It gives me no pleasure in writing this review because on the whole, the serving staff at The Kestrel are pleasant and amenable. However, the quality and standard of the food here has gone downhill rapidly over the last couple of years. Today, i ordered a smoked chicken liver pate with onion marmalade followed by belly pork on a bed of crushed sweet potato with black pudding and roasted pear with sticky ginger beer glaze.
Sounds nice? Yes, that's what i thought too.
The pate had curdled and was heinously over cooked. Horrible. I managed half a teaspoon full and the onion marmalade was akin to some badly sliced onion sitting despondantly in a pool of its own sweat. I sent it back. The waitress, very apologetic and polite, took it off my bill.
Then the main course arrived. It was a limp piece of pork belly on luke warm (at best) cabbage with two small pieces of sweet potato. Maybe the description of "crushed" on the menu was referring to it's state of morale as part of this dish.
The black pudding atop the pork was the size of a fifty pence piece and had been cooked for at least a week because anytime my fork went near it, it crumbled as if Medusa herself had turned it to stone and ash. And as for the roasted pear, well that was so small that the hubble telescope would have struggled finding it from ten feet away. I'm sorry Kestrel, but I won't be coming back. Just an awful lunchtime experience. :( read more