Farmers Arms, Muker

Visited The Farmers Arms on Sunday the 9th of Nov 2010. It came highly recommended and the people I was with had visited it several times before. The welcome was friendly enough and we sat down by the roaring fire and cast our eyes over the menu. All of the items looked delicious and all but one or two said �Homemade� somewhere in the description.
Between us we settled on a Game Pie, Chicken Pie and Roast Beef with all the trimmings.
One of our group asked what kind of pastry was used in the pie, puff or short�.the response was �ummm don�t know, but its proper pastry�. We also asked for Roast Potatoes with the Game Pie, but we were told we couldn�t do that, the choice was chips of new potatoes (despite roast potatoes being available with the Sunday lunch.�when asked if the chips were home made we were told they were not. The warning bells should have been going off at this point.
When the food arrived we were sorely disappointed. The roast beef was sliced impossibly thin�.so thin it clearly came out of a packet, �All the Trimmings� consisted of 2 flavourless old boiled spuds (despite asking for roasted), undercooked carrots, a frozen Yorkshire pud and a big heap of ASDA�s own canned corn (honestly who puts canned corn on a Sunday roast!) topped with packet gravy. There was some much un-drained liquid on the plate it was like soup! I have had microwave meals better than that rubbish!
Game pie wasn�t much better and came with the same �Trimmings�. The chicken pie gravy was the same as the gravy used in the game pie, which didn�t complement chicken at all. The pastry was soggy, all in all very disappointing!
If this is what passes for good pub food in the Dales then something has gone horribly wrong! It�s a shame to see what was obviously once a really great pub slide so far down hill. I will be doing my best to avoid this place in the future, if you are in the area and you want a decent meal take a quick trip over the hill to Hawes instead.

8 Nov 2010 09:36