Samuel’s

Slowest service imaginable. The restaurant is woefully understaffed. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. Disappointing food cosidering how very long you have to wait — every table full and only one waiter kind of ridiculous. Perhaps the management used to care about this restaurant, sadly not any longer.

Samuel’s (restaurant located the Inn) is a combination of high end food, beautiful New England Charm, and excellent service. Samuels at the Andover Inn is a go –to for any romantic or professional dining experience. The wine list is to die for & the food should be featured on a cooking show. I am getting married at the Andover Inn this summer, and I cannot wait for my family and friends to experience the food from Samuel’s.

Not a place in rushing to return to ! We went for the Thanksgiving buffer at $ 40 per person for hotel low quality food. The staff booked our reservation for 5:30 little did we know the kitchen was closing at that time, so needless to say we got cold and old food we had to have Turkey and stuffing with no gravy no cranberry sauce even someone at the table didn’t get mashed potatoes because once they where out that was it. I wouldn’t mind so much if it was a regular prices buffet but for $ 40 a head I expected a bit more quality and service. Save ur money it a hotel trying to be a restaurant. This is coming from someone who owned and worked in restaurants since birth.

Good service, inspiring ambiance, below average food quality and above average prices.

Great location. Very nice bartenders especially Bobby. Flatbreads are awesome. Wine selections are great. Best place to have a seat at the bar and chill with friends. There are TVs and very comfortable bar seats. Always a nice crowd! Great customer service.

The service was unbelievably bad, almost comically bad. Waiter told me I couldn’t have a cocktail because he wasn’t familiar with it and was t sure what to charge me. Didn’t pay a lot of attention to us; kept having to flag him down. Food was good; one bright spot of the evening.

The Andover Inn sold out after the remodeling effort a few years ago. The Inn is still a perfect place to stay, but the restaurant feels like an airport café. All the charm has been lost and the food is very average. Too many good spots in andover to waste your time here.

Worst! Amazingly disappointing entrée with equally disappointing service, with MUCH better restaurants within a 15 minute drive, this is one to miss.

Sunday brunch: food OK, service horrendous. The waiter forgot to tell us about the chocolate waffles, which my step daughter would have enjoyed. After serving the entrees, they completely forgot about us and we never even got a coffee refill. Finally, we had to literally chase a waiter to get the check.

Disappointing given the surroundings…
Samuel’s is located in Andover on the lovely grounds of the Andover Inn. Given this setting, one might expect the restaurant to produce equally lovely cuisine. The ambiance and service were good and suggested that we might be in for a treat. Alas, it was not meant to be.
To start, I had the caesar salad which was pretty good but not much better than the caesar you might get a sandwich shop or fast food-​type Italian eatery. For my meal, I had the Hunter’s chicken. A small piece of chicken (thin cut of breast) grilled and drowned in a tomato based ragu, it was utterly forgettable and gone-​in-​60 seconds. The pumpkin potato mash was too liquid and had no distinct taste.
Won’t be back… ever…

What a wonderful little restaurant! Service is excellent, manager came to our table to see that we were enjoying our meal and server was so friendly and polite.
Food is amazing! I got the duck breast, I don’t even remember what came with it… Just that it was delicious. We also got the goat cheese and beets appetizer which is also delicious! My boyfriend got the haddock, I didn’t try any because he ate it all before I could even ask for a bite!
We will definitely be coming back. Dreaming of the duck until I can return!

Under duress, we had Thanksgiving dinner here with both older and younger family members. The food was lousy, but that’s basically what I expected. Meal was served buffet style out of chafing dishes. Turkey was basically deli meat, only sliced a bit thicker and covered with salty gravy. Hors d’oeuvres were very pedestrian. Prime rib au jus was under cooked, so I avoided it. Pasta consisted of ziti covered in thick cheese sauce, salty, inedible. Deserts were bought-​in; little pastries, some of them frozen solid in the middle, others not so bad, but unoriginal in total.
Service was OK; we had a private waiter for our group of 16 and he did his best to take care of us.
Cost was outrageous; $ 45.00/person without alcohol for the unlimited helpings. Again, this is what you expect for hotel food.

I’m updating the review to give it an additional star after having dinner here several more times.
The service is much better at dinner, probably because everyone is awake and going from table to table (in contrast with early breakfast).
Their bread is okay — it seems underbaked because it’s a little gooey/​spongey in texture. The butter they offer varies between different things, but I actually prefer plain salted butter to their chili oils and honey butter.
Almost everything else is much better than breakfast, but still not nearly worth the extremely inflated cost. Cobb salad is good, though the dressing is a little bit sweet. The winter salad is also enjoyable but suffers from inconsistencies. For example, sometimes I get way too much garlic and the little cheese tuille is sometimes not browned and rendered enough. I had their prosciutto-​wrapped artichoke, and that was really disappointing. It was the same canned artichokes I can get in the grocery, baked until the prosciutto got a little dry and presented with congealed blue cheese. They should have made the cheese into a sauce which would help disguise both the texture and the weird color from that comes from melting the blue into the white cheese. I might be nitpicking, but it’s these details which require much more care for the restaurant to be considered fine dining.
However, there is one thing that Samuel’s does really well — grilled meats. Their grilled chicken has always maintains juiciness and their ribeye is well executed to the correct temperature and enough rest. There’s a good balance of char. The portions have been a little bit inconsistent (though I benefitted from the giant steak lottery), but whoever runs the grill is doing a good job.
The major pro of this place is that it does a good job of maintaining electricity when there are outages. Andover electricity crashes downtown when it even hears that a storm is coming.

