Review: The Ship Inn, Caton (From The Westmorland Gazette)

Review: The Ship Inn, Caton

11:31am Tuesday 24th April 2012 in Restaurant reviews

THE Ship Inn, harboured on Caton's main road goes to great lengths to create a nautical experience for its customers.

Its front windows are decked out with small lantern lights to highlight the vessel, there is also quirky boat memorabila peppered around the interior – including a goldfish in a tank.

This came across as a quite depressed little fish, however, as it hardly made a move throughout my meal.

And unfortunately the ocean theme continued with the taste of the food, with salt bursting through as the main flavour for both the courses I was served.

For my starter, I decided on creamy stilton mushrooms with crusty bread (£5.75) – though when the starter arrived the bread was far from crusty. Instead it looked and tasted liked sliced bread out of a package The creamy mushroom sauce for me was over powered with salt and it meant the other flavours could not be enjoyed. But there was a good amount of mushrooms served in this dish. I did finish this course wishing I had gone for one of the other options on the menu – things like Morecambe Bay Potted Shrimps with mushrooms in garlic butter(£6.95) or smoked salmon and prawns bread and butter and salad garnish (£6.95).

Moving to my main course I was already quite salted-out but disappointingly my main – a classic mushroom carbonara with garlic bread (£9.75) – seemed to have a very similar taste to the previous dish.

But again this came out with a generous portion. My friend had a home-made beef burger with tomato relish and salad garnish (£9.95) which he said was tasty.

The waiting staff were very efficent which is always good to see and there was a friendly atmosphere created by both staff and locals.

VERDICT Generous portions but heavy on salt.

• Food: 5
• Service: 7
• Atmosphere: 8
• Value : 6