Le Petit Manoir des Bruyeres

Having driven from England, we were looking forward to staying overnight at this hotel. Pre-booked a week prior through hotels.com. Sadly arrived at 16h15 (1h15 after check-in opened) only to find NOBODY there... and I mean nobody! So this is a version of a B&B run by the people living there but whom do not understand that running a business means making yourself available for paying customers. The result in our case was to wait 40 minutes, have Hotels.com call repeatedly only to have no joy... answerphone says only a little English spoken... I am bilingual French and it made no difference... we left having to find another hotel. The place is very remote and circa 8 from Auxerre. Could not say more about the place other than the fact the front gate if locked forget trying to access humanity. Not impressed!

This is NOT a hotel. It is a B&B. It does not serve food in the evening and the nearest restaurant is several miles away. In order to get in you must ring the bell in the lane and a gate will eventually be opened for you (don't arrive in the dark). You will have to carry your own luggage up the stairs to a room without air conditioning, without TV, without internet and with a tiny wholly inadequate bathroom. I did this and found the room unacceptable so I lugged my luggage back to the car and departed (I discovered that they charged me the overnight fee later but it was worth it to stay somewhere with adequate facilities).

There wasn't a warm welcome here but the elderly and not too agile host wasn't 100%. We were shown to our room which was old fashioned and quirky, we knew it was a bit quirky from the photos. However it was very clean and well presented. It was raining which didn't help. So we sat in the dismal, all purpose and large salon in front of an unlit fire to relax and read, which was okay but a bit depressing in the badly lit room! We asked for wine and found that the only white was Chablis, which after tasting we passed over. They had a reasonable (though rather pricey) selection of local reds and we the St Amour Medalle d'or. Which proved to be acceptable. We were the only ones dining that night and it truly seemed as though the cook had 'found' some ingredients in the fridge and made a meal of them! Starter was v. small scallops in a sauce, then pork medallions in a sauce with such dreadful reheated vegetables. I didn't have the dessert which was an individual apple pie, plonked on the plate, no cream, creme anglais or ice cream! And it was most certainly from the supermarket. I can say it was terribly disappointing and without doubt the worst meal we have had! Of course it does depend on individual taste, however overall we would have preferred a less embellished bathroom and bedroom, and just a little more style and taste in the general furnishings and more up to date bathroom fittings. Of course this is a small Manor House which in fairness had many interesting features but none of this managed to enhance our stay. The price of the room was 180.00 euros including a very bread and cake oriented breakfast which was not bad value. The dinner was 46 euros each coffee 3 euros extra. At any price it was awful and we felt quite frankly 'conned' with the dinner.