Churchill’s Port House

Andrew M. managed to score us a reservation here on a Thursday night after his first reservation had been messed up due to the website having the wrong hours. To make up for it, they gave him the new booking and offered a free glass of port for everyone. He invited us along, so we got to go and experience it for ourselves.
The menu isn’t extensive. There are a few bar snacks and some tapas on the menu. They also have about nine ports on the menu, and about five wines. All of them are from Churchill’s. We tried the roasted marcona almonds with rosemary and thyme, a cheese board, a meat board and pretty much every one of the tapas they had listed on their menu.
Unfortunately, the food really didn’t do it for me. The cheeses were nice and so were the meats, but the only one of the tapas I really enjoyed was the garlic prawns (and to be fair, they are pretty hard to screw up). The burger was too dry and way too salty for my taste. The salmon tartare just tasted weird. The grilled chorizo was tough and chewy. The salad was okay. The pork belly confit wasn’t really that exciting and my piece was pretty much all fat. The filo-​pastry baskets were dry and the filling had a really unpleasant texture. The desserts were also mediocre to average.
The ports were kind of boring to be honest. Nothing really jumped out at me as amazing. And they were quite spendy. The wines we tried were also expensive and average at best. The best thing there was the chocolate pairing with the ports, but the chocolates were made at Paul A. Young, not here, so it’s a bit of a sad affair when the best item on your menu is just something you get from someplace else.
The service was average. I found myself asking quite a bit for water and the wine we ordered seemed to take ages to arrive. One person tried to tell us there’s not much difference between a 10-​year Tawny port and a 20-​year Tawny port (I’m pretty sure he’s severely mistaken). So overall, just not impressed with anything here. And that saddens me, because I was really hoping for a place to go to get really amazing port, but instead just ended up with average port and lackluster food.