The Prince of Wales Review

Situated in the village of Baslow in The Peak District, The Prince of Wales is a village pub with a longstanding reputation for serving good food, having held two AA rosettes since 2023 and a Michelin Guide listing in the past also. Although it was my first time here, my wife had visited in the past when the pub was named Rowley's under previous ownership and not had a particularly inspiring meal, but given the awards held and indeed its position of best gastropub in the Peak District on this very website, I was very much hopeful of some high quality cooking as I visited for lunch with my wife and two young children, on a mild March Saturday.

There's a decent sized car park behind the pub which is always handy, and the welcome on arrival was warm. We were shown to our table on the ground floor around the corner from the bar, near the open kitchen. Internally the decor is smart and modern which I liked, unfortunately our table position wasn't great. We were sat directly adjacent to a permanently open door which led both upstairs to the toilets and also to a kitchen area, so there was a steady stream of people constantly passing behind me. Then directly on the other side of the table was a staff area where drinks were passed through from the bar on a regular basis; they should really rethink the layout for me, as it's not right to expect a table of four to sit where we were positioned.

On offer at lunch is a fairly limited three course set menu (a scaled down version of the full dinner menu from what I could see), plus some light lunch and sandwich options. There was also a two course children's menu which is always a plus when eating with children. Drinks wise, the wine list we were given looked like it had been in a fight, but it contained a good range of wines and plenty of other options too, including a decent range of non-alcoholic cocktails.

We ordered drinks first which took an unusually long time to arrive, that theme unfortunately continued throughout the meal. For starters, I went for the crab risotto. It was actually a pretty decent dish, the crab was flavourful and although the risotto was pretty heavy on the salt, it was well made and very edible. My wife had less luck with a few slices of cured duck ham atop which sat a few pickled shimeji mushrooms; it was fine but an uninspired start to her meal.

We also ordered a couple of portions of gochujang bread with our starters; this was a little bit dense but packed a bit of heat; the butter was listed on the menu as whipped garlic butter, but it hadn't in any way been whipped which was a shame. For the kids, my young son had a portion of chunky chips which weren't very good (in reality, they were closer to potato wedges than chips) but my daughter's mini fish and chips from the children's menu was fine and a decent portion size also for a kids option.

For mains, my wife and I both had the chicken ballotine, served with a mushroom duxelles, mashed potato and a tarragon and pancetta sauce. The chicken was on the dry side but overall this was a tasty enough dish with some nice (albeit safe) elements, and it was a decent portion size too; I wouldn't have an issue eating that dish again.

Although the savoury courses hadn't exactly blown us away, we pushed on and ordered dessert, however this proved to be a surprisingly difficult task. We first asked for dessert menus after our main courses were cleared, but after a long time (around fifteen minutes) we'd still not received them, so we had to ask again. We were then presented the dinner dessert menus which didn't highlight which dishes were available at lunch, nor did it list the desserts available from the children's menu either, so my wife had to go up to the bar to get the correct menus. It was just all such an unnecessary faff and took so much time; perhaps most people just don't bother with dessert at lunch here.

Well, it turns out most people would be right, as the desserts were poor. My malt custard tart with toasted marshmallow and a peanut butter ice cream was OK but I wouldn't order it again. It was however much better my wife's affogato. When I see affogato as a dessert on a menu in any restaurant, I'm expecting a little bit of effort, maybe a caramel sauce, maybe some liqueur, maybe a homemade biscuit, but not here. It was literally two scoops of ice cream, with a separate shot of coffee arriving afterwards from the bar; by any standard, it was a lazy, lazy dessert. The kids were happy enough though with some fairly tasty ice cream and sorbet.

And so a pretty poor meal came to an end. Flagging someone down for the bill took an absolute age, we were just completely abandoned, but I was eventually able to pay. Although there's no automatically included service charge, there's an option to leave a tip on the card machine (which I did, although I probably shouldn't have given the standard of service). I have to say the service throughout was not good; although the staff were friendly enough, the pace of service was glacial with the overall meal taking nigh on two and half hours, which is way too long for this level of food.

Even the basics weren't done; glasses just piled up on our table and weren't cleared once, and our tap water bottle wasn't refilled at any point either. It didn't feel at first like the restaurant was understaffed, but I realised later there was a large party upstairs which may go some way to explaining why the service for our table was so frustratingly inattentive.

The food in all honesty wasn't massively better than the service; there were some decent dishes but nothing near the standard I'd been hoping for; a lot of the cooking was just lazy in my opinion and devoid of any passion or desire to deliver high quality dishes. All in all, this was a disappointing lunch with a number of issues, and I think it's unlikely I'll be visiting here again any time soon.