The Glass House, Ambleside Review

Overall Rating

The restaurant is very pretty and has a lovely location and ambience. Service is friendly.

The food is inedible.

We visited the Glass House in early October for lunch, and I can honestly say it was one of the most terrible dining experiences I have had the misfortune to endure.

It all seemed quite promising to begin with. Physically, the restaurant looks great. The staff are friendly and helpful and the wine list is impressive.

And then the food arrived.

Starters of prawns with chorizo and beetroot with goats cheese were edible enough, although these simple dishes would have been more difficult to get wrong than right.
This underwhelming start to the meal turned out to be the highlight - the main courses were genuinely inedible.
I should make clear at this point that my partner and I are very keen foodies and the very opposite of fussy eaters. As such, I cannot remember the last time, prior to our lunch at the Glass House, that I literally could not bring myself to eat a meal which was in front of me.
My partner had a roasted chicken breast with mustard mash, while I opted for a gourmet style burger on focaccia.
My burger arrived literally swimming in a very odd sauce which was tooth-rottingly sweet and extremely overpowering. The burger itself was so over seasoned with various herbs (plus a very strange taste which I couldn't identify as anything beyond soap) that there was absolutely no hint of beef flavour left. So sweet and hideously flavoured was the sauce that I was actually unable to stomach it, and since everything on the plate was liberally doused in the stuff the entire meal was inedible.
My boyfriend's meal was similarly over-flavoured - the mustard mash had such an enormous amount of mustard in it that after a few mouthfuls he couldn't taste anything at all.


I have no idea what is wrong with this chef's palate. Perhaps the two cigarettes that he smoked outside the restaurant (in full view of the lunchtime diners) in the space of an hour didn't help. Or perhaps he has some strange disorder which prevents him from tasting flavours which stop short of having to be labeled "industrial strength". Either way, judging from our experience he is most certainly in the wrong job.
I fear I will run out of adjectives if I try to further express my feelings for the Glass House. I sincerely hope that the management realises sooner rather than later that their restaurant can be as pretty and as friendly as it likes; ultimately it will be judged on it's food. And at the moment, that food is appalling.

Stay clear.