Murphys Historic Hotel

Great restaurant to eat for fresh seafood and a great prepared steak. Although the saloon is right next to the dining room so there is a lot of bar noise during the dinner. We will be back and next time part take in the saloon fun.

Having a great time at Murphy’s bar. Bill is our bartender and he’s super awesome! The spirits are great and the atmosphere is wonderful!

Awesome historic hotel and restaurant. Vickie at the front desk is very hospitable and was so great walking us through the hotel experience.
The dining restaurant stayed open for us. Chris, Donovan, Ashlyn and Dylan were working this evening and the service they provided was awesome. Highly recommended the fried chicken dish.
Great weekend getaway.

Terribly cute hotel in the foothills where Mark Twain once tread. For the ghost-​conscious among you: It’s haunted by Eleonor (a maid), a prospector, and a child. I was hoping to have ‘spectral relations’ with Eleonor, but she never showed up. Nevertheless, our stay was swell.
Due to the historic nature of this hotel, this hotel lacks amenities you’re used to. The rooms do not have their own bathrooms, so you’ll have to use the communal (but private) showers and bathrooms at the end of the hall. I never found that they were occupied when I needed them, but your mileage might vary.
The attached restaurant has a nice outdoor patio that’s heated and has hanging lights. If I recall correctly the food was pretty solid. The serve local wines too.

It’s hard to imagine a more festive place to celebrate the winter season in California’s Gold Country than historic Murphy’s Hotel. This isn’t a 5-​star, corporate-​owned resort that will coddle you with false friendliness and bill you $ 300 per night to do so. No, here it’s all about keeping the rain off your head and the historical value of this unique place intact in a third century of continuous operation. That kind of work requires more than comfy bed cushions and complimentary mini soaps. It also means that you, the guest, accept your role in helping to keep this operation running.
Especially if you stay in the main building in one of the two rooms with Main Street balcony access (Astor or Pillsbury), you’ll get an almost New Orleans feel to the place, replete with street noises, breaking bottles, live music emanating from the downstairs saloon, and all sorts of merry-​making that makes Murphys, well, Murphys. You need to embrace the energy and indulge yourself in the magic of what happens when you open yourself up to new places, people, and experiences.
6:30 am morning coffee at the front desk allows one to start early on ski and snowshoe trips into the high country on Highway 4. To reach the snoparks above 7000 feet and access the downhill and xcountry trails at Bear Valley, or to spend some quality time with the sequoias in Calaveras Big Trees state park, bring a vehicle with good tires and pack chains for all 4 wheels. Even if you don’t need to use them — the CalTrans folks plow the road really well — it’s safe practice in a place where 2 – 3 feet of snow can fall in a 24 hour period. Possibly more.
From the hotel, you are also only a 5 minute walk away from Gold Country Coffee Roasters, great for morning or afternoon pauses in your day, and literally a few footsteps from all the best tasting rooms along Main Street and surrounding side alleys. Alchemy wine bar’s Tuesday music and $ 5 winemaker nights sound pretty appealing, too, and there are good grocery stores on Highway 4 (a natural foods one and a general market), where you can stock up on classic snacks to go with the wine and cheese you’ll purchase at places like Lavender Ridge, Hatcher, or Newsome-​Harlow.
Give yourself a new year’s challenge to spend a night in a room older than your grandmother’s last fruit cake. Come to love the little quirks and oddities of the place and be grateful that people are so good at revelry around here. Soak up some of the good Gold Country vibes and broaden your sense of what California has to offer. Hard to be a Christmas Grinch about all of that! Happy holidays have never been so historic as at Murphys. Hope you’ll enjoy the ride.

Love this place! Great authentic atmosphere with very hard working bartenders. A fun experience every time we visit, plus can’t miss karaōke on Thursdays! Breakfast is fantastic as well, get the Eggs Benedict!

Some history here. Maybe a gun battle or 7. Maybe just some drunk people.

We really enjoyed our stay at Murphy’s Historic Hotel, we could park and walk everywhere. It was our anniversary and we enjoyed dinner in the dining room and a great time in the bar. Staff was very friendly. Our room was in the new area and could use a little updating and more light, but it was clean and comfortable. We will definitely stay again.

