Four of the best dog friendly places to eat in Bath

We arrive at The Scallop Shell with a dog and find the fish in a bath. It is a proper roll-top affair, filled with ice, serving a more immediately useful purpose than most of the city's celebrated bathing arrangements: the possible contents of our lunch are there to inspect. A restaurant confident enough to show its ingredients before it cooks them is a promising place to begin. That it welcomes the dog indoors makes it considerably more promising on a wet afternoon.

Eating well with a dog in Bath takes us beyond the expected Georgian dining room. The grand façades tell only part of the story; there are good meals in buildings that once served the city's working life. Our preference is The Scallop Shell for a meal built around one clear speciality, the Marlborough Tavern for a more expansive dinner, Green Park Brasserie for a sociable evening and the Locksbrook Inn for a substantial meal attached to a walk. Each admits dogs inside, although a busy music night and a quiet lunch ask rather different things of the animal under the table.

1 The Scallop Shell

22 Monmouth Place, Bath, BA1 2AY.

The fish display holds our attention before we settle downstairs, where the open kitchen keeps the business of lunch in view. Our eyes move from the catch to the menu, matching names to the fish on display. It makes the decision more engaging than choosing an anonymous fillet from a printed list. We keep the dog beside our chairs, away from the route between kitchen and tables, and consider how far to depart from the original intention of haddock and chips.

For Garry Rosser, that apparently simple meal has a particular history. He and his wife Lisa grew up next door to one another, and met again while he was working as a fishmonger at sixteen. In a 2026 interview with The Bath Magazine, Garry recalled Friday fish and chips as the eating-out luxury of his childhood: the visiting van, or a trip to The Merry Fryer at Bear Flat. His subsequent career took him through Bath restaurants including FishWorks, then a farm-shop fishmonger's and takeaway, before the couple opened The Scallop Shell in 2015. He understood the appeal of this meal before he entered restaurant kitchens, and brings a fishmonger's interest in what is available to cook.

The order stays with the familiar fish-and-chip dishes. Haddock comes with chips, mushy peas and tartare sauce; on the published sample it is £23.50. This is a restaurant bill, and anyone arriving with a takeaway budget should know it. At weekday lunch, however, the £15 Fisherman's Lunch changes the calculation: a daily choice of main, peas, tartare and a mug of Yorkshire tea, served between noon and 2.30pm. We put the mug beside the plate. Fish and chips with tea has its own small satisfaction; there is no need to turn every lunch into a celebration.

There is ample reason to look beyond batter. The sample lists Lyme Bay scallops with garlic and herb butter at £16.50, and grilled pollock from Newlyn with lemon, capers, herbs and potato salad at £26. We would choose the latter when we wanted fish to remain the centre of dinner without another plateful of fried potatoes. The ports and markets attached to dishes are useful information, although the catch changes daily: treat a named fish as a possibility, not a reservation. The potatoes receive their own attention, cut here each day in a dedicated room with a viewing window. Few restaurants invite us to inspect the preparatory life of a chip.

The dog welcome extends beyond a fair-weather terrace. Well-behaved dogs are admitted, and the booking system lets us request downstairs, upstairs or the Little Scallop, the partly open-air space on the first floor. Upstairs is described as quieter, but is reached only by stairs; the ground floor is the accessible choice. Area requests are not guaranteed, so speak to the restaurant if stairs or a particular position would determine whether the meal works. Wine, beer and cider are available alongside our less expensive mug, and the sample menu adds a 10 per cent service charge. Sunday is lunch only. For a first visit, the weekday set lunch leaves room in the budget to investigate the scallops.

2 The Marlborough Tavern

35 Marlborough Buildings, Bath, BA1 2LY.

After the Royal Crescent, we turn towards the Marlborough Tavern with the appetite of people who have walked uphill rather than been carried. This was once a meaningful distinction. The pub's history records sedan-chair men and servants among its early customers: the people whose work allowed Georgian Bath to look so effortlessly at leisure. A sedan chair was an enclosed seat carried on poles by two men. Thinking of it while climbing a Bath street makes the job description rather more vivid. The tavern has been recorded as a pub since 1800, long enough to have fed several quite different versions of this neighbourhood.

We take the dog inside. The welcome applies in the pub, with water bowls available, and the room has the reassuring combination of a working bar, local art and a fire for colder weather. The courtyard gives us an alternative for staying outdoors after a walk. That freedom lets us plan dinner around the menu, instead of making the whole occasion conditional on whether an outside table survives the forecast. Book for a meal at busy times and mention the dog, particularly if it needs more floor space than the phrase 'under the table' tends to suggest.

Head chef Filip Tencer's menu encourages us to begin with something smaller than a conventional first course. We put lamb koftas with baba ghanoush, feta and pomegranate beside plaice goujons with curry mayonnaise. The aubergine purée in the first dish gives the saltier cheese and lamb a softer companion; the goujons take the curry-and-fish partnership familiar from the chip shop into a plate for sharing. At £8 and £9 respectively, they also make a more interesting beginning than ordering bread and then waiting for the serious food. We divide the small plates between us before turning back to the grill section.

For a main, our eye goes to the £26 hanger steak. The £34 sirloin is the same listed weight, eight ounces, and both come with chips, tenderstem broccoli and peppercorn sauce. Hanger is a working cut from the diaphragm area, valued for flavour rather than the effortless softness associated with fillet; we would order it pink and take the saving. A £19 jackfruit and coconut curry gives a vegan diner a main of their own, rather than a negotiation about what can be removed from someone else's plate.

