We booked a 3 night stay for some luxury R&R. Our room was lovely but too hot at 23°C (on a hot day). Whilst killing time before our booked Afternoon Tea, we availed ourselves of the 20 minute horse drawn carriage ride around a small part of the extensive grounds. Not sure that we would have done, however, had we known that it would set us back £120 ! Tea was quite the worst - and most expensive - we have ever eaten - anywhere! 1 glass of Champagne was £19. The sandwiches were the sp****st filled joke. The fillings read well on paper but the reality was that there was so little filling it was virtually impossible to discern exactly what we were eating. The tiny cakes (dessert) were very pretty & the warm scones, large & doughy. The worst part of the scone experience was that the cream was not 'clotted' but just slighty whipped cream. The strawberry 'jam' looked like the pink foam you would skim off the top of the boiling fruit whilst making the jam & tasted of absoloutely nothing. The lemon curd - well, wasn't curd! The finalé was a 'tea cake' - but not as we know it. Not a hot, buttered fruity bun but a slice of a dense loaf flavoured with apricot & lavender! And this for £136.85!!! At dinner in La Terrazza we were served starters of Buffalo Mozzarella with Organic Tomatoes & Rocket leaves. Not as you might expect in a 5 star hotel, a delicate presentation of sliced cheese & tomatoes but a large bowl in which was a pile of rocket leaves, in the middle of which was a whole mozzarella ball, surrounding which were two large pale & tasteles tomatoes simply cut into quarters! So lacking in finesse, it was breathtaking. This was followed by a pizza each which were poor, at best, with soggy middles & sp**** toppings. I was charged an additional £6.00 for 3 anchovy fillets. We had a beer each and the bill was £98.90. Breakfast next day was a spectacular spread. There was everything imaginable, across a huge expanse of service area, including falafel which gave us the final clue that this was not a Candian 4 Seasons (or English) run hotel, but Arab owned & run. Breakfast at £40 a head seems excessive because whilst there was a huge selection of things on offer, even the greediest of people can only consume so much at one sitting which would explain why we saw people loading up napkins & taking food out with them - the only way to come anywhere near getting value for money. Our one dinner taken in the Wild Carrot restaurant cost in excess of £216, was adequate to reasonable but not noteworthy. Having asked for the airconditioning in our room to be adjusted by the engineers (as it was pre-set & could not be changed by us), it never happened so we roasted at 23°C all night every night in spite of opening the window, the crack permitted! Apart from that one issue, one could not fault the service offered by the extremely large staff at this hotel. They were cleary highly trained, efficient & courteous and maybe a little fearful, we thoug
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