I’ve been a fan of the Hotel for many years, and dine there on average at least 5 times a month. However, I decided to read these other reviews and felt compelled to write. It’s true, service may be spotty depending on how busy they are. NEVER GO TO SUNDAY breakfast/​brunch unless you’re prepared to wait 30 – 40 min. for food. Highly recommend their breakfast food (esp corned beef hash), but as others have noted, this is not the place to order shrimp or steak. And the only thing special about the Special Fried Chicken is the gravy. Please. Really. Can’t go wrong with the chicken sandwich or burger, and crab cakes. Gordon f*%#g Ramsey’s changes from Hotel Hell have mostly all been reversed. Too bad, I say.
Hotel: DO NOT STAY anywhere, hotel or new-​tel, on a weekend if you plan on going to bed before 2 AM or so. Seriously. However, if you want a late night party place, the Hotel bar is the place! There are a number of other motels, and a great B&B in town.
My last comment is that management needs to read and respond to reviews – I will tell them personally when I go back.

Can I please leave no stars?
I’m at a loss at how to explain how awful the bartenders are in this god awful place.
What does a girl have to do to get a bartender to notice them? I basically had to jump up and down waving my hands to get them to notice me. Every other bartender in the world knows that you work side to side and keep your eyes up to see who’s waiting. Not Kurt… he’s eyes down and helps the first person he sees. Doesn’t work that way!
The little brunette with terrible eyebrows and resting bitch face? Why are you even in the service industry? I was appalled at her attitude. She wouldn’t help any of us in our party and was basically useless. When my friend tried to close out her tab the bartender basically told her she couldn’t help her and had to go back the next morning to close her tab… then got attitude from that bartender to practically threw her card across the bar.
I’ve worked in the service industry for a long time… if I treated anyone the way I got treated I’d be out of a job.
Ps: hotel was great. Enjoyed the stay besides the bar.

Recently went to Murphy’s for a work trip and decided to stay at the Murphy’s Historic Hotel. If you are looking for the new modern cookie cuter hotel, Murphy’s is not for you, but if you value old world charm and great customer service then this is the place. Murphy’s is a beautiful town and the main strip is full of really cool shops and Wineries. When you are done wine tasting on the strip the Murphy’s Historic Hotels bar downstairs was full of very friendly patrons from what seemed all ages and backgrounds. The bartenders were tentative and knowledgeable. I also recommend eating at the bar restaurant. I order the fish and chips and it was some of the best I have ever had. If you are looking for a fun vacation spot to get away and have a good time, this is the place. I will be back!

My husband and I loved our room. we stayed in 108 newly remodled it was perfect. Loved everything about it! Thankyou for an awesome honeymoon experience, we will be back!

My wife and I just celebrated our 20^th wedding anniversary by taking the Honeymoon we never got. We wanted to stay somewhat local, so we decided on Murphys, Ca. A few months back we were up in Murphys for a day trip and got some information and pricing on some local lodging. When we decided on the Historical Murphys Hotel, we lucked out due to a buy one-​get one deal they were having. We stayed in room 308, which was renovated by Gordon Ramsay from Hotel Hell. My wife loved it! She loved the colors, the décor, everything. I loved the bed. It wasn’t like the average motel bed. It was high, full and comfortable. I would have liked to have had a bigger bed than a queen but that wasn’t an option. But its comfort made up for it. We found out that the hotel (main) IS haunted, as well as the other rooms, just not as much activity as the main. We were given a tour my the head maid and she shared some detailed personal experiences.
We will be back, and depending on our willingness to have our feet tickled by the young children, we will be staying in the newest renovated room in the main building that has its own restroom.
We loved our stay, we loved the people, and we will be back.

Avoid. Awful.
This place is a dump. I’ve tried coming up with another, less starkly uncharitable word, but that’s the best way I can describe the Murphy’s Historic Hotel.
The bedspreads are that old motel style that are not only hard to look at but that look like they’re crawling with germs even if they aren’t. Folded over two mediocre pillows the way Grandma used to make the beds.
The carpet is ancient.
The grout on the floor in the bathroom is stained. I don’t just mean gray all over, I mean you can see actual stains where someone spilled something. Nasty. The molding and baseboards in the bathroom are disgusting.
There was a little sitting table with two chairs, and precisely zero light near it. There’s not much light in the entire room: just two old bedside lamps and a light by the door. It gives the place a dull, creepy vibe.
There is a couch that looks like something you’d see dumped on the side of a rural two-​lane road.
The hotel says it offers free WiFi, and they say it’s «spotty» in the «new» part of the hotel. Well, if one defines spotty as nonexistent, then yeah, there’s free WiFi. If you want to walk over to the lobby and do your internet searching there, then cool. If you prefer the convenience of looking at the internet in your room, forget it. And you will get zero sympathy from the front desk; they appear not to give a rip about much of anything.
On the up side: It did not smell the way it looks like it ought to smell and the beds were sleep-​able. The noise from the road was noticeable but not terrible. The TV worked and there was hot water.
On a side note: we were here on a Saturday night. Don’t expect to get to sleep before midnight. Very many loud and drunk people partying in the parking lot.
Next time, I’ll try to find a VRBO or something. Or maybe sleep in the truck; that would have been better.

