Matthew Grant

Very disappointing meal on Saturday. Some dishes were under seasoned and often felt one dimensional. I felt everything was crying out for something else in the dish e.g. acidity, salt, sweet etc. Service was annoying as well, we never got offered any bread and when we asked for some cheese our American waiter told us that the liquor licence finished at midnight, looked at my watch and it was only 2245, the waiter then asked us whether we thought we would be able to finish by midnight, predictably we were paying up less than an hour later. He also presented the pheasant with the explanation "because its game season, or as you call it in the UK "bird season"..." Since when did we call it "bird season"?

Is the Gregg Wallace comment a joke?

A bit late now but during San Fermin Mcdonalds and Burger King are probably your best bet! I say that only half in jest, if you're drinking half as much as the locals you'll want something to soak it all up and trying to get any significant amount of food down your neck is difficult without resorting to fast food.

Nice report. Alona Berri closed a few years back? Unless of course it has reopened, this might account for its decline :-). It was just round the corner from Bar Bergara and looked closed earlier this year.

That's a pretty decent summary of my experience as well. It feels like a soulless restaurant, better suited to terminal 5. Waitress literally repeating the same lines for every table. Wine waiter completely thrown when I asked him to leave the bottle on the table "I'm afraid we can't do that in this standard of restaurant" (I bit my tongue and to be fair he did leave it 5 minutes later after checking with a manager) . Nothing particularly bad or memorable apart from the pigeon which has to rate as the most flavourless bird I have ever eaten.

I'm not sure why we're even debating why some 3 stars aren't on the top 50 list why some on the top 50 don't have 3 stars. The Michelin guide is ....wait for it.....a guide. The Top 50 is a PR exercise which occasionally has some correlation with some of the best restaurants in the world.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cast-Black-Steel-Baking-Stone/dp/B0001IWYFA

Yes, a more contemporary version of the old Roux Brothers series would be very welcome.

i wonder, i don't pay too much attention to scores due to the way some food inspectors interpret things like sous vide but when they start scoring zeros its definitely time to pay attention. They keep mentioning his Michelin star yet the restaurant doesn't hold one, poor form in my opinion!

http://www.scoresonthedoors.org.uk/business/hengist-restaurant-kent-186852.html Their food hygiene rating is Very Bad = Almost total non-compliance with statutory obligations! Doesn't seem such a great deal now!

Westminster are denying that they have banned rare burgers, they simply ordered Davy's wine bar to stop serving rare burgers due to the way they were prepared: http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/bloody-burgers-are-being-taken-off-westminster-menus-in-chaos-over-rare-meat-8410585.html Interestingly enough for me a good burger needs to be cooked more than rare in order to get the significant amount of fat it should contain to start melting. I'm not saying they should be cooked through but rare rarely works for me with a burger.

Me too, Spanish coffee has never been great, still too much UHT milk being used

This thread is discussing the renaming of Italian style coffees. I understand you being miffed about english dishes being translated to French but you can't have it both ways!

So your advocating taking somebody elses heritage (Italian coffee) and renaming it as if it was our own?

Are they all visiting Debenhams?