Club Bar & Grill, The Westerwood Hotel, Cumbernauld, Scotland

I travel away for work fairly often, and a recent restructure has extended my patch to Cumbernauld in Scotland  for the first time. I always try a few different hotels if it's an area I'll be returning to fairly frequently, and if nothing comes up trumps I end up back in a Premier Inn (reliably good, clean rooms/reliably good breakfast options/reliably rubbish evening food). First up in the Cumbernauld area on recommendation of a colleague - The Westerwood. It's one of those big corporatey/conferencey/golf spa type places but not all in a bad way. The rooms are rather lovely so if this were a hotel review blog it would rate quite highly. Unfortunately it's not.

The Club Bar & Grill (big, bland, corporatey, conferencey) was serving meals to an array of lost souls wondering what they were doing there on a Monday night. Or at least I was anyway. On perusing the menu I was foolishly lured in by the description of 30 day dry aged Orkney beef. I should have known better. These corporatey,conferencey,golf spa type places often have menu descriptions that flatter to deceive, I know this from experience. And so it proved.

Steak: rubbish

Rib eye steak, chips and tomato (£19.95) and an accompanying house salad (£2.50) were rubbish in just about every way. The steak was a damp, greyish, flabby specimen, with little flavour beyond salt. It had been cooked unevenly despite being uniformly thin (the alleged 200g weight seemed unlikely) so that one side was medium-well whereas the other end was the requested rare. The chips looked promising, but had somehow gone horribly wrong. They were a lovely deep brown colour, promising crispness, but in practice offered greasy limpness. I have no idea how they managed this, the only thing I can think is that they were fried to well done earlier in the day and then refried in oil that wasn't hot enough. The tomato was pointless. The side salad appeared to be dressed, as it had a sort of glossy sheen to it, but I've no idea what with as there was no discernable flavour. The bag of leaves it came from had probably been open some time as the cut ones were browning at the edges. Any redeeming features? No problems with the service and a glass of Malbec was fine.

A pretty terrible experience all told. If that steak was burning a £20 hole in my own pocket I would not be a happy bunny. Onwards and southwards, tomorrow night I'll be in Newcastle.

Oh and apologies to anyone reading this and wondering why I seem to be anywhere but the M62 corridor. I'll be spending a lot more time in Manchester & Leeds over the next few weeks so you may find something of interest if that's your area!

3/10

The Westerwood Hotel & Golf Resort
1 St Andrews Drive
Cumbernauld
G68 0EW
http://www.qhotels.co.uk/hotels/the-westerwood-near-glasgow.aspx