Restaurant review: LA TROMPETTE (Chiswick)

Pre-La Trompette, the closest I’ve come to dining at a restaurant with a Michelin star was at Chapter One in Orpington. Chapter One used to have a Michelin star, until it was stripped of it (bit of a kick in the teeth). So I was both excited and curious about my foray into experiencing how the other 1% do live!

Unsurprisingly, given