My wife and our friends decided to have dinner at Belhurst Caste, on our final night of our vacation to Newport and the Finger Lakes area. There were four of us for dinner.
When we called to make a reservation they said it was full, but if anything opened up, we would get a call back.
Within 24 hrs, we received a telephone call confirming our reservation for dinner.
We arrived early to have drinks on the patio prior to dinner and enjoy what we thought would be an epicurean evening in a beautiful environment.
Boy were we soon disappointed. The bar opening onto the patio, was obviously short staffed and it took lots of time for us to be even acknowledged never mind seated. Once we were on the patio, I have to say that our waitress was excellent , efficient and had a very quick sense of humour.
It was in the patio that I first noticed that something looked amiss. On looking at the castle windows from the patio, there was large cobwebs hanging on them, obviously more than a few days old. There were cobwebs, on all of the bushes , which showed a lack of maintenance on the part of the management.
We then went into dinner. Expecting the restaurant to be full, since we had to wait back for a confirmation, we were totally surprised to find that there were only four couples in a sun room of the main dining room, The rest of the rooms were empty. Where were all the diners. The lighting in the sun room was so bright, that we felt we were in a cafeteria at some factory.
Our waitress came to our table after 7 minutes and asked if we wanted water. We said we did and also ordered a bottle of wine and then looked over the menu. By this time the four of us were getting extremely concerned not only about the service, but also what would the food be like. We therefore decided to order a light appetizer and the Roast Beef for dinner with trimmings.
My goodness they could not even do that correctly. The first time they brought the plates of food, they did not know what we had ordered and came out with Roast Beef cooked medium - well when we had asked for medium rare and rare, they brought the plates back and we then waited.
About ten minutes later the plates returned with all of the roast beef cooked well done.
We decided just to eat it and get out of there as quickly as possible.
I would not recommend this Hotel/restaurant to anybody.