Heineken. Refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach.
Classic Heineken Advert from 1976
My kind of Aero
Anyone fancy a coffee Aero?
When I was a kid there were lots of coffee flavoured chocolate bars and treats. You may remember the coffee flavoured Walnut Whip?
Of course in any box of chocolate there were always the coffee creams… which always seemed to be the ones that were left at the end, alongside the turkish delight.
So do you miss those chocolate coffee treats? Or are you glad that have been consigned to the dustbin of history?
Grilled Sardines
I have been tempted many times to visit the Tall Ship in the docks in Gloucester, but have never really found the time. On a recent visit for lunch though I realised what I had been missing. This is a very traditional pub in the Gloucester Docks that specialises in fish and seafood.
I had initially anticipated that the “speciality” may mean a reliance on their “special” deep fat fryer. However perusing the menu and the specials showed that this was most certainly not the case. There was a wide choice of dishes, as you might expect a fair bit of fish and seafood, however there was a fair few meat dishes and a nice selection of vegetarian food.
I have found with some pubs an over reliance on the deep fat fryer and the microwave. Processed chilled dishes then reheated either in the fryer or the microwave. Looking over the menu in the Tall Ship, it did appear that wasn’t the case. There was no lamb shank for example. If you ever see a lamb shank on the menu, then be warned I would suspect a lot on that menu would be chilled meals just waiting to be bunged into the microwave.
I decided after a good long look at the menu on the grilled sardines at £8.95. They came with crusty bread and a crispy salad. I really wanted a relatively light lunch. I also wanted to try something that was slightly different to what I would normally have and I also wanted freshly cooked fish, with no chance of reheating.
The food was delivered promptly, but certainly not rushed. It certainly looked great, four whole sardines alongside a small bowl of salad.
The sardines were delicious, moist and full of flavour. Sardines can be a little tricky to eat due the bones. They had been seasoned and garnished with some olive oil.
The crusty bread arrived in a basket, there was a nice selection, it looked homemade, but I wasn’t sure how fresh it was, some pieces were a little dry.
The salad was basic, some iceberg lettuce with tomato, cucumber and a slice of orange! Now that could have been so much better.
However the centrepiece of the meal were the sardines and they were delicious.
Rum Aero
Looking over old sweet wrappers (online and for a charity quiz as it happens) I realised how much I missed out in the 1970s and 1980s on various flavours of Aero.
Rum Aero anyone?
I don’t really like Aero now, I am not a fan of Nestlé chocolate which has too much of a nutty oily taste. But coffee and rum aeros, I could be tempted.
Winter Fuel
The Dining Room at the Gloucester Campus at Gloucestershire College is in many ways one of the best places I have ever eaten at in an educational institution. They use fresh ingredients and cook the food everyday. There is no pre-processed food here, well not too much. There are usually at least three options on the menu. A recent meal was homemade Lancashire Hotpot served with mashed swede and carrot and cabbage.
Perfect food for a cold winter’s day. The lamb was very tender and full of flavour, the potatoes on the top were cooked through with crispy edges. Overall a delicious meal and excellent value at £3.10.
It’s not the best educational place I have eaten at though (and remember I haven’t eaten everywhere). I use to work at City of Bristol College in the 1990s (or as it was back then Brunel College) and they, like a lot of colleges had a training restaurant. I never use to eat there for lunch, as they did full silver service, you had to have three courses and as a result needed a couple of hours for lunch, and even back then no one had that sort of time for lunch. Then one year a decision was made to move the restaurant from a silver service restaurant to a bistro approach. As a result you could have just a main course and service speeds were much faster, so you could order, eat and pay the bill in about 30 minutes, perfect for a lunchtime in a busy college day. It was also so much nicer than eating a sandwich at your desk. The food was excellent, I remember it been cooked to perfection and seasoned correctly and delicious. There was something rather nice about having a restaurant quality meal for lunch during a busy day, had a really positive impact on morale.
Alas it was a short term venture and before we really grasped what a good idea it was, the concept was reversed. The result, we stopped going there for lunch.
