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Matthew Grant

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Posts posted by Matthew Grant

  1. 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"?

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. Ok, but we need to expand on that translation as it isn't descriptive enough. As I said, Milky coffee could be nescafe with a lot of milk. How about "15gms ground coffee, brewed under pressure to a 50ml measurement topped with milk heated to 70 degrees"? Gives me a much better idea of what I'm getting. Alternatively, lets call it a Caffe Latte.

    This isn't anything to do with fine dining, it is simply to do with a commonly used term. Moving away from Caffe latte as the example, who doesn't know what a cappucino is?

  5. For me Espresso/Cappucino/Cafe Latte etc bestow a confidence that I am going to get an italian style coffee brewed under pressure (i.e. an espresso based drink) instead of a Nescafe with a lot of milk (this doesn't necessarily mean all coffees made this way are good.). Its nothing to do with coffee snobbery. What is easier to say, "an espresso" or "a shot of really strong black coffee", what if you got 2 teaspoons of nescafe in a shot glass would you be accepting of that because thats what the description could actually be. If you want a filter coffee, ask for a fliter coffee, if you want an instant coffee, ask for an instant coffee. I struggle to believe that anybody that really enjoys coffee doesn't understand what these terms mean after so many years of them being available in this country.

    In the case of those who think it is snobbery I fully expect them not to use any foreign food terms when describing dishes eaten in the UK. No more Sushi on this board, that will be rice with raw fish thank you! No more after dinner espresso, no croissants, pot au feu, creme anglaise etc. etc. Where does the snobbery end!? :rolleyes:

  6. Don't forego everything Stein related, his fish and chips are a must in my opinion, good quality fish, beautiful thin batter and all cooked fresh. Travelled there from Fowey twice last week for them and the coffee at Bin Two (they use Monmouth coffee). Worth trying a battered Oyster at Steins, lovely thin batter, barely cooked oyster, fantastic.

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