Fleur de Lys Hotel, Cranborne

Once upon a time this pub Inn was a proper Pub and was patronized by masses of people from miles around. During the time of Charles Hancock who owned it, the food was superb, the service was excellent for years and remained that way even after he had sold-up to a new management.

My wife and I regularly dined and drank there. But a couple of years ago we showed up whilst on holiday in Dorset and to our horror found this Inn was being run by a seemingly jumped-up snob who refused to let us enter the Inn with our dog, and wouldn't even sanction that we had a meal outside in the beer garden with our dog beside us.
It was a hot afternoon and too stifling to leave the dog in the car.

When we realised it had been turned into a Gastro pub we knew then that the place had lost its credibility and we decided we wouldn't eat at his Inn if it was the last place left on earth. I said at the time that it was more likely now a Gastro Enteritis pub!

We left and decided we wouldn't give him the pleasure of taking our money and that was the death of the Fleur as we knew it. Gastro pub indeed! It's aggressive take-overs like this that are responsible for the death of the British Pub and not the changing tastes of the public nor the drink drive laws nor the non smoking ones - the pubs have mainly survived that. They'll not survive gastro rubbish.

No doubt the food there is all promoted by printed fanciful nonsense about how it is "created" with very little information about what it actually is.

I rate it 1 out of 10 for the fact that it still looks like the Fleur we knew from the outside. As for the inside and the bottom line, well I wouldn't even bother to buy a packet of nuts in there now on principle because of the grossly unfriendly and stuck-up attitude of the new landlord.

I won't say what I hope will happen to it in the future as I expect you know.

25 Dec 2011 15:42