“A compact dining room adjoining a busy town-centre pub” where “well-sourced steaks are the star feature”; a couple of disappointing reports this year tend to confirm suspicions of slippage “downhill”.
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Ater an introduction of positively AA Gill proportions, the critic finally gets around to reviewing “a new venture by the guys from the excellent King William on the edge of town, which I reviewed here a few years ago, and which follows its model of robust English pub cooking, chunky 18th-century tavern elegance and big, well-sourced dishes, this time based around a fantastic charcoal grill”. “Where the King William was a renovated stinker on a loud main road”, however, The Garrick’s Head is “flush in the bijou plushness of central Bath”.
Jay Rayner (3rd June 2008)
Like its stablemate the Guardian, the Observer does – laudibly – try to get out from the capital. And similarly it often finds its journey wasted. “And so to dinner at the Garrick's Head in Bath, a food pub by the Theatre Royal, run by really sweet people who couldn't do more to make sure you were having a good time, apart from give you nice things to eat” (emphasis added). This may be “a solid, reassuring space of wood-panelled walls and wooden floors and nicely positioned tables, but with the first dish the critic encounters, “everything floated into itself until it was one of those weird German compound nouns”. It was, as his companion observed, “the kind of thing your dear friend who can sort of cook would serve their vegetarian mates at a dinner party if they were really trying”. The meal, sadly, “was a succession of such events”.
Giles Coren (23rd March 2009)
Jay Rayner (3rd June 2008)
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