On another occasion I tried to visit the pub at about 10.15 in the evening, the doors were locked and a couple of staff members seemed to be having a private chat, sitting at the bar. I was told in no uncertain terms that they were closed for the evening. A real shame - this used to be a top pub. read more

Their website will tell you that the atmosphere is warm and friendly and no one is standing on ceremony in this pub, but that certainly wasn't our experience during the lunch service on the bank holiday Monday at the end of August. We have had quite a few meals in highly rated dining establishments in this part of the country recently, fairly close to the hallowed culinary mecca of Bray where the Roux brothers and Heston Blumenthal ply their trade, and most of them seem to have one common denominator. Snobbery. Serving staff around here somehow seem to believe that they are in some way superior to their paying customers, apparently forgetting that it is the money from those customers which pays their wages at the end of the day. A lot of UK restaurants don't open on Mondays because there isn't enough business so you might have thought that they would be grateful to have customers on a Monday. Far from it. In the Belgian Arms we were sitting at the table two from the door when a couple came in and were seated at the table next to us, the table immediately next to the door. The female that appeared to be in charge of front of house I will refer to as "Sybil" from now on, as she greatly reminded me of Sybil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers. Anyway, this couple had the temerity to turn up for Monday lunch - the quietest serving of the week - without having made a reservation, and you could tell that this really irked Sybil. "Oh well, we can serve you but you'll have to order within the next five or ten minutes, we're expecting a large party shortly!" as if she was doing the couple a big favour. There are two points that I want to make here. The first is that their money is just as good as the people in this imaginary "large party" and they should be able to expect the same level of service as anybody else. Turning up without a reservation shouldn't make somebody a second class customer. Who does she think she is? Secondly, we were there for quite a while after that couple departed and we never did see this "large party" that Sybil had told them about. They seem to forget sometimes that they are there to serve customers, not the other way around. It might be inconvenient for them if a couple of unexpected diners turn up shortly before a big party is expected but that should be their problem if they are professional, not the customers'. Anyway, Sybil sent a pretty teenage girl to serve this couple, but they were mainly interested in the set price lunch menu that The Belgian Arms used to offer, priced at £10 for two courses. Now if you have been led to believe that an establishment offers two course for ten pounds and you are given a menu where most dishes are priced between sixteen and twenty pounds EACH then you can understand why people would take a sharp intake of breath. At the end of the day this is pub food and that is extremely expensive for pub food. Most of us mere mortals can't afford to spend megabucks on a Monday lunch. When the girl was asked if they did a set price lunch menu, priced at ten pounds for two courses, she looked at them as if they were totally stupid. However, the reality is that this place did offer that menu within the last year or so, meaning that it wasn't actually an unreasonable (or stupid) question that they were asking. The couple decided that they would leave it and go somewhere where they were made to feel a little more welcome, I can't say that I really blame them after the snobby way that they were dealt with. As they were heading for the front door Sybil called out to them "Chancers!!" which really sums up the whole attitude of this place. Snobby and pretentious with delusions of grandeur. I can just imagine Basil Fawlty hurling abuse at departing potential diners in a similar sort of situation. Our food was OK but it was nothing special, definitely not worthy of the inflated prices that were being charged and two courses for ten pounds actually seems more in keeping with the standard of cooking on offer here. I had the duck but I like it to have dark, rich, moist flesh. Here it seemed curiously grey and anaemic. At the end of the day they are serving pub food and that doesn't really give much room for airs and graces. The cooking was definitely more complex, sophisticated, adventurous and exciting at The White Oak in Cookham than it was here. You might have gathered from our rating that we can't recommend this place and we wouldn't return. Too snobby and cliquey for our liking, although that seems to go with the territory in a lot of eating places in this part of the country. Avoid. read more

Four of us went for a meal on the 6th October 2010. The starters were a disappointment, especially the mushrooms on toast, which were plain and dry with no sauce or seasoning. My husband and his friend had the Steak and Kidney puddings. My husband took one mouthful and could not eat his, while his friend ate a couple of mouthfuls before declaring it inedible. My friend had the fish pie, which was watery and tasteless. I had the duck, which was adequate, but served with a small dollop of plain cabbage and 3 soggy pale roast potatoes. We told the manager how disappointing the meal had been. He called the owner over, who told us if we were not happy then not to come back. We wont! read more