I probably should have gone home after the starter. It wasn’t that the pork belly wasn’t sufficiently rendered down. Or that the honey and sweet chilli glaze was cloyingly saccharine. It was the hairs. I counted seven of them on a three inch square slab of meat, reminiscent of a cheap pork scratching. It showed a worrying lack of attention to detail to a quality piece of meat that deserved better.
And therein lies the issue. The New Inn singlehandedly destroyed the notion that if you start with quality ingredients and treat them well, you’ll end up with a quality dish. Every single piece of protein was well sourced, though it was slaughtered by a lack of care that ran astonishingly throughout the food and into the service. There was a main of chicken that was allegedly stuffed olives and sun dried tomatoes, though we managed to find little evidence of either due to the massive clove of garlic that dominated the cavity. And don’t even get me started on the tagliatelle that it was served on. Underseasoned and undercooked about sums it up.
As if this car crash of a meal wasn’t enough to make you want to bang your head repeatedly against their solid wooden tables, the shambolic service certainly will. There were long pauses between courses and equally long time gaps between serving main courses to our table. Thirty minutes between the first burger and the last dish reaching us; twenty minutes between a side dish of cauliflower cheese and the main course it was supposed to accompany. Fine if you find yourself in Frankie & Benny’s on a busy Saturday afternoon, completely unacceptable in a relatively quiet gastro pub in Harborne paying up to twenty quid on a main course.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom. A cajun chicken burger finally reached the table in good nick, as did an accurately cooked rib eye, but by then it was all too late. As appetising as the desert menu looked we were all defeated, unable to risk further disappointment to a meal that promised much and delivered little. For a pub that goes to a considerable length to serve only the best meat, The New Inn has some way to go before the final product reaches the anywhere near the same standard.
5/10
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