The problem with the Great British Carvery as the gods wish it to be known as is that there's actually very little that you can do at these places other than pile your go-XL-for-one-fifty plate as high with food as you can, and woof it down like an insurgent is going to fight you to the death for it if you don't finish it in under a minute. And, looking around, that did indeed seem to be the general modus operandi.
I don't usually go to carveries for this very reason but a little peer pressure meant that this was what today's menu was going to look like. We were close to this place after being too late for the China Garden lunch buffet so we checked in and got a table close to the action after about five minutes.
It would seem that before 4pm is a good time to get seated; after the lunch rush and before the dinner rush. Larger parties and more smaller parties started to arrive after we were seated.
The plates are a tenner on a Sunday and for that you get a decent portion of meat plus unlimited veg and stuff to lump on afterwards. The food tastes good enough; the pork and gammon I had was a little too chewy but, well, meh. I didn't expect fine dining.
My other half was getting some potatoes that had been sitting in oil (not sure if they should be, they just were) and as she was loading up, a member of the kitchen staff very kindly came and replenished the potato stock for her. Even better was the way they did it; instead of swapping out the dishes, they instead poured the hot potatoes (and hot oil) sloshing into the original dish, with the resulting oil splashes ending up all over my other half's top and jeans. Specks of oil are now permanently embedded in her clothing as a reminder to us of how mediocre this place is.
We had a quiet word with our table server (who couldn't be a nicer human if she tried - she was lovely) and the manager came over to hear our story. What I was expecting was for her to do a quick calculation of how much it would be to replace the clothes (about forty quid) versus what we were paying (about thirty quid) and write the whole meal off for us. But instead she just offered us free deserts, which we had ordered anyway, so the tenner that the puds cost us were removed from the bill.
And here's the grind; the deserts we ordered were the apple & rhubarb crumble (water, sugar, apple, rhubarb - microwave til lava, spread thinly across the base of a dish, and sprinkle with clumps of flour and sugar, then do nothing to it, and serve) and a delicious-sounding-but-mediocre-tasting ice cream desert (a mass of synthesised strawberry syrup at the bottom of the glass, fill to the top with cheap whippy ice cream, omit the layering of the ingredients that the menu promises, then carefully decorate with four bits of chocolate, and also omit the strawberry on the top). So we'd have complained and got these sent back anyway, as they were bland and unsatisfying to say the least.
By this time we just wanted to be gone. We prompted our server for the bill, paid it in cash there and then, and made our way out, determined to not see the inside of that place ever again. read more