We decided to join the AA this year and are very pleased to say we have been awarded their 4 Star rating but far more importantly, they have given us both a breakfast and dinner award. The assessor explained that B&B’s are not awarded the coveted AA Rosettes; these are reserved for fully fledged restaurants but that our food was of rosette standard. The best he could give was the B&B equivalent which is the ‘Dinner Award’. Hey, it will do us and gives official recognition to what our paying guests have always maintained, our food is top restaurant standard.

Are we pleased? You bet your life we are!!

The post March 19th 2013 – More Awards for White House appeared first on White House Gastro and Specialist Vegetarian Bed and Breakfast.

It would appear the original owners of White House sent out some undated letters to various people when they started the place some 9 (ish) years ago. One of them recently surfaced in the office of the coordinator of one of the regional vegan societies. She decided to check the web-site to see if we still existed and was so mortified to find a picture of meat, or as she put it ‘dead animal’, on one page and fish listed on the vegetarian breakfast menu, she felt obliged to e-mail to demand an explanation!

Her checking of the web-site did not go as deep as her indignation however as she missed some quite vital facts. She addressed the e-mail to the old owners, she missed the comments on the home page which clearly show we are not a pure vegetarian establishment and she failed to spot the fact we clearly indicate the fish offered is for our pescetarian guests. She failed to spot or ignored, the many complimentary comments from past customers, vegetarian and vegan included, who praise our approach and food, one is actually the coordinator of another branch of her own society. She also pointed out the obvious that some, with more extreme views, will not visit anywhere with meat on the premises, this is obvious to the point that we actually state such on our ‘Vegetarian-Vegan’ web page!

I consider myself to be pretty well balanced; I don’t take any extreme views except about extremists whom I tend to find tedious. I follow the way nature made humanity by being an omnivore but also understand and appreciate that some people exercise their right to avoid meat and some to avoid all forms of animal product, that’s their decision and I support them 100% with it.

Everyone staying with us have their views honoured regardless of their personal preferences and should this particular coordinator ever decide to come here she would be offered tea and vegan cake on arrival, soy milk and vegan biscuits in her room, an a la carte vegan menu for evening meals and homemade vegan bread and a full vegan breakfast in the morning. I wonder, if I were to stay with her, would she offer me a steak for dinner and bacon and egg for breakfast?

The post December 24th 2012 – I Have Been Castigated! appeared first on White House Gastro and Specialist Vegetarian Bed and Breakfast.

I know some time ago I had a rant about the official appraisal system for B&B’s etc but having just spent two weeks going around Scotland, I’m now really disillusioned with it.

One must assume that the grading system is the same for Scotland as it is for England, by which I mean the standards they are looking for are the same, we are after all still one country (just), yet different establishments with the same grading were totally different and most rather disappointing.

We stayed in fourteen different places in fifteen days and they ranged from one, not in the scheme yet very good, some three star hotels and some 4 star hotels and B&B’s. I was so disappointed with the inconsistency of standards that since coming home I have re-read the minimum requirements for star rated establishments to make sure I was not talking through my hat.

One 4 star B&B had no apparent booking-in procedure nor offered any form of receipt – not through the books me thinks! In this same place the lighting in the stairwell was dim enough to be dangerous and for breakfast I had a fork encrusted with someone’s left over cabbage and a cereal spoon with dried on something, that looked like pea, 4 star?, my foot. Mark you the place looks stunning on their web-site!

Only two, both 4 star B&B’s, offered any assistance with our bags. In one ‘small hotel’ we were left to struggle up two flights of narrow stairs, dragging our cases with us, whilst the receptionist, who looked a good deal less than half our age, scampered off in-front, waiting at each landing for us to catch up.

In one 3 star hotel the kettle had to be placed on the carpet, under a table, as this was the only place there was an accessible plug and the cord was too short to reach the table top. It also had a rubber hose attachment to fit over the taps in the bath with a shower head on the other end, yes this was the shower! To use it one had to kneel in the bath and hold it with one hand whilst soaping with the other, I thought these things went out in the 60’s.

Two 3 star hotels in the same group varied from filthy, with peeling wallpaper, frayed towels, noisy plumbing and a lift stinking of cigarette smoke to perfectly reasonable! What planet the assessor of the first place comes from I have no idea but the two places were simply incomparable – where is the consistency?

The levels of cleanliness varied from spotless to filthy.

How are you, a potential guest, to know which 4 star place is good and which is a dump if the grading system is so inconsistent, remember I too am a customer when I go away and if I am taken in by a system that I’m supposed to know and adhere to, well what chance do you have?

I know I have said this before but I would far rather rely on the comments of our customers, those people who spend their own money coming to stay with us and who return again and again, than a ‘tick box’ system with the opinion of only one person a year, who is PAID to visit us and where some obviously have no idea what they are doing.

The post October 22nd 2012 – What Value the Star System? appeared first on White House Gastro and Specialist Vegetarian Bed and Breakfast.

Don’t you just love hackers? Nothing better to do with their time than make a nuisance of themselves and disrupt the life and business of people who do have better things to do with their time than sort out the problems they cause.

To anyone out there who tried to book accommodation with us and was re-directed to a site where the people were wearing little or no clothes and were doing things only normally done in the privacy of the bedroom, I give my sincere apologies.

Our brand new on-line booking system was hacked and a re-direct virus added to the site code. I am told the site is constructed in a particular system which is prone to hackers. Now they tell me!!

Anyway steps have been taken to identify any rogue code as soon as it is added so the problem shouldn’t happen again.

The post October 12th 2012 – Hackers Should Be Hanged! appeared first on White House Gastro and Specialist Vegetarian Bed and Breakfast.

