"The best thing about our experience was the telephone booking for a special lunch. Lovely, friendly, helpful person who noted that it was my wife’s 50th and would pass this on so the staff could ensure that this would be a great and memorable occasion.Lovely day, the sun shining, and the setting glorious – but the moment we entered, things were not as anticipated – a “matter of fact” greeting, perhaps acceptable in an ordinary 3 star hotel, but little warmth – a vague, “who are you?” from the maître d’ on entering the restaurant, as if we were intruding on their comfortably empty dining room and they would be called to work – and a rather “take it or leave it” from the waitress, though we did get an embarrassed smile on one occasion – the only smile we received all lunchtime.The menu was rather unexciting – I ought to have looked on line first Very little range, though lunches probably don’t have a resident chef at that time of day, so that might limit the available options: baguette, beetroot tartare with rice, burger, black bean burger, fish and chips tarted up with “Iford cider”, tagliatelle, a gnocchi, sirloin steak, and a “superfood salad” with choice between chicken breast, smoked salmon, and tofu. We opted for the latter, one chicken, two salmon, and added 3 extra sides (great idea with us choosing pork belly, polenta chips and gougère. Having taken our order we were told, “sorry, there’s no gougère,” so we chose the “crispy calamari” instead.For drinks we chose the local Kettlesmith beer, which I enjoy anyway, and an alcohol free Pink Negroni. The latter arrived and was so alcoholic it could well have made our driver fail a breath test on the spot – maybe that was why we were billed £11.50 for the replacement, an unadorned, ungarnished glass, mainly of ice cubes that rapidly melted into a warm alcohol-free wishy-washy liquid I suppose we should not have expected too much of an alcohol free cocktail, normally of gin and vermouth .. but what was quite unacceptable was that the thin strip of orange peel that had enhanced the original, probably quite lovely cocktail, was absent and no one had bothered to replace it, not even with a sprig of mint!Well, maybe the food might make up for it? No such luck. The attractive, large ceramic bowls were generously filled with a range of leaves, but the kale, hard and chewy as kale at the end of a hard winter, (or a mature chard) failed in a desperate attempt to masquerade as tender. The chicken dumped atop was bland, with any taste poached out of it, and the salmon was just ordinary farm-bred, cheap supermarket salmon. I loved the pork belly – could have had a full plate of that! – but the polenta chips were pretty mushy under a tasteless crumbly, far from crispy cover, and the replaced calamari a disaster – far from “Crispy”, they drooped into a bowl, batter hanging off, and the cooking oil that welled at the bowl apex typified the lacklustre attention of the kitchen, examples of whom waddled in and out with shoulder-burdened posture and bored, inattentive facial expressions that seemed to typify the rest of the on duty staff on what should have been a happy celebrative half-a-century birthday – an occasion that not one member of staff had even bothered to acknowledge!The setting is a typical local Jacobean building with Victorian additions and a lovely green countryside overview. The garden has a few choice plants, shrubs and trees but could have been cared for more attentively. The view from the restaurant needed more care and a bit of back-bending weeding. The restaurant was tired and disappointing, but the architecture holding up the ceiling glass was imaginative and the lighting, if needed, would have been exciting. Perhaps the brown-edged, ailing leaves on the table and wall plant decorations were typical of this establishment’s attitude to making what should have been a joyful occasion into one that made us never, ever want to grace it with our presence again."