The Boatyard Restaurant — Restaurant in Kenmare Municipal District

We had what ultimately was, for me, a genuinely bad dining experience here last week. TL;DR - awful music for the atmosphere, strange and not great service, and a truly abysmally bad fish pie.

I don’t enjoy leaving negative reviews but with the prices being what they are, I feel obligated to say something. My main problem really revolves around their fish pie, but there were quite a few problems before we got to that point.

Being seated, things started off somewhat normally – we didn’t have to wait too long to be able to order. It’s a beautiful dining room with a nice view of the harbor. I don’t feel good complaining too much about this initial point, but it was frankly challenging communicating in English with our wait staff. I would normally not want to criticize a restaurant or their ESL employees for this, but I was attempting to ask about food allergens for one of our party, and it was quite clear that our server couldn’t fully understand or respond to my questions. Given the stakes of food allergies, that was a bit worrying.

On to the more substantive issues – first off, the music choice was so repellently bad that it genuinely was making our party feel aggravated the longer we sat there. They were playing a CD of some incredibly cheesy jazz covers of 2000/2010s pop music that were absolutely awful. Not only was it repellent but it killed the vibe that otherwise was set by the elegant dining room and made our dinner feel super tacky. Genuinely either jazz or just playing pop music would have been fine, but this album was bad enough that it ended up being a primary and negative memory of the night.

Second, we were served our appetizers with the server saying “enjoy your meals!”, and then … the time just passed, as we picked at our (fine) starters, getting increasingly annoyed with the music, not being checked on at all. We began to wonder if our server had just not understood that we had actually ordered more food. Eventually, well after half an hour of sitting getting increasingly pissed off by the music, we must have looked disgruntled enough that another server came over and asked “would you like the rest of your food now?” and immediately brought out the rest of our meal. I’m not sure if they were expecting us to first finish every bite of our appetizer (we had something like 50 mussels to get through and were slowing down) or if they thought we would otherwise ask for our food, but it seems our mains had just been sitting in the oven waiting. This was a baffling decision, I’ve never experienced this in another restaurant.

Finally, the fish pie – I had been to this exact restaurant five years ago and had their fish pie, a memory so cherished that I deliberately sought this place back out again. I even have a photo of the pie from back then, with a fluffy mashed potato mound topped with a bit of cheese over a delicious seafood base.

The pie I had this time was like a desecrated, pitiful imitation of that ideal. Maybe it was due to them just holding it in the oven for too long, but the top of the pie was just a flat, burnt crisp of salty cheese that I had to break through in order to get to the pie. On the other hand, a lady next to me had also ordered the pie and seemingly also got this burnt crust. There was more or less no mashed potatoes to be found, and instead inside of the inedible and repulsive crust was a similarly salty and unappealing thin stew of fish. Look, I have eaten many fish pies, cooked quite a few myself, and I even ended up trying a fish pie at another establishment in town the next night that reaffirmed my faith that they are a delicious recipe. This was by far the worst I’ve ever had, in fact, amongst the worst meals I’ve ever had and by no means was it cheap.

I really should have just returned it but honestly I was so frustrated between the wait, the awful music, the bad food, and servers who I struggled to communicate with that I just was ready to leave.

Beware any of you fellow fish pie enjoyers, this is not the...

The treatment we were given as soon as we entered the restaurant was extremely disappointing and actually quite disgusting! We were a large group, I had booked the reservation months ago and because I was 15 mins early (to a mostly empty restaurant at 4:45) I was told I’d have to wait for seating and the man at the front desk was extremely rude because I had arrived early! I have never encountered such rude and disrespectful behaviour from restaurant staff in my life!! My sister and her friend had to stand for 10 minutes even though there was a room full of free tables and seats. The male waiter did not seem to care! Then he continued to tell an elderly couple to get up off their seats and finish their drinks. He could have easily taken chairs from the mostly empty dining hall!! I couldn’t believe what I was seeing! What kind of treatment is this for customers? I’ve been to the other restaurants in Dingle as I live in the area, and I know for a fact none of them would ever dare to treat customers in such a disgusting way. We asked to change the waiter after this and luckily we had a wonderful older women and she was incredible to us! Thank god the restaurant has a women like her! Otherwise I’m sure it would have been shut down a long time ago! Everything was going fine until we went to pay the bill. The “manager” tried over charging us and blamed people that had already payed and gotten receipts on not having paid. It was a huge issue for her to realise that she was in fact wrong! I could not believe her attitude to lie about people having not paid, that had clearly paid. Even that they had receipts to prove it. She did not even say sorry. When we made comments about the rude behaviour of both the male staff at the entrance and her behaviour she said “write whatever review you want, we have the Americans coming anyway!” … utterly shocking experience. I have never encountered such a horrible dining experience in Ireland. Even another member of staff followed me to the toilet to privately apologise to me for the treatment of other staff members. Stay clear of this restaurant. There are many more deserving restaurants in Dingle that provide fantastic service and food! The Boatyard is definitely not...

We have been to 'Boat Yard' on a Thursday evening and ordered starters as well as main dishes. As starters we had the Oysters, which were fresh and very good, the prawn cocktail, which was delicious, but the portion too small for 15 € and smoked salmon on toast, which was good as well. As main dish, we had the "signature dish", the seafood platter for 3 (according to the menu consisting of the best single dishes you can order in the restaurant: seafood chowder, calamari, scallop, crab claws and battered fish) and the fish pie. Regarding the seafood platter, we expected a great platter for 3 people, but what we've got was 3 single wooden platters with tons of the fried stuff (calamari and battered fish) and very few of the fine, really good seafood stuff (1 (!) scallop, 3 crab claws, mussels), accompanied by 4 dip sauces and - way too sweet - Guiness bread. If this restaurant was a fish and chips snack bar, this platter full of fried fish and chips would be the perfect signature dish, but not in a restaurant where you have to pay at least 25 € for a main dish. Besides, the breadcrumb coating of the fish tasted like old fat that hasn't been heated to the correct temperature. We've eaten better fish in simple snack bars. Nevertheless, the seafood chowder was great get a little salty and the fish pie was good as well. A pity - we wanted to eat fine seafood but in the end got overpriced fried stuff and a huge bill (180 €...