Wagners Hotel Greifen-Post in Feuchtwangen

I have to review the hotel and restaurant together because that is how we booked. The hotel is probably worth four stars and the restaurant two stars. I have therefore given three stars overall.

The hotel is full of charm and character. It is old but lovingly updated and maintained. The lift seems to be an issue, but we only used it a couple of times with no problems.

Due to age everything squeaks, from the stairs to the beds. Whenever someone was on the landing outside the room, we could hear them, so we have to assume that they could also hear us.

The sauna and pool are small but nice. I used them, but I'm not really interested, so I'm not going to go into detail. As long as you don't expect anything big, you won't be disappointed.

The restaurant was the biggest disappointment. We booked two nights with a three course meal on the second night. Having seen the restaurant in Michelin Bib Gourmand we expected this to be the best food of our trip. It turns out that was at Gasthaus Kulmbacher Eck in Schnelldorf, where we popped in for a quick meal the previous evening. One has beautiful décor and the other amazing food.

We started with Délice vom Matjes which confused us when we were presented with a strip of filo pastry with a red paste on top. We asked the waitress if we had the wrong starter, as the other option was Filoteig-Tartelette with beetroot. She very patronisingly explained to us that what we had was clearly correct and because it such a high class restaurant we shouldn't expect to recognise the dish from the description.
When we ate the food there was a clear fishy taste, but what difference there was to the other starter we will never know.

My Schäufele was very dry, as was my Sauerkraut. The sauce provided, was not port based, but was clearly the red pepper sauce that should have come with the Lammrucken. This did help against the dryness of the meat though.

The Lammrucken either came without sauce, or we were supposed to share a tiny portion between us. The waitress clearly gave me the sauce with the Schäufele though.

The desserts were poor, very poor. The granola with some fruit and yogurt would have been fine as a breakfast option, although I would have preferred fresh milk. As a dessert, it was a bit odd, and felt a bit lazy. My wife is a huge f an of desserts, and she didn't finish her Knödel. She will destroy even a halfway decent sweet, but she couldn't manage this. She didn't want my Müsli either.
They used the same decorations with no taste on both main and sweet food.

If we hadn't had high expectations based on what we had read, we wouldn't be so disappointed, but it felt like they had a high class chef quit, and hired someone else who is doing their best to make to food look like it used to.