this only hapened last week
i enjoy my food. Well, when it lets me, anyway. Stand up and be shamed, the Perdiswell pub in Worcester. Since it was my wife's birthday, and we had her friends round, and a total of five children to contend with, we thought we'd go there. it has a Wacky Warehouse thing attached, so when the kids have eaten they can piss off and wear themselves out while the grownups set to the main course and talk of the deeds of the day, or some such. Anyway, to reduce the staff workload I had to fill in an order form for what we wanted for dinner, a bit like Argos. i'd asked the desk muppet to serve the kids' dinners with the starters, so that they wouldn't get bored. Easy? You'd think so. the starters were horrid (barbecue chicken? turkey twizzlers and a macdonalds style pack of sauce) and the kids remained unfed. Complaints came to nothing, more a sort of "sorry, didn't get that" approach. The main course was something else. I'd ordered a lamb balti. it came in a small dish with rice. In the dish was a red fluid with green bits. i fished around with a fork and recovered four solid components, three fo which were mutton and one of which was gristle, species unknown. The residual red fluid was tinned tomatoes and pepper. This does not a lamb balti make. I ate it, just to stop myself feeling hungry (not enjoyable, but I realised it could be metabolised, so down it went). A naan bread came with it, i picked it up and realised it was four or five days old and could be used to bang loudly on the table. By now the kids have missed their chance to get intoo the wacky warehouse and several have got the wrong dinners, and are going mental. I'm disgusted, and i wrote on the naan "A bit hard for my liking. 0/10, must try harder". It came back in the hands of the manager who said "Look, I don't know who wrote this, but if there was anything wrong with the meal you could just have told me" then he left without waiting for a reply, the lying monkey. Well, i refuse to apologise. Anyone who serves me a naan bread that i can write on using a pencil deserves all the spite i can summon. And while you're at it, keep your gristle in tinned tomatoes and your miserable turkey twizzlers. And if you'd rather we complained, we'd been complaining all night and nothing got done. I hope you get sacked.

On the bright side, I'd like to plug my favourite two eateries. Floodgates, Left Bank Village, Hereford. Excellent, amazing food. And for the other end of the day, Rations cafe, southern avenue industrial estate, leominster, for the best fried breakfast in the free world. Black pudding, yum.

Apologies for length, but it wanted some air round it.
(Jack Rarebit ...We like chillies, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 1:08, Reply)