It's all just one big restau-rant...

Wednesday 29 April 2009

Breakfast at The Betjeman Arms

I've not had a proper holiday in about a year - so have decided to have one despite the risk of letting things slip a little at home that I need to go away. First stop was an extended weekend with friends, eating vast quantities of rather nice curry and a bit of roadkill - and then impulsiveness took me and I bought myself a Eurostar ticket.

Right now I've just had breakfast at the Bejeman Arms at St Pancras, watching the trains glide in and out, rather excited at the prospect of actually getting on one. With a bit of luck my bicycle is already half-way to Paris by now. It was a reasonably reasonable breakfast however what points they gained with the tasty sausage they completely lost with the bacon which was utterly dried out and a bit like cardboard, only crunchier.



The service however was provided by a very pleasant, smiley and well spoken young lady who when informed of the state of the bacon first offered to fetch more of it and then got me a free cup of coffee instead. I suppose it's not free really as she has thereby swung me into leaving a tip.

In summary; great atmosphere, good service, bad bacon.

Sunday 5 April 2009

#piemob

There is a new anarchistic culinary passtime going down in Manchester. Piemobs are impromptu twitter-organised outings to eat pie of a Friday lunchtime. Preferably with mash, peas and gravy.

Cup in the northern quarter gets a bit of a bad rep on the intertubes for lacklustre, disorganised and unfriendly service however they do do Pieminister pies which while not exactly made on the premises are always very passable. Sadly as a mob it was a bit of a mess as a number of people bailed out leaving only three of us.



A couple of weeks later a second sitting was organised at the Bay Horse, just a few doors down Thomas Street from Cup. This time our mob counted thirteen and the pub was even warned of our impending arrival by one of the twitterers. However come 1pm their pie selection had got rather limited. There was some kind of thai-fish pie and a vegetable pie. They may have been home made but neither were really up to the mark particularly when the blackboard had various interesting sounding gamey pie items on it which were not available to us. The food all came out very haphazardly, pies followed later by gravy followed by peas followed (once we'd pretty much eaten all the pies) by chips. The peas were really the only saving grace being minty and made of gently mushed garden peas rather than processed-to-death marrowfat ones.

The bar seriously needs raising here - so if anyone has any particularly good sources of pie in central Manchester please do leave a suggestion in the comments, or call it on Twitter using the #piemob hashtag. If we don't get any good ones we might have to abandon it all and have #falafelmob instead.

The Governor's House - AVOID

Yesterday I suggested we might go out to some kind of little festival type thing in Chorlton but instead we went for a rather poor pub lunch at the Governor's House in Cheadle Hulme. The food was seriously rubbish with horrendously overdone steak, nasty sauce with the children's spaghetti and meatballs (soundly rejected in favour of stolen chips) and was really not worth the cash. If we weren't hungry and they hadn't made us pay up front it would have been a walk-out job. Don't even bother going there.