I wish I had ordered that…
Sometimes when going out to eat I think about what I would like to eat, of course you then make a choice, but when the food eventually arrives, you think, I wish I had ordered that.
Of course it doesn’t always work that way, usually I am happy with what I have ordered, and sometimes I am really glad I ordered what I did, but now and again you wish you could have chosen differently.
I had a recent experience of that at Frankie and Benny’s where I had ordered the Philly Steak Bake.
My son had gone with the Spaghetti Oceana (£9.25). Spaghetti tossed in our Neapolitan tomato sauce with large prawns, clams and garlic. Served with a fresh rocket, tomato and red onion salad sprinkled with Grana Padano and half a char-grilled lemon on the side for added flavour.
This looked fantastic and according to my son tasted great.
My wife went with the Californian Pizza (£9.75). Creamy goat’s cheese, slices of fresh tomato, mixed peppers, sautéed mushrooms and red onion, with melted mozzarella on our tomato and nut pesto base.
It looked really nice and she said it was delicious and she finished it off, and there was me hoping that I might get a slice at the end.
This was one of those meals where I wished I had what someone else ordered.
Hmmm, needed more pasta
Having had quite a good experience with our last visit to Frankie and Benny’s we decided wanting to eat out again to visit once more.
I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to eat, and at first was going to go with something I had before. Then I remembered that I had decided that this year to make a noticeable effort to try out new things when eating out.
I usually avoid pasta dishes when eating out, mainly as I find that most places overcook the pasta. However as I was willing to try something new, and didn’t really want pizza, I went with a pasta dish, the Philly Steak Bake at £10.95. This is described as strips of tender steak, red onion, peppers and Philly cheese sauce, oven baked with penne pasta and topped with cheddar cheese.
Probably the best way to describe this dish is to ask if I would order it again.
So would I order it again?
No I wouldn’t!
Don’t get me wrong it wasn’t an awful dish, but it certainly was not an outstanding dish. I enjoyed the steak, the cheese sauce was a little too processed for me, however as had anticipated the pasta was overcooked! Maybe it’s just me, I like my pasta al dente, with some bite, this was very soft.
Mozzarella and Tomato Salad
This is a very different kind of dish than just a salad and makes for a nice refreshing, quite light, starter. Works well when having pasta or pizza, but I often have it as a salad amongst a range of other salads.
It’s also really easy to make. Take a beef tomato, and slice into thin slices. Doing this makes you realise how important a really good sharp knife is in the kitchen. You can of course use other tomatoes, I quite like using small ones.
Having cut your tomato, now get some mozzarella. I do prefer buffalo milk mozzarella, but this is about twice the price of cow milk mozzarella. Slice the mozzarella into slices and place with the tomato on a plate. Drizzle with olive oil, white wine vinegar and then add some freshly ground black pepper.
Breakfast, wasn’t much better…
I recently wrote about my dinner at the Holiday Inn Express and I wasn’t that impressed. You can imagine that my expectations about breakfast weren’t that high, but how badly can you cook a hotel breakfast. As it happens quite badly!
Even though I certainly don’t travel that much, I think you can tell a lot about the way a hotel cares about it’s guests by how it prepares and serves breakfast. When attending events and conferences I like to have a good breakfast so that I am set up for the day and it won’t matter so much if I miss lunch or dinner. To be honest it is also really quite nice when someone else cooks you breakfast.
Most hotels I have stayed at have the breakfast buffet model, you come down, queue, hand over your room number and help yourself. There are variations, in some places you get toast served to you at the table, at other hotels you can burn your own toast!
Once I was staying at the St David’s Hotel in Cardiff and having breakfast in your room didn’t cost anything extra! There was (at the time) no tray charge, usually hotels charge another £5 to bring you your breakfast. So I took advantage and it was a really nice breakfast, still warm too!
Attending meetings in London, I stayed at the Ambassadors hotel in Bloomsbury London a few times I was always impressed with their service and food. The first time I had breakfast, though there was an element of help yourself, if you wanted hot food, you placed your order with the waiting staff and they served you at your table. The breakfast was also very different to your typical full English breakfast.
