The Prae Wood Arms - St Albans

Have just had the loveliest birthday lunch with family and friends. Food excellent and friendly staff made it a very special time. Thank you to all of you

Beautiful surroundings .nice to sit outside weather permitting but that'd as far as it goes.Service slow.The food definitely not up to any kind of star rating. I ordered vegetarian cottage pie with greens and sweet potato. When it arrived we had to check it was what I had ordered.Mixed greens covered over half the plate, red wine gravy a quarter of the plate and the some kind of pastry pie with a spoonful of dried cracked sweet potato on the top, tasteless would definitely not recommend this place for food. There are many good places to eat in St Albans which are worthy of your money, this was not one.

We had a really disappointing experience here when we came with friends in the run up to Christmas and they were only offering the Christmas Menu. The purpose of this menu just seemed to be a way of charging extortionate amounts of money (far more than usual) for a much smaller selection of extremely poor quality food. My partner and I both felt that our turkey Christmas dinners were appalling, especially in comparison to previous meals we’ve had at this restaurant. The turkey was overcooked, the sausage undercooked, the veg wasn’t nice and the portion sizes were small. I wouldn’t have minded the price if the food was nice but it was awful. It’s a lovely setting and they’ve done a really nice job of the decor etc but we felt completely ripped off by this experience so sadly won’t be coming back for a while and certainly not when they’re only offering the rip off Christmas menu.

Beautiful venue, as ever, but staff could risk a smile. The food is fine, but whole experience could be improved by the staff pretending to at least be hospitable

Took my brother here for his birthday hoping that as a 'gastro pub ' and a higher price point than other local venues, the food would be reliably good for an occasion. I had the pumpkin and sage tortellini to start and some of the things on their nibbles menu instead of a main. My brother had a steak burger, which incidentally is minced steak rather than a piece of steak, as you would expect if you ordered a steak sandwich. It was a brioche bun (when is this 10 year old 'trend ' finally going to die a long overdue death? The bun was soggy as hell not sure if from gherkins or 'beer onions '. Of all the things I ordered, the only thing I would order again was the crispy squid. Everything else was completely bland (pumpkin tortellini, whipped feta, halloumi the 'tomato relish ' did not at all compliment the flavour ' . When I go out for lunch and spend £55, my expectation is that the food will be, if not exceptional, at least tasty and either better than I could make at home, or on a par with this. It wasn 't we didn 't even finish it. Wish we had gone somewhere else. Very disappointing.