The Black Swan The Inn Collection Group

Have been a customer at The black Swan for over 30 years on my visits to Helmsley and had many excellent lunches there with friends from USA etc. Today I visited with a friend for the first time in a few months and found standards had slipped drastically. The place was far from pristine the food was very poor ...Luke warm and tasteless and the staff ( at first although it was noon a single young man) were under great pressure. Both my companion and myself were extremely disappointed and will not return again in a hurry

We came in for a quick lunch on a weekday after visiting a nearby spa. I’ve never been to Helmsley which is a gorgeous little town and from what I understand, popular with tourists. This is quite a nice pub-hotel which is a bit of a tardis once you enter. Very traditional decor and a very pretty beer garden at the back. One of the very few beer gardens that actually IS a garden, too. It’s really very well taken care of and very pretty indeed. We both fancied a no frills pub lunch and that’s what you get here. Husband had the game burger and I ordered scampi and chips, and we had onion rings on the side. His burger was quite tasty, but my scampi was a bit disappointing. It was £18.95 for my portion which, while there was nothing abjectly wrong with it, was a complete rip-off. I suppose that’s the tourist premium! I also felt I had a rather meagre portion of chips which were exceptionally average and not crispy or fluffy really. More just like chunks of cooked(ish) potato than proper chips. The portion of tartar sauce was very mean considering I paid nearly £20 for the meal, too. We did ask for more sauce but none arrived and there wasn’t a lot of waiting staff circulation. Oh, and the mushy peas were vile, couldn’t eat them. The onion rings were nice, they leaked a lot of oil though which was a bit off putting. I’ve been to nicer pubs for lunch, but then I’ve also been to much worse. (Note we just dined at the pub and didn’t stay at the hotel so my “room rating” is simply in line with the overall review)

Booked for Sunday lunch, a special treat for my wife; she last visited 53 years ago! Her experience has stayed with her ever since. The staff were kind and friendly. We were expecting a 4star hotel lunch, it would have been nice. However it was very poor, reminiscent of a canteen meal. My wife was presented with just two slices of pork that had been cut a long time before and kept in water. They were arranged on a pile of mashed potato, to make it look like a large portion of meat, which it was not. This pile was surrounded by Savoy cabbage, red cabbage 4 slices of carrot and some swede. The gravy was tasteless, watery and really poor. The roast potatoes were white, not roasted at all, I suspect that they were boiled then fried or put in an oven? Everything was lukewarm and the plates were cold. We had to ask for horseradish and apple sauce, sadly the Indian waiter had no idea what they were! We had driven 205 miles for this treat, thankfully the Yorkshire Moors didn’t disappoint. Probably the worst Sunday lunch in Yorkshire.