Food for thought...

Last week, over our Family Saturday Breakfast, it was decided that it was time to move on from our venue of choice and try somewhere new.  This was because of two reasons.  Firstly the food is not particularly good and secondly the coffee is even worse,  As I said to everyone last week, trying to accentuate a positive slant on the matter, it really isn't about the food, but more the fact that three generations of family get together once a week and talk bo**ocks for a couple of hours.  We've been doing this for almost thirty years now, so some territory has been covered on the bo**ocks front.

Anyway, we finally all agreed that our venue of choice would be a pub on the High Street.  This venue had been suggested on several occasions over the last five years, and I had been putting up quite a show of resistance after a particularly bad scampi, jacket potato and peas meal (six scampi, twenty four peas and a potato which was related to the Jersey Royal family.  Oh, and no tartare sauce).  But Mrs Jangles and The Father assured me that new management had improved the food greatly, so bowing down to a majority vote, I agreed that yes, we should try it out.

It didn't start well. The waiter, who looked like he needed a haircut, a wash and the love of a good woman, came to take our drinks order, and to explain how they 'did' breakfast. 'I'll take your order for  drinks and hot breakfast, but everything else is self service and on the buffet table'.  This was all announced in a monotone voice, and I imagined him going back to the kitchen and looking at the gas oven door longingly.

But a buffet?  This all sounded very exotic, and the menu promised all kinds of different breakfast fare.  Miss R was first to go up, as she had seen that American pancakes and maple syrup were on the menu.  Her excitement lasted about fifty three seconds, when she came back and announced that the pancakes were stone cold and resembled a stack of stale ginger nuts.  There was no maple syrup either, but the staff had very thoughtfully put small tubs of peanut butter next to the pancakes as an alternative.  I imagined the waiter mulling over the fact that as peanut butter was also an American kind of food, then it should work.  Silly man, does he know nothing..

And then, there was the major stumbling block.  We were in a round booth, and as each person ventured to the buffet, the other six had to get up/shuffle round/or simply tell the standing person to 'bloody well go the other way'..  At this point, Miss R, daughter number one and I decided on a bacon sandwich as this would mean we could sit down and have Mr Charm bring it over.  The Mother and Mrs Jangles thought this a fine idea, and suitable hot food was ordered.

I would love to tell you that the bacon sandwich was delicious, but I'd be lying, and having eaten two rashers of bacon, I decided to venture up to the table.  Finally settling on a couple of crumpets which I had to toast myself (much like being at home, and yet here, I had to pay to cook my own breakfast), I sat back at the table and suggested that the buffet, service, coffee and food were not quite what we wanted on a Saturday.

At this point, Mr Charm came over.  'Ladies, we will be shutting the buffet table in five minutes if you'd like to get anything else'.  The Mother was keen to have a pain au raisin, and Miss R offered to go up to the table and get it for her, rather than making the rest of us stand up again.

'There's none left', she said, after a quick recce.  Calling the waiter over, she told him that there were no pain au raisins left, and could he rustle up a couple from the kitchen please.

Well apparently not.  You see at this point, there was only three minutes of buffet time left, and a pain au raisin took twenty minutes to cook, so he couldn't ask the chef to cook breakfast when it was really lunchtime.

So we did what everyone does when faced with an 'eat all you like' buffet.  Taking a couple of plates up, Miss R and I brought back some blueberry muffins (three left and the size of a large conker).  These tasted much like the bacon, and the crumpets and the coffee...ie, of nothing.

It's back to the drawing board for next week, I feel...