Billy Winters — Restaurant in England

We drove down to Weymouth on Thursday 29th August and once we crossed onto Chesil Beach it was like driving into another world.

This is sailing Country. At least it's a place for all forms of water sports from Paddle boards, Kite surfing, Canoeing, and sailing to fishing and diving.

Everywhere we looked there were people engaging with the water, Kids were paddling, dogs were chasing sticks into the shallow water and people were sitting around on the pebbles.

On a beautiful sunny day like Thursday it was like being in California. It had that Surfer Vibe. It was like a set from Scoobydoo.

We stopped for lunch at a place called 'Billy Winters' which was a typical Beach Bar offering drinks, cocktails and food, primarily to folk's who wanted to sit outside though there were so many people many were forced in doors.

The place was obviously popular and it had its fan base but having eaten there I would suggest its more about the venue (right on the beach) and Cocktails than the food, which at best was rustic.

My wife chose Squid Rings with Fries (£8.50) which was a brave call as it can be fantastic if its fresh and cooked correctly. (Not to be confused with Calamari which is a different beast).

However, if it's old or overcooked, it can be like chewing an inner tube. Unfortunately she had a combination of both on her plate.

I went for Bubble and Squeak (£6.50) with a fried egg and two strips of Streaky Bacon.

This was good, the bacon was really tasty, the egg was cooked just right and the Bubble had just enough greens and Cabbage to make it authentic. My only complaint was the size. It wouldn't feed a two year old. It was tiny.

The other thing we found problematic was the cutlery which was made of wood. The wooden knife wouldn't cut the bacon and the wooden fork wouldn't spear the chips, luckily my wife found a solution. She used them like Chop sticks and she was fine.

I guess we will all have to make some sacrifices if we are to deal with Global warming but we need to engineer better cutlery if we are not gonna starve.

We washed this down with a pint of Soda and lime at £3.60 each. Thats a lot of money for some thing that is basically fizzy water.

It was a fun place if you ignore the crowds, the queueing and the 30 minute wait for food which wasn't very good when it came, though the Fish and Chips did look good.

The facilities are Ok but the view is great, You can sit here and watch the water sports for hours. Well, two hours to be exact. That is the time you are allocated in the car park They give you a 'FREE' ticket with your receipt which you have to display on the windscreen.

So the moral of the story is: If you want to hang out in Billy Winters Bar, make sure you have swimming trunks with deep pockets because it...

Sadly, after hearing many great things about this place we had a very disappointing breakfast visit today. We were a table for 4 and all locals on our first visit here. It started well as the place looked amazing. Had a great vibe about it and really quirky. You could obtain a free pass to display in your car window for free parking and the views across Weymouth harbour from the cafe are always stunning. No denying it’s a fantastic location.

The young fair haired waitress from Halifax was an amazing waitress. One of the best, most friendly attentive waitress I’d ever come across. She was brilliant.

We were the 2nd table to arrive that morning. The food however was not great. 2 of us ordered eggs royale, one ordered eggs Benedict and my hubby had fish and chips. It had been about 25-30 mins after our order was taken that we were informed there was no salmon so couldn’t do the eggs royale. It took about 30 mins and an empty cafe to realise there was no salmon in the fridge. Really! Two gents walked in after we’d ordered our food, making them the 3rd table in that morning, yet they ended up getting their cooked food about 15-20 mins before us. That annoyed us big time! The Americano, latte and cappuccino were ok, but just ok. It wasn't great coffee. When the breakfasts finally arrived all the poached eggs were rock hard and were luke warm (we had 2 eggs each on the egg meals). How difficult is it to poach an egg !! When asked how our meals were, we did mention this to the lovely apologetic waitress, who kindly offered us complimentary coffees and cake. Clearly very embarrassed. Again it’s not the best coffee, but was ok. 3 of us had the raspberry and white chocolate sponge as our complimentary cake, and all 3 of us left it as it was stale hard dry sponge that had clearly been hanging around in the cake chiller too long. Awful. Very disappointing visit. It’s put us off going again. £12.50 for eggs Benedict with rock hard Luke warm eggs….not a pleasant experience when eating out is an expensive luxury these days. I can see why they insist you pay the minute you've ordered your food now….so you can’t refuse to pay when the food is less than satisfactory! I found it hard to believe the owners also owned the Crab House across the road, where the food & chefs there are...

Was taken by friends who are local & eaten there before. Sadly they, as well as we, were deeply disappointed. The Margarita I started with should have been a warning. It had a very odd taste & was nothing like any Margarita I've ever had before (although my son's Strawberry Dawquiri was nice). The food, however, was very poor. My Haloumi burger was pretty tasteless with a strange sauce that had no flavour. The promised salad was a couple of limp shreds in the bottom of the bun. Only the fries were halfway decent. The shredded pork burger my son had was fairly empty, overly sweet & equally tasteless. The same applied to all the food ordered by the rest of our party: tasteless, small portions & generally soggy.

Decided to go for dessert. At about £8 expected at least the Knickerbocker Glory would be a treat. Can't really go wrong with that? YES YOU CAN. They were awful. Tiny bit of stone strawberry syrup at the bottom (what happened to the fruit jelly?), sickly ice cream filled with huge chunks of some kind of really sweet fudge like concrete and topped with squirty cream. That's not a Knickerbocker Glory. The cake portions the others had were very small & not worth the £3 charged.

It's a shame as our friends had been really keen to take us out to a lovely local place with good food but seems the management has changed since the last time they came. It is extremely overpriced for mediocre to poor food and their barman needs some lessons in cocktail mixing. Guess they are relying on the tourist trade rather than repeat business so perhaps don't care, maybe thinking the view is enough to detect from the poor food. Its a shame as it could be really great but if your going to sort-change customers with quality it will eventually impact. Need to either cut the prices to reflect the quality of the food or get a new chef & use the quality of ingredients the prices suggest. It may be that the lunch time menu is good but the evening food was truly below average. There are better places not far away. The view is not...