Hmm this is probably a 2.5 star type of place. We wanted to stay in the hotel during the week thinking it would be quiet and we could do some ghost hunting. It was Jan 1^st so you would think everyone would be home nursing their hangovers but nope, the bar was quite noisy until their closing time of 1 am. We had been warned about that so that was fine but a couple of things bugged me. When we checked in we weren’t told where to find the shared shower facilities. We found them but it would have been nice to have a bit more info. We were told that the old building did not have any modern amenities but I didn’t realize HEAT was a modern amenity? I mean even in the 1850s you would have had a fireplace or a hot brick or something to keep the room warm. There was a small (like desktop sized) space heater in the room. We plugged it in and it was noisy so it drowned out the sounds of the bar below. We waited patiently for the sounds of the partiers in the saloon to die down and watched a movie on the laptop while we did so. Unfortunately after the bar closed the employees decided it was time to run a very loud vacuum cleaner. This I had an issue with because that went on until about 2:30, plus whoever was working down there was whooping it up and talking loudly. By that time, husband was asleep and I was too annoyed to do anything but go to bed.
The room itself was nice enough. It could have benefited from a larger heater (those little ones use up SO much energy. I would suggest something like the flat Eco heaters which can be painted to match the walls. they’re ugly but they do the trick). It would have been nice to have shades on the windows or thicker drapes to act as a buffer for some of the sounds coming from the garden outside. It would have also been nice if whoever was working in the morning had used their inside voice at 7:30 rather than yelling down the hall as it woke me up.
We did get to do some investigating in the room and the conclusion was that there is a very soft spoken female there, as well as a man. There might be one other man or woman but it was hard to make out what was being said and I haven’t reviewed all the evidence yet. This is not a creepy haunted hotel by any means. the spirits here are friendly and a bit shy.
*edited to add-​we just watched the Hotel Hell episode and now I’m totally confused. The lobby was redone on the show but when we checked in it looked like the «before» pictures. What happened to the big «Murphys» light up sign and dark blue walls?

Never disappointed! Nothing is lacking or sub-​par here. Every time we come here we’re happy with our experience. Service is great, quality is great, ambience is great! Nothing I would change except the frequency of which i get to go :)

Came with my husband to celebrate our 1 year anniversary. Bread was great. My husband has been looking for a good steak for a long time and he finally found it. According to him «melted in his mouth». When we thought was done our server Morgan came out with a Sundae and on plate they wrote 1 year. made our night. We loved everything about the place.

Wow. DEANNA the lady who checked us in soo sweet. Thank you
Options of historic with shared bathrooms ughhhh-​no —or modern, which is a traditional room nothing fancy but accommodating! This bar is the only one that Rocks everywkd I was told! We are talking digital juke box that doubles as a photo booth! Great bar outside (small) and the the outside dining area casual, very nice. Complimentary coffee in the lobby in AM bakery w/​coffee across the street if you must. Close walking to wine tasting rooms
This lilt jewel is a great date wkd get-​a-​Way
Take the road up for a drive to Alpine lake hike to Lake or drive a lilt further to mosquito Lake, beautiful drive, stretch area — a lawn chair to enjoy some serenity, take a sand which from the store in Arnold w/​fruit, water your good to go! Limited cell Svce!

Attended a wedding held outside on the patio of this beautiful property. Very cozy and intimate. The staff was very friendly and efficient. The gentleman at the bar was friendly and accommodating even as guest became more lively.
We are breakfast here too. That was a less enjoyable experience. It took quite a long time to get our food and the eggs were greasy. The place seemed understaffed for a Sunday. The corned beef hash and gravy were delicious. The coffee was good too. A big plus was the homemade salsa.

This is an original building. I love it!
I’ve been to the bar & the restaurant. The bar has very reasonable prices on drinks. But that’s coming from someone that lives in the bay. It’s probably a normal price!
Dinner was good. Our waiter was Jason, he was very nice & funny. He pretty quick witted.
i think soon it will be on Hotel Hell with Gordon Ramsey, we were there for the recording. I hope that they do well. The staff seems pretty great.
My gramps goes there often. I like that the locals go there all the time. It’s a great place to visit.