The drinks list rewards a little of the same attention. We choose Bath Ales Gem, listed at £5.80, while the wines run from £28 bottles to serious Burgundy. There is no obligation to follow them all the way there: the £35 Les Pierres Dorées Pinot Noir is a more moderate bottle to consider with lamb and steak, and a non-alcoholic sparkling Riesling appears alongside the sparkling wines. The food bill carries a discretionary 10 per cent service charge. With no pub car park, we would make this part of a walk through the upper city, using Charlotte Street parking if driving in. By the time we return to the wine list, the dog is beside the table and the difficult part is choosing how long to make dinner. This suits a meal with friends who want more than a quick pub lunch.

3 Green Park Brasserie

6 Green Park Station, Bath, BA1 1JB.

In the former booking hall, we have the dog beside us, a pizza order and no train to catch. The room is sufficiently large to explain why somebody once thought a restaurant might work here. Its survival needed more than attractive proportions, however. When Andrew Peters took on the business in 1992, he was following a succession of failed restaurants; he later told The Bath Magazine that it took until 2005 to reach a stable break-even point. His son Alex joined him in 2016. There is persistence behind the easy-looking business of putting food and drinks on these tables.

The station itself opened in 1869, according to Historic England, and lost its passenger trains in 1966. The restaurant occupies the old booking hall; sister business Bath Pizza Co uses the platform space beyond. We have come for the way these spaces are used now. Dogs are welcome inside the brasserie and on its two covered, heated terraces, giving us a choice of company and shelter instead of a single outdoor table labelled as an accommodation. We would put a dog in the reservation notes and request a position away from the busiest route. On a music evening, distance from the performers may matter more than distance from the door.

The shared menu for the brasserie and Bath Pizza Co takes us past a considerable selection of garlic breads to the pizzas. Our choice is the Spicy Spinaci, £16.95: ricotta, spinach, artichokes and red chilli over tomato, with mozzarella and Parmesan. It is the combination we favour for a vegetarian who wants dinner rather than a pizza made conspicuously emptier by the removal of meat. There is also chicken schnitzel with creamed mushrooms and fennel rémoulade at £18.95. We would come for this sort of casual supper, keeping a hand free for a drink and leaving elaborate courses to another evening.

Alongside our pizza comes Wiper and True's Kaleidoscope, a Bristol pale ale listed at £6.80 a pint. For an earlier visit, the weekday offer of selected pizzas and a qualifying drink for £15, ordered before 6pm, is the better bargain. Pepperoni is among the eligible pizzas. That would be our order on a budget; there is more to enjoy in a pub evening than proving how extensively we have read the menu. An optional 10 per cent service charge is added.

Music changes the recommendation. The current programme runs from 6.30pm on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, mixing acoustic music with jazz, funk, soul and swing. We can enjoy the idea of an unhurried dinner without asking a noise-sensitive dog to enjoy a band. For that dog, choose lunch; for one already comfortable in busy rooms, book an evening table and enjoy a place that makes eating out feel like going out. We finish our pizza without the usual calculation of whether to move on somewhere else. The live programme is part of the appeal, provided our companion is happy to share the room with it.

4 The Locksbrook Inn

103 Locksbrook Road, Bath, BA1 3EN.

At the Locksbrook we take the longer way to lunch, following the water before turning towards the pub. The path shares its practical usefulness with cyclists, so this is a walk on a lead, with attention to what is coming behind us. Beside the inn, the water runs through Weston Cut, an artificial channel built as part of the Avon Navigation in the 1720s to get boats around the river's obstructing bend and weirs. This is the Bath of moving goods rather than promenading visitors. The picturesque pause in our walk began as a piece of transport engineering.

The inn was formerly the Dolphin, a name retained by the adjacent bridge. The cut created the island later known as Dutch Island, after the Dutch workers employed in its brass mills. Their water-powered hammers turned brass into sheets for such things as cooking pots. We stop by the bridge and look towards the water, trying to place the working mills in this now much quieter scene. It also gives a walk beyond the centre an actual destination, rather than an arbitrary turning point that sends us back hungry.

Lunch takes us inside; the waterside garden can wait until later in the afternoon. Dogs are permitted throughout the pub, including the bar and garden, provided they remain on leads and are not left unattended. That is a particularly helpful policy for a mixed group: the person with the dog need not negotiate a separate version of lunch. There is parking on site, including accessible spaces, though ordinary spaces are first come, first served. The broad welcome has a qualification of a different kind. This is a pub with sports screens and an interest in Bath rugby; ask about the day's fixtures if a cheering room would spoil things for the dog.

St Austell now owns the pub, and its beers appear in both glass and pastry. The steak, beef shin and Tribute pie, £17.50, comes to our table with chive mash, vegetables and red-wine gravy. The attraction is a full pub dinner at a sensible price: mash and vegetables arrive as part of the order, leaving us to consider the beer instead of calculating supplements. The mushroom bourguignon version is vegan and £17.75, served with crushed potatoes and tarragon gravy. We would choose that over assembling a meal from vegetable sides. The menu has enough alternatives for a group without requiring everybody to share our interest in pies.

For something smaller, the three-small-plates-for-£20 offer is worth a look. We favour salt-and-pepper squid with gochujang mayonnaise alongside buffalo cauliflower and grilled halloumi: a spread that gives two people something to pick at while deciding how much walking remains. Gochujang is the Korean fermented chilli paste whose sweetness and heat make it a useful partner for a fried coating. Proper Job and Tribute are the regular cask beers recorded by the local CAMRA branch, and we would begin by looking at the handpumps rather than ordering an elaborate spritz after the walk.

The Locksbrook makes an easy destination for a walk that deserves more than a sandwich at its end. Its broad dog policy and reasonably priced pies are more persuasive reasons to come than any claim to gastronomic grandeur. The Scallop Shell remains our choice when the meal itself is the destination. Here, we would leave time for the route home along the water, keeping the dog close when the bicycles pass.