The Horn of Plenty

The most appalling stay ever. We booked for the very expensive Christmas Stay and it was the worst Hotel stay we have ever experienced. We wanted lunch on Christmas Eve and were told this was unavailable as the entire restaurant had been booked out by the Management with non-residents. These non-residents then took over the lounges etc -so the guests arriving for their "Christmas Stay" were all shoved into the small dining room. Christmas Day was also utterly ruined - as yet again - the restaurant was crammed to the gunnels with non-residents - who also took over the lounges again. The Christmas Day lunch was a fiasco. The food was mediocre, the delay betwen courses long. The breakfasts were not fit for purpose. Overcooked. One resident ordered porridge which was so hard she turned the bowl upside down and it stayed put! The Room was not a success. No mini bar/fridge. You could not access the dressing table as the wardrobe was right in front of it - and the two occasional chairs were only fit for children to sit in. We wrote to the owner of the hotel with a complete review of the stay - and asking for some kind of compensation. We said we would be happy to withhold any media reviews until he had a chance to reply. As yet he was not even bothered to reply let alone apologise. The moral of this story is whilst the staff are good, the location obviously superb, etc - never but never book a stay if there is a Wedding and/or event - as the priority will be on this rather than the paying in-house residents. Needless to say we will never be staying there again and never recomending it to anyone.

We recently stayed here for a weekend. The food was excellent, both from the table d'hote and tasting menus. Tom and his brigade of chefs are great at producing imaginative and tasteful dishes. The rooms are well appointed and relaxing with amazing views. We cannot praise all the staff at the Horn of Plenty who were engaging , knowledgeable and always offering to do whatever they could to make our stay so good. New owner Jeremy has a winning team here. We look forward to our return for our thirds visit. Highly recommended.

We pre-booked the lunch menu as we were in the area for other reasons and this was one of the only places open this time of year. It's really easy to find and the drive up is really beautiful however parking seemed limited. When we arrived we were lead to the drawing room to wait for our table to be ready (we arrived a bit early so this was a nice touch rather than us standing around). The only strange thing was that we were given the menus and our order was taken in the drawing room. Strange but not a big deal. We were then led to our table by the very helpful host. Both hosts on that day were excellent and struck the right balance between checking on us and leaving us alone to eat. As part of the lunch menu you are given some warm bread and water at the start of the meal. The bread was good and was well received as we had been traveling in the morning and hadn't eaten since early in the morning. For starters we both had the Haddock fish cakes. They were really good and the perfect size for a starter. For main I had the chicken breast which was perfectly cooked. It was served with mash, broccoli, caramelised onion puree and a roasted onion. This course was solid cooking and I would 100% have it again. The desert was my favourite part of the meal. We both had the chocolate cremeux with the star of the show being the hazelnuts it was served with. It has a salty hit which was really needed with the rich dessert. It was excellent. The reason it is not 5 stars is purely a few bits we had an issue with. Being January it was pretty quiet and I don't think the staff in the kitchen realised how loud they were being. We could hear some of them swearing which we wouldn't normally care about but when the you are trying to have a nice lunch and the fact it was quiet it was pretty hard to ignore. That said, everyone swears sometimes so not that big of a deal and we would return!