Curshaws - now named The Cat again- is a lovely place to eat and drink. The atmosphere is very relaxed and the meals are unique and great tasting. However, the bar staff are not the quickest, and on a couple of visits they have had to apologies for running out of wine glasses- giving customers their wine in half pint glasses. It is a lovely place but the attention to detail can be an issue.

Stopped here for lunch one Saturday afternoon. Sat outside in a very comfortable booth, can't understand why they have put those great big umbrella's up as everyone was sitting on the edge of the patio to try and get some sun! Fortunately for us we got a seat in the sun and ordered a simple sandwich and fries for lunch. Food very reasonably priced and tasty and the service excellent, have not ate upstairs for a long time but certainly the lunch in the beer garden was very good. I really like this bar, it's great in the evening when the sun has gone down and during the day in the sunshine you need to be outside as it is pretty dark inside. I like it!

The food is OK and most of the staff, despite the fact that they all seem desperately disappointed that they're not in an indie band, are charming and friendly. However, the scowling hard-faced manageress is horrid and seems to view people who want to eat and drink as a tiresome obstacle to her primary aim of sitting around gossiping with her clique and pinching her face in that Les Dawson over the garden fence way. Spoils it for me every time. Oh, and if I am in a supposedly posh place, I don't appreciate Neantherdal and sarcastic door staff: your only advantage in life is that you have more square feet of skin to tattoo: we KNOW you're "hard", you're also a bouncer in a provincial bar, so get over yourselves. That said, I actually DO like Curshaws. I like the outside bar, I like the building, I like what they've done with the new hotel part and let me say again that the bar staff are quirky and cool and I like that. If they took a leaf out of Firenze's book (which I think is owned by the same people) they'd be better. The management there are much better, despite (or maybe because) being less "manager-y". Lesson there, I think.

The service in the restaurant upstairs is extremely poor, food is ok but overpriced for the quality, eating downstairs in the pub is a much better bet, staff more helpful and the lunch menu much better value. Nice pub atmosphere.

Although we had visited for a drink in the bar many times since "Curshaws" became "The Cat", this was the first time that we had eaten. The food was great from the starters of mushrooms in cream and garlic, to whitebait, to shrimp cocktail to a fillet steak and burgers - it was all fab, the ingredients were excellent and the portions generous. The fillet steak was perfectly cooked and so lean, the burgers were huge, one of our friends had his burger rare, you have got to be sure of your ingredients if you are prepared to serve up almost raw meat – they clearly use only the best quality!.

The only thing that grated on us slightly was the fact that our waitress felt the need to remind us that the tipping rules had changed recently and explained the difference between adding the tip on when paying by card as opposed to leaving cash. We didn’t feel that we needed to be reminded.

That said, I would highly recommend The Cat, the quality of the food was excellent!