Robin Hood’s Bay – Bay Hotel

The impressive looking Bay Hotel, which dominates the lower part of the town and, perhaps more importantly, is listed in the Good Beer Guide. It’s the only pub in the town which has that honour and we visited the upper bar. Incidentally, the pub has a history of the building on its web-site, something I always appreciate.

The bar area, with the service being reasonably efficient and always polite. It was also clean and well presented, although a little too hot for my liking. They had put a fan behind the bar to keep the staff cool, which was a good idea, but there didn’t seem to be any provision for customers.

The beer selection was either Theakston Best Bitter or Theakston Lightfoot, and I went with the former. It was well kept and at the appropriate temperature, but not really to my taste as I struggled to find much depth of flavour in it, although I suppose it would an entirely acceptable session ale.

The specials board.

The colour of the fish meant to me that they’d either used a dark ale to make the beer batter or it was overcooked. I would have been surprised at the former as they didn’t have any dark beer, although they could have used Guinness. Anyway, it was the latter, it was overcooked.

The fish itself was fine and the chips were adequate (I liked the hand cut and home made feel to them, but they were rather greasy), with everything being hot and it was also served promptly. The mushy peas were bloody awful, I have no idea what they’d done with them as there was a layer of water at the base and the taste was off. I might have asked if there was a check back, but there wasn’t, so I didn’t.

The location is still used as a hotel, and I imagine it’s a really interesting place to stay. There are some decent views of the harbour from the pub windows, and I think also from at least some of the hotel rooms. The prices here for food and drink were towards the higher end of the scale, but it’s a tourist destination and nothing was unreasonable.