Review: The Aysgarth Falls Hotel, Aysgarth

This was a Sunday roast, albeit in the evening, the Aysgarth Hotel being one of those places that just does nothing but the roast right through Sunday. On the other hand, being one of the few places actually serving dinners on a Sunday evening in the middle of the Dales, it’s handy to know!

The hotel is in a nice spot, looking out over the Dales countryside above the famous waterfalls (for non-UK readers: don’t expect Niagara, the most famous waterfalls in the UK might not even be named on a map in Iceland, New Zealand, South Africa or Venezuela!). The dining room is comfortable, if a bit vanilla. The front of house team were young, friendly, energetic and just a bit unpolished. This was fine as we were in a cheerful mood and nothing much went awry. One of the guys did a card trick for us at the end of the meal. Our hostess at our B&B later said “oh yes, he’s always doing that” so you might also be lucky if you pop in!

Anyway, the roast. It was a fairly good bit of beef, cooked to still have some pink in the middle, although I’d prefer it a tad pinker. Roast parsnips and roast carrots were both excellent, earthy and full of flavour, very much worth having on the plate. Roast potatoes were great too; I got the sense of all good produce being used here. The gravy was at the “fine” end of the spectrum rather than superb. Oh, and rather crucially, I can’t review their Yorkshire pudding because they had run out of them. To be fair: we were just about the last table seated at 7:30 this evening. But on the other hand: no Yorkshire pudding on a Sunday roast, in Yorkshire!!!

Testament to the quality of the roast that we didn’t mind the absence too much. And it left us room for a sticky toffee pudding, another excellent specimen with a nicely bitter-sweet toffee sauce and a pudding that was moist and rich enough to stand up on its own. The roast was £20 and a three course meal would be £35ish, and to my mind that’s about right in terms of value. I can’t say (on the evidence of a Sunday roast) that the Aysgarth Falls is the best cooking in Wensleydale, but I’d certainly be happy to recommend it.