"We visited the restaurant for our 10th wedding anniversary dinner based upon good previous reviews on tripadvisor The staff were pleasant and helpful, but the service was slow. The standard of the food in terms of both presentation and flavour was poor. There was a limited menu available because of covid, which was understandable. However, the full normal menu was on the website when the booking was made and even though we called ahead on the day, we were not made aware of the change to a limited menu, so we were immediately disappointed on arrival. The choices available were laughably basic and boring. It was our 10th wedding anniversary after all so you will understand how we felt. For example, the starter menu was basically a vegetable soup, or smoked salmon or a slab of what looked like supermarket pate served with some mixed salad and a couple of oatcakes. Basically nothing that required any preparation or cooking whatsoever, like something you might have on a picnic perhaps. Then we ordered chateaubriand for main course which per the website should have been cooked on a josper grill and served with hand cooked chips etc. What we actually got was a cold slab of poorly cooked pan fried meat with a couple of small mushrooms, some hard carrots with dried parsley on top, half an unripe tomato and some poorly cooked cold frozen chips. They did knock some money off the bill (the chateaubriand supplement) as they could see the disappointment in our faces and were apologetic about the standard. There were excuses made relating to covid, but we are aware from friend's and our own experiences, that many other restaurants in Edinburgh are operating just fine so if Blackwoods can't meet it's own standards it should remain closed until it can."
