Restaurant Review: The Silverton Hotel, Shrewsbury

This is going to be a bit of a weird review, primarily because I’ve been to The Silverton many times before and although the quality of their food has gone downhill in recent times (but don’t get me wrong – it’s still good stuff) I’ve never felt compelled to write a review of the place until now, and this isn’t going to be a glowing report.

The Silverton Hotel opened relatively recently by Shrewsbury’s standards and shortly after opening acquired something of a reputation for their food – quality I can attest to, at the time they were serving arguably the best steaks in the town.

It has now changed hands from the original management team and, based on my experiences this week, is a far cry from its former glory.

Tuesday

Kit (friend, colleague and extreme BeEx lurker) and I visited The Silverton on a whim on Tuesday lunchtime for a spot of “posh” lunch.

We both chose “The Famous Silverton Beef Burger“, although I felt compelled to check if the burger was served with cheese on it (I have an aversion to the stuff, nyurk) – I’m glad I did, as despite it not mentioning it on the menu, it was indeed cheesed-up to the nines. I requested they not put cheese on mine, and we waited.

About 15 minutes later, the waitress came over to our table and apologised to me, stating that the chef had put cheese on my burger, and asked if I was allergic. I’m not, fortunately (we didn’t have another 15 minutes to wait for a fresh burger to be made) so I asked the chef to simply remove the cheese from the burger.

As it happens, it was all very nice and the rest of the time passed without incident. Although I did note that pepper had been put into the salt shaker, and vice versa.

Wednesday

Last night, after being cruelly* denied a table at the new Smoke Stop BBQ restaurant on the outskirts of town, Jem and I went to the Silverton instead and decided to take advantage of their Two Steaks For £30 deal (which after 7pm is actually £35, but that’s still fine) – two steaks and a bottle of house wine, can’t be bad.

The waitress didn’t impress me right from the start. We gave over our drinks orders (“A coke” for Jem and “A pint of coke, with no ice” for myself) for her to then ask if we wanted ice with our drinks.

Then came time for our food order to be taken. Jem ordered “a sirloin steak, rare” while I decided to go with “a ribeye steak, medium rare, with peppercorn sauce.

Amazingly, the waitress then asked how we wanted our steaks cooked and whether we wanted any sauces. We repeated our requests, and when she read them back to us, said “So, that’s a sore lion steak, rare with no sauce, and a reeb-eye steak, medium rare with peppercorn sauce.”

I managed not to laugh at her pronunciation, but alarm bells were ringing. Still, I then ordered a bottle of house white as part of the deal, and thought no more of it.

I then asked the waitress if it would be possible to have a side order of onion rings – which, to be fair, weren’t on the menu (although the menu had no side dishes listed at all which I found a little odd) – she went off to check and later informed me that onion rings were not available. As they weren’t on the menu, I’ll let this one slide, even though they’re not exactly difficult to make…

A short while later, the bartender (who, up until now had been minding his own business in the bar area) came over with our wine, in an ice bucket with two glasses. Jem is currently doing #DryJuly, and we already had Cokes, so I asked the waiter to just leave the bottle as we’d be taking it home.

To my amazement, despite acknowledging what I’d said, he proceeded to put everything on our table and even said he’d leave the bottle in the ice so that it would stay chilled.

It was at this point that I started to wonder if the words that had been tumbling out of my mouth all evening were in the English language.

The food then arrived. Jem’s sore lion steak was severely overcooked given her request, and my ree-bye was cooked correctly but tasted incredibly bland. My peppercorn sauce was also so chock full of peppercorns that I literally could not dunk my chips in to the damn stuff.

At the end of our meals, we decided not to risk asking about dessert – I couldn’t face the prospect of having to repeat a conversation about ice cream flavours with the waitress – so we just went home, although Jem couldn’t resist getting in a complaint about how her steak was overcooked.

That’s about it – I’ll give them another chance, they’re very local and are usually very good, but it will have to be much improved next time.

Rating: 1/5

* My own fault for not thinking to book a table, curses!

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4 Comments

  1. Jem

    You forgot to mention:

    – the waitress failed to take away the menus after we’d ordered
    – they didn’t bring us a jug of water with our meals, which they normally do

    I also noted that when the waitress asked how our meals were after we’d finished, & you’d said yours was fine, she didn’t actually wait for me to answer the question before diving into the next bit of scripted service.

    I could have forgiven the overcooked steak if the service had been up to scratch. Disappointing 🙁

  2. GRIM... WHO IS MIGHTY

    Did you avoid laughing at the waitress’s punctuation because it was her pronunciation that was funny?

  3. I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN.

  4. GRIM... WHO NOW LOOKS SILLY

    Dude! You totally changed time!

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