Bellbird Hotel

Went there for a meal and catch up with friends as 3 couples. We are locals. We haven't been there since the renovations were done. Nice renovations to the hotel. Excellent live band playing in new outdoor area. Drinks prices are reasonable and staff friendly. The $15 lunch menu during the week is probably ok. Before the renovations, the meals were reasonably priced, great value and a large serves. . BUT. The Dinner menu is expensive, poor to average quality and small. Most of the meals were overdone on our table. Different Kitchen Staff. They are now affiliated with another hotel in the Hunter Valley which is also expensive compared to other local pubs meals. They advertise a Courtesy Bus, but No Bus is running. A major disappoin**ent. Unlikely to go back as locals. We will stick with other pubs and clubs in Cessnock area.

Unfortunately have to give this establishment one star but if we could, we wouldn’t even rate it that highly. This establishment appears to be undergoing major refurbishment - we were not aware at all of this and nor was this made clear on booking. We would not have booked if the true condition of this place had been clear. It is effectively a building site. The photographs on *********** do not reflect the condition of this place. It is dirty. The public areas that one must use to access the one bedroom in use at time of our visit (seriously - we were apparently the only guests) are not only dirty but seriously dusty and even dilapidated. There was cable strung across the hallway and the public bar had areas taped off. Although food was apparently available, I know from my profession that for the establishment to have prepared any open food in the prevailing structural conditions would have constituted a major contravention of UK food hygiene law , if not an imminent risk to health. I do acknowledge however that Australian food hygiene laws may differ from UK or EU laws. There was no parking at the hotel despite staying on *********** that there was, we were obliged to park on the busy main road. The furniture on the verandah outside our room was dirty and fit only for the tip. There was a pair of worn socks on the corner of the sofa and dirty glasses remained uncollected on the table next to the sofa. The lock of the door to the verandah was smashed and hanging off, making it impossible to lock the door to exclude some of the noise of the road. We were incredulous that anyone would even use this area, let alone leave socks there. Our room had what appeared to be a newly refurbished bathroom that could have been nice, if only it had been cleaned prior to our visit; there were splatters of ?toothpaste in the mirror and the glass shelf in the bathroom had marks left on it from someone else’s toiletries. There was a brown large stain on the ceiling of our room ?rust or something worse. The door lock looked as tho someone had tried to chew his/her way out of the room, the door frame was splintered and all horizontal surfaces in the room were dusty. The one bedside light was so dim as to be pretty useless but on reflection this did mean that further horrors remained undiscovered. The curtains were thin and did not block out the light at all. This place is situated by a busy main road - without earplugs and eye masks, sleep would have been impossible. There was a communal kettle, fridge and microwave down the hallway but frankly they were dirty and had seen much better days. Apart from some disposable plastic cups - we didn’t touch anything else in that area. We left just before 8am having decided that it was probably best to remain unwashed than use the shower in the room. This is the worst hotel by a huge margin that we have ever stayed in. It looks like, and is, a building site and frankly is not currently fit to let out rooms. To