The Glassblowing House

Nice enough place with an excellent setting. The food was fine but didn’t blow my mind. The service was a little slow given how quiet is was but as it was overall an okay experience I’ve given it a 3. I imagine the fish would be better if it wasn’t yhe festive holiday period
. All a bit meh…

I am sorry to say that our dining experience here was poor. Yes it is a lovely location, yes the décor is good, yes the staff are friendly but to be a good restaurant you need food and service to be spot on.
Now maybe we got a bad day and it was a Friday and it was around 9.15pm but standards are standards and it just didn’t measure up.
There was quite a large menu, not that much fish considering it was virtually in the harbour but plenty of well sourced meat. An odd sort of menu in places struggling for an identity — international Moules frites, warm thai chilli beef salad, seafood linguine but it was mostly good honest gastro pub type menu — I wouldn’t call it fine dining.
We both ordered Mussels to start Marinier for my partner and Devonaire (not a classy pun by the way — bad idea) for me. Good flavour, generous starter portion but a bit gritty (not cleaned well was my guess) and no spoon given or offered for the sauce and no bread to soak it up either — dreadful service in my opinion.
For main we both ordered seafood linguine — which was crayfish, mussels and catch of the day with linguine in a cream crab sauce. Really very poor — an embarrassment. The linguine was horribly overcooked to the point of being sloppy, completely without texture, the sauce drowned the linguine — way too much and way too little fish in the sauce — my partner failed to find even one crayfish tail in her dish! The sauce had obviously been thickened with flour (some lingered on the mussels — yuk) and there was no evidence at all of crab.
The wines (glass of Prosecco and a bottle of Merlot) were perfectly good and reasonably priced.
It was slightly off putting for the restaurant being cleaned and tidied around us as the staff very obviously wanted to go home — we obliged. We were so disappointed however when we talked to our friends who had been they all gave very positive reports although one said it hadn’t been as good since Christmas and speculated that the chef had changed. Maybe we will return when they get a new chef.
In summary — maybe we got a bad day and it would probably be worth risking it again to see if it was better.