No more waiting for Isabel or I to get back to an enquiry, on-line checking will give you room options available for the days you want and will also tell you the total cost of your stay. You will get an instant acknowledgement of your booking and a further confirmation e-mail within hours with full details of the booking, directions, details of our evening meals and everything else you need to know.

 
Naturally should the system not be able to handle the details of the stay you want you can still phone us on 01691 658524 or send a message through the ‘Contact Us’ page and for same day bookings we still need a call; we simply hope the new on-line option will make booking quicker and easier for you.

The post August 13th 2012 appeared first on White House Gastro and Specialist Vegetarian Bed and Breakfast.

For almost two years now many of our guests have been telling us one thing, over and over again. “Wow, are you are too cheap!”

So be it, the customers have spoken and we have listened – our rates are going up. Mark you when you read this they will have already gone up!

Joking apart, we inherited the old rates when we bought White House over three years ago and have no idea how long they had been in force then. Back then it was just a 4 star place now it is 4 star silver, with a breakfast award and in all probability would achieve gold standard if the rooms were larger (see the newsletter 30th May 2012). All our costs have gone up, some by as much as 20% and regrettably, the time has come where we simply cannot continue to absorb them. The increase is modest and will enable us to continue to offer the best of ingredients from breakfast to evening meals and the best service we can.

In case you are worried, all bookings confirmed by us prior to the 17th June will be honoured at the old rates.

The post June 16th 2012 appeared first on White House Gastro and Specialist Vegetarian Bed and Breakfast.

How true old Will was when he wrote the quote above!

Every year we get an inspection on behalf of EnjoyEngland and when we took over White house it was simply 4 star rated. Naturally we asked what we had to do to get 5 stars and were told, in no uncertain terms, to forget it because the overall property was simply too small. That year we were delighted to be awarded ‘Silver Standard’ with an award for our breakfasts and since then have been working hard to get the coveted ‘Gold Standard’ on the basis 5 stars was a nonstarter.

We have added a new 20 square meter dining room with wonderful garden views so guests can watch the chicken, rabbits and squirrels gambolling on the lawn, hum, not too sure chicken actually gambol but you get the idea. We opened a new super king bedroom with a twin option and a second guests lounge with recliner chairs, have repainted the public rooms and added a la carte menus for even greater choice. We flattened and widened the driveway, lowered and opened up the entrance from the road and hung a sign so it is easier to find us and created a very large new car park needing almost 200 tons of stone chippings to say nothing of having spent ages and buckets of energy, making the garden somewhere pleasant to wander and sit, rather than the overgrown wilderness of weeds we inherited.

One guest recently said ‘If this is Silver what the heck do you have to do to get Gold?’ We wondered the same so when we had this year’s inspection, we asked. In short the answer was ‘rebuild’! It appears two of the bed rooms are too small and the balance of king to double beds is wrong so in practical terms we can never, get to Gold! This is bit like telling Roger Bannister, before he tried for the 4 minute mile, that no matter how hard he trained nor how good he was nor how fast he ran ‘they’ would never acknowledge he had actually broken the 4 minutes. Would he have bothered to pull his tripe’s out in the attempt or would have simply said, ‘what’s the point’. Demoralising in the extreme.

Re-building is obviously not a solution to the problem so all we can do is say poooo to the rating system, continue to improve everything we do and continue to deliver a Gold Level service from our Silver rated establishment!

Current Guest Rating 5.72 stars

The post May 30th 2012 appeared first on White House Gastro and Specialist Vegetarian Bed and Breakfast.

The bl@~%&!y site e-mail system crashed – again – sending messages off into the wide blue yonder, never to be seen again and certainly not to be read by yours truly. It just so happened that my IT guru was looking at traffic on the site, apparently there is something in Google tools that lets him see when the site is being visited, anyway, he was looking and saw a hit on the contacts page and fully expected a message to come through. After a couple of hours, when nothing had materialised his suspicions were aroused so he checked the system and found, well nothing! It had packed up. After a few ‘Oh dear, that’s a nuisance’ or words to that effect the found the bug and squashed it and assures me it will not raise its ugly head again.

Thank you to the two people who phoned when they did not get a reply and abject apologies to those who tried and failed and simply went away thinking we are ignorant toads.

The post APRIL 27TH 2012 appeared first on White House Gastro and Specialist Vegetarian Bed and Breakfast.

Thanks to Kavita, who phoned today to make sure of a booking, I discovered the direct e-mail system on this web-site was not working. It said it was, it gave the sender the correct message but simply failed to pass the e-mail on to me! Fortunately No 2 son (IT guru) was here for Easter so was able to get onto the problem straight away and sorted the glitch out so things are now back to normal.

All I can do is apologise to anyone who may have enquired, through the system, in the last couple of weeks and assure them they were not simply ignored, not that I guess they will be rushing back to read the news page if they think I don’t have the manners to reply to them!

We wondered why things had gone a bit quiet recently.

The post April 9th 2012 appeared first on White House Gastro and Specialist Vegetarian Bed and Breakfast.

Eating out down there is OK but we found to be a bit hit and miss. One or two of the restaurants we went to are worth giving a miss next time but some of the others were stunning, we even pushed the boat out with a Michelin star place in Dorchester and well worth the effort (and expense!) it was too.

We are back, several pounds heavier and with even more liver damage but also with lots of new foodie ideas which we intend to play with over the next few weeks, so look out for new Michelin inspired items appearing on the menus shortly. Don’t panic, they won’t be Michelin star prices!

The post February 9TH 2012 appeared first on White House Gastro and Specialist Vegetarian Bed and Breakfast.