Would have given 3.5 (if I could) since I have given 4 some other similar restaurants in the area. Food has definitely been improved both in quality and presentation in the last year or so. The room is quite cosy except for the televisions at the bar. The back room where the main dining occurs is VERY quite, so quite that is erodes the «cosy’ factor. The one thing that this restaurant needs is a «service» upgrade. Given that the food is improving the next step is to get some wait staff (and greeter) who can rise to the quality of the food. The service is so pedestrian that I took the extra star off. Otherwise; you will find solid food in a good room but the rest of the experience might disappoint.

It’s convenient if you’re staying in the inn but honestly this restaurant is not good. The food is quite mediocre and overpriced. The service is not great. Yes thank you for letting us know that our waiter was using the toilet. We ordered the same dish several times and the quality was extremely inconsistent. The first time it was pretty good but then after that the portions got much smaller and it seemed hastily put together. They need to higher more servers and chefs.

I recently visited family in Andover and was advised to check out the renovated Andover Inn and the restaurant. My vodka martini was delicious. I wanted a lil nosh and was advised to have the Slow Braised Short Rib Parsnip & Carrot Purée, Mushroom Ragout. The bartender brought it over to me and as he put it down I noticed a hair on the plate. I handed it to him and asked if I could have it without hair in it. So he wiped it off and put it in front of me. Call me coocoo but usually they bring it back to the kitchen and make a new plate for the customer.
The short rib was not tasty and my meal was cold. Hope to have a better experience on my 2^nd visit.

Beautiful setting on an «old school» prep school campus. The presentation, atmosphere and service is excellent. For my taste, the food itself sometimes seemed to be trying too hard, which made it seemed particularly over-​priced. What was listed on the menu as soup of the day and described as «lamb stew» was watery and flavorless on one visit. The cheese ravioli on a prior visit came closer to expectations. I still have a hard time paying $ 10 or so for a hamburger, though.

I Love this place. food is good atmosphere is great. I swanky place without the crazy
Boston High prices

We desperately need some really great restaurants in the Andover area. After a lackluster start when Samuel’s opened, my wife and I decided to return last night with the hope that they had worked out the kinks and were on the way to establishing a new dining go-​to destination. Sadly, our mission of finding another local go-​to place was unsuccessful.
Starting with the martinis, we were told by the bartender that they had put together a «signature martini list». We were excited to try some. It was terribly disappointing though. My wife’s cocktail tasted like bad cold medicine, while mine had barely any flavor — it was more akin to flavored water.
Next came the salad. We got the Caesar salad and that was a bit under-​sized but good. (It’s hard to get that wrong after all.)
For dinner I wanted to try a couple of things on the menu so I ordered the half portion of the butternut squash ravioli, one of my personal favorites that I can barely resist ordering when I see it on a menu. I also ordered the mini Cuban sliders. My wife ordered the pan roasted North American salmon. I have to say that I very disappointed with the ravioli; it was very al dente — too much so — and the squash was not particularly flavorful. The sliders held promise, but sadly were also disappointing, with too many favors competing for one’s attention on the palette. My wife’s salmon was reportedly well cooked, but the «braising greens» described on the menu that accompany the dish were no where to be found. We later learned that the greens were cooked into the broth on the plate — a clear misalignment of expectations with a disappointing result.
The one saving grace for the evening was the crème brûlée desert, which we thoroughly enjoyed.
We were really sad to have found the culinary menu lacking in so many ways. The redesign of the space that they completed some time ago really holds promise, with a fantastic bar area. But it will likely be some time before we try Samuel’s again. Please guys, figure this out and get it right!

On the Andover Inn home page, there’s a link to «Samuel’s» — there’s no indication it’s a restaurant until you click (though it does say «dining» if you hover). But I really think they’re hoping people won’t notice they have a restaurant. After having had the food, I understand their embarrassment and only wish their crafty subterfuge had worked on me.
Before I get detailed, I’ve got to say that the bar would get four stars. The main bartender is personable, the drinks well mixed, and there’s always some interesting conversation and people to meet (though the crowd runs a bit on the older side — hipsters won’t find their ilk here).
But Samuel’s isn’t just a bar. It’s a restaurant, and wow, what a bad one.
I went once for «high tea» with my niece, and while the setting was very nice, the food was not. Croissants, obviously store-​bought. I think they got them at Market Basket. Hi, have we heard of scones? We told them we didn’t eat meat, but did eat fish and dairy. They seem confused, and brought out ham sandwiches. Great. A friend ate them later, and said they were just random deli meat.
Another time I went for drinks and appetizers and had the calamari, which is hands down the worst calamari I’ve been served in New England. Cold. Soggy. Overbreaded. AND Rubbery. It was really an achievement in horrible food. There was a dip with it too, and it was warm-​ish mayo-​something. Urk. Didn’t touch after the first wary taste. My husband had the crab cake, and though he was hungry, he couldn’t eat more than a third of it, it was so awful.
If you’re staying at the Inn or in Andover and looking for a bar, or live in the community and want a new watering hole, definitely go for drinks. Just eat somewhere else first.