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From: Fatz
Category: Other stuff
Date: 30 June 2003
The naviety of looking forward to a sunday lunch. We began badly and things kept getting worse. Turned up at the wrong pub (a sort of mirror image in location of the real place), should have known it wasn't organic as it was full of common people.
After that most emotional of experiences: looking for a place to park the car, we made it to this middle-class mecca, the organic crown of London, the right place, overflowing with the chattering classes and copies of The Sunday Times.
The menu wasn't promising and we were curtly told that if it we couln't see it, they didn't have it. We thought to leave, a noble and correct impulse, but we stayed, for they deigned to offer some Penne and sausages for the children.
My beer was very organic with bits of crap(hopefully not literally) floating in it. But let us cut to the chase. The food. The awful food. I really have not eaten such terrible food since the last time I attempted to stomach overpriced pub food. There was for £7 ( a starter in a pub!?) some tasteless chicken liver pate with a couple of small pieces of toast. As I finished it, I noticed it had a green tinge, which I hoped was not mould.
The main courses were worse: all the food was old, like it had been cooked days ago, and was prepared with no care or talent. The vegetarians enjoyed a dish(literally for no recipe could exist for it except in hell) of a giant watery tasteless mushroom, a bit of cauliflower cheese(wihtout sauce or much cheese), and some shrivelled thrice cooked potatoes. All this awash in gravy of all things.
The meat-eaters were punished more. The desultory stick of lamb kofte kekab (£9) actually tatsted if it were rancid (organic though). The rare breed pork (£14)mangaged to be both watery and chewy at the same time, and was uniquely without flavour. The childrens sausages were exceptional: just the flavour of rotten pork combined with the texture of a substance you might use to insulate walls.Their dryness mirrored the stale crumbliness of the organic bread we had snacked on at an earlier more optimistic time.
To be fair one diner said their Melanzane was ok.
All in all one of the worst lunches in my restaurant/pub history. The only way a place like this can have survived and thrived, is through those usually demanding people who go there being blinded by its self-righteous organicness so much as to ignore the senastions of their bodies.
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