Not so sure about the lettuce, but the rest of the breakfast was cooked to perfection and tasted delicious. They used “proper” sausages that had been grilled and not deep fried. Too often when eating breakfast the sausages have been cooked in a deep fat fryer! The breakfast I had at Bloomsbury was so very different and was delicious. This was so much more civilised than trying to fight with others around the buffet table.
One piece of advice I would give is don’t leave it too late in going to breakfast, there are two key reasons. Firstly the food is not only fresher and hasn’t spent ages under the heat lamp or in an oven. Secondly, there are usually a lot less people. The other piece of advice I would give about what time to go to breakfast is that people usually go on the hour or half-hour. Most people will say let’s have breakfast at 8:00 or 7:30, no one every says 7:48. Of course what this means is that there are large crowds, and so long queues, just after 8:00. Arriving twelve minutes before means that the 7:30 rush is over and you get not only much better service from the staff, but the experience doesn’t feel rushed and hectic.
One disappointment about the breakfast buffet are the eggs, they have usually been under a heat lamp or on a hot plate. As a result they can be dry and overcooked. I personally prefer my eggs to be freshly cooked, so nine times out of ten I ask for poached eggs, these are cooked to order, so though I have to wait, I get freshly cooked eggs.
As you might expect I am virtually always disappointed with the coffee at breakfast, so much so, that more often than not I will have tea instead!
So what about the breakfast at Holiday Inn Express in Burnley? When I arrived for breakfast, I could just walk in, no checking by staff. Probably because they were dealing with the smoke from the burning toast… I wasn’t that enamoured with the breakfast, the hot buffet was very limited, sausages, scrambled egg and baked beans; that was it, no other choices and certainly no possibility of a freshly cooked poached egg! You could also have fruit and yoghurt, as well as cereal. There were croissants and you could make your own toast. The coffee was from a machine (using instant) so I had tea.
However this isn’t the worse cooked breakfast I have had (it came close though), the worst was at a Travel Lodge in central London. So bad that on the second morning, I went out to get breakfast.
So a rather disappointing breakfast all in all.
Dinner, wasn’t that good…
Despite a reputation, I don’t spend that much time travelling and staying away from home. However the other day I found myself in the Holiday Inn Express in Burnley. I hadn’t done my homework so I wasn’t sure what was available in the local area and it was quite late (due to big problems on the M6) as a result I decided that the “easy” solution would be to eat in the hotel. When I saw the menu my initial thought was to go and find somewhere else… however it was late so I took the plunge.
It was very apparent that most of the menu items would be prepared in the microwave, so I went with the special, which was a double BBQ burger with salad and chips.
Please note that the menu said BBQ and not barbecue or barbeque. What it consisted of was two meat patties in a burger roll with onion rings and a BBQ sauce. It was served with some lettuce (no way could this be described as a salad) and chips. It was priced at £9.99 which was cheaper than many of the main menu options. When I looked at the menu, it was a combination of the choice and the price which made me think about going somewhere else.
The chips were typical mass catering chips, pre-cooked slightly and cooked to order. They were crisp on the outside and fluffy on the inside. There is a huge difference between the freshly cooked chips you get in a fish and chip shop and those that are cooked in places like pubs and hotels. The main difference is that with the chips I got that they are partly pre-cooked before been frozen. So when they cook them they fry much quicker than if they cooked them from freshly cut potatoes. I am aware that some places use these chips, cook them, and then reheat them in the fryer when the order comes in. As a result they are fried three times, which increases the fat content as well as making them more crunchy and less fluffy. It may be just me, but when I have a burger I prefer having smaller fries over chunky chips.
The less said about the lettuce, probably the better.
The burger was a real disappointment, I wasn’t convinced the burgers had even been grilled, they looked and tasted like they had been microwaved. The BBQ sauce was sticky and over sweetened.
Overall the meal was a real disappointment, but I wasn’t expecting anything special. The one thing it will make me do is do more research and find places in advance, so I don’t have to rely on this kind of place in the future.