Dinner tonight was a celebratory birthday affair of one of the party in the restaurant that critics should call ‘laughable’.
Themed in a kind of Old English/American grill stylee the menu was fucking expensive and fucking awful.
I plumped for steak, at thirteen quid it had better be good, but I had my doubts.
About ten minutes after ordering the waitress came back to take our order again ‘just to be sure’. This was either very good or very bad, I’m sure Gary Rhodes doesn’t get his waiting staff to check twice, maybe they’re good at their job, or just don’t care.
I was tempted to change my order just to annoy, but this would have involved eating something that sounded worse than centreparcs steak. Half an hour after this the waitress came back round to tell us that it was on the way, I’d kind of guessed that, but was now worried that for the previous half an hour it wasn’t on the way at all. The incompetence was making me fear that I’d have to eat two steaks.
Over an hour after ordering and I was trying to suck the previous diners food of the laminated menu.
finally, to a sarcastic cheer, the food arrived. The steak looked ok, the side salad was the minimum about of things allowed to comply with the definition of salad, a bit of lettuce, two slices of cucumber and what looked like a bit of a tomato.
The steak was raw, now I always order medium rare because only idiots have it well done, but also because this is cool. If I’m honest, I prefer it well done, but this is what parents order. I don’t like medium rare if it’s too rare, I should ask for heavy rare, but just pointing at the menu was confusing this lot.
But it was ok, the next bit of steak was well done to a crisp, so on average I suppose it was medium rare.
I appeared to have the gristle of half a cow in my 10oz of meat, maybe I was just lucky.
Turns out, mine was one of the better steaks…