Lydford House Restaurant in West Devon

we stayed one night and will certainly return. candlelit tea by the fire with the christmas tree twinkling was fantastic. honeycomb served at breakfast from their own bees was delicious. room was well lit and the products in the bathroom were really good.

What a fantastic hotel, very friendly staff and such beautiful rooms. the lounge over looks Dartmoor and you could sit here with the log burner going and play board games if the weather wasn't very good, it was fantastic. The breakfast is well worth getting up for, whether you went for the full English or even just for the porridge. Would be happy to book this hotel again, fully recommend it

I booked a table for Saturday night to celebrate my birthday and took some friends with us who had come down for the weekend from Godalming. We had been to the Hotel quite regularly many years ago and decided to revisit as a new restaurant to frequent after seeing an advert for Christmas meals in the local paper. I booked for the four of us. When we arrived after a 30 minute car journey a very pleasant and friendly polite waitress gave us the menus. When I asked her about the advert she had to ask her manager why there was no Christmas meal on the menu as she was new and she was told that we should have booked it, at the time of booking. We were asked if we still wanted to eat there. My friends ordered starters and my husband and I just the main course. Three of us ordered the duck as the main course. We sat down at the table at around 7pm having ordered in the lounge. The starters were good according to our friends, but when one duck was given to our friend, I noticed it was bloody and looked raw. I asked the waitress to make sure ours were well done as neither of us like undercooked meat. My friend attempted to cut into his and realised it was raw still and couldn’t eat it. At the same time our other friend had ordered a salmon parcel. When she cut into the fish it was raw too. She returned the fish and was asked if she’d like to order something else, she chose soup of the day with a bread roll. The waitress returned with this and told us that we would not be charged. Eventually our ducks arrived, but were so tough that we couldn’t eat them as they were so difficult to cut into. Our friend ate all of his, but he is a guest after all! It looked as if the mashed potato had been waiting for the duck as it had a slightly hard skin to it, with lumps in and one table spoon of it, 2 baby carrots, 1 brocolli floret. We waited a long time for the plates to be removed, by this time it was around 8.30, we were still waiting for the plates to be taken away. We had been sitting at the table for an hour and a half. In the end we decided to go. I went out to the reception area and asked for the bill. To their great credit they said they would only charge for the drinks, I had expected to pay for what we had eaten, because we had eaten it! The waitress handled the whole thing extremely well, apologising frequently, it must have been very difficult for her as she was so new. In those circumstances I would have expected the manager/ management to have come out to deal with it and not left it to such a young new employee. Having looked at the more recent reviews, something went wrong surely. For us it meant that we had a drive of about an hour, for a celebratory meal on a Saturday night with guests. Maybe they only really cater for hotel guests, but we had responded to their Christmas advert in the local paper. We won’t be back.

Stayed at the Lydford House Hotel and decided to stay for dinner. The food and ambiance was delightful. Great range of options. Had a wonderful post dinner drinks with newly met friends in the parlour where the owner had put on a lovely fire for us. Sensational from start to finish.