Twa Dogs Inn, Keswick > Reviews (1)

When we were in the Lake District recently we needed to go and find somewhere to eat on the Saturday evening so decided to take a drive into Keswick to see what we could find. We came across the Twa Dogs Inn which is on the outskirts of town and were attracted by the signs advertising home cooked food and the large beer garden.

After checking that kids were welcome at 7pm on a Saturday night we decided that this was the place we would stop and eat and had a look at the menu. There was the typical range of pub grub like fish and chips, burgers, gammon, sausages, salads, baked potatoes and a couple of veggie options. Me and my friend both went for the veggie dish of the day which we were told was vegetable and stilton crumble and my daughter went for chicken nuggets and chips from the kids menu. Main courses cost from around £6-£10 and the kids menu was overpriced at £4.99 considering a drink was not included in the price.

The interior of the pub looked really dark and a bit dated although the games room containing pool tables, darts boards and dominos looked good so we decided to head out to the beer garden to enjoy the warm sunny evening. We chose some benches under the trees as other parts of the beer garden were filled with drinkers and this area was quieter. The good thing about sitting here was that my friend was able to get her dogs out of the car and let them sit with us, there were several dogs with their owners and the bar staff were happy to give the dogs a drink of water.

The location of the Twa Dogs is lovely with views up into the hills. The beer garden itself is a bit tacky and twee with a plethora of England flags obviously for the world cup, lots of flowers and tacky little ornaments nailed to the huge tree in the car park. The pub overall gave an impression of somewhere that could do with a lot of work to modernise it.

We sat in the shade of some trees, there were bird feeders in the trees which was nice as it attracted birds to the area, the problem being that the birds sitting in the trees loved to poo all over the tables making them filthy and there were also a couple of near misses where we were nearly bombed from above.

When the food came out the waiter brought one vegetable crumble and the chicken nuggets out first, the problem was that the vegetable crumble was finished so my friend got pasta in a stilton sauce. When the waiter brought my meal out I explained this was not what I had ordered and only then did he apologise and explain why there were no crumbles and I was not happy at being given a substitute dish without being asked first if it was ok. I was given the choice of a refund or to re-order something different and I decided to order a roast beef salad and a plate of chips instead.

The food itself was average to below average in quality and taste, you can’t really go wrong with chicken nuggets and chips so my daughter was happy enough but me and my friend were less than satisfied. My friend described her pasta dish as being very average with very few vegetables and it was served with chips which would have been nice with a veggie crumble but not with pasta.

My salad at first looked good, it was truly enormous but it turned out half the plate was covered in iceberg lettuce which was annoying to dig through looking for the good bits. The brisket was plentiful, so plentiful in fact that I ended up feeding some of it to the dogs but the meat was low quality and they had hidden the fatty and gristly meat underneath the nice looking slices! Apart from the beef and iceberg there was an overboiled egg with a green ring around the yolk and some dollops of supermarket coleslaw and pasta salad, really when you pay £8 for a salad you expect something nicer. The chips were nice enough and obviously out of a packet and not properly home made.

As you can probably tell from what I have written above I was not overly impressed with the Twa Dogs in Keswick and would not recommend it as a place to go for a bar meal, the quality of the food was very low which was not reflected in the prices we paid for our meals. It’s a fairly nice place to go and sit and have a drink with friends, I was impressed that the atmosphere was calm and laid back on a Saturday evening, just don’t sit under the trees!