One of our favourite venues so far is Carey's Manor in Brockenhurst. This hotel boasts 3 restaurants on site, the Manor Restaurant, a Thai Restaurant - Zen Garden, and a French Bistro - Le Blaireau. We decided to have lunch at the latter today, and although the outside is needing a bit of a fix-up, the inside is well decorated and nicely laid out. The waiters were very attentive and friendly. Ian ordered the snails to start, and I opted for the goats cheese parcel with apple and parma ham. The snails were nice and garlicy, a bit slimy but they are snails after all. Ian enjoyed them but I think he would have liked a few more (there were 6 or 7). My starter was delicious. I'm unsure what the pastry was on the goats cheese parcel but it was light and crumbly and tasted really good. There were some fried apple slices to accompany it, and some shredded apple on the top of the salad garnish. It was well presented and went down well.
For mains, Ian ordered the duck in plum sauce, served with dauphinoise potatoes and I ordered the trout with new potatoes and a melted butter and lemon sauce. Ian is always worried about onion in the dauphinoise, so we swapped potatoes, which I was happy with because I love dauphinoise potatoes very much! Ians duck was succulent and tasty and the side order of fries that he ate most of were nice and crispy. My fish was in fact an entire fish, and I struggled to get round the bones, but I soon got the hang of it. The butter and lemon was amazing and really worked with the fish. They dauphinoise was extremely tasty.
Again we didn't have room, or time for dessert. I'm really pleased that we ventured into this restaurant. We were not disappointed and it really beat our expectations.
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