Anywhere this close to newly fashionable King's X, with only two tables taken on a Friday night, should ring alarm bells. From the get go it was clear we were in for a comedy, if not gustatory, treat. If John Cleese as Basil Fawlty and Gordon Ramsay were clustered in the kitchen with a video camera rubbing their knees and plotting some form of post-divorce double act money-spinner they couldn't have done a better job.
The venue is cosy, kitschy and stuck in the 80's. The bad 80's. The middle class 80's. When normal people with normal jobs had started to eat out semi-regularly but my God you ate what you were given and didn't ask questions.
And questions were verboten hier. A deliberately Teutonic phrase for a casual French bistro. And the two questions seemingly most verboten were "why has my main course arrived 40 minutes after everyone else's?" and "could my food be cooked until not raw?".
Trust me, it's a long time since I've been somewhere that has deserved a slagging off like Bistro de la Gare, but my God did they strive to serve (or not in one case) one of the worst dining experiences I've experienced this year.
Of the main courses; one was allegedly pretty good (but then I defy you to fuck up a Caesar Salad), two were acceptable, three were pisspoor and another, chicken based, meal failed due to being slightly bleedy in the middle... My pisspoor processed ham pizza, its semi-raw base reminiscent of bad paratha, was only cleared because it was shared two ways with the poor soul deemed unworthy of dinner. I did mention we were one main down didn't I? That's slightly unfair, it actually arrived as we stood up to leave and so they tried to charge us for it anyway...
It could have been worse I mused, watching the elderly woman next to us gamely give a stiff upper lipped response as she struggled on with not one, but two fawlty racclette machines in a row. At least I'm confident I've got a good few years of dining ahead of me. Gamely pushing a curly slice of cheese round a lukewarm hotplate, she must have felt like a pained participant at the last supper.
I'm not going to describe it further. Suffice that others suffered so that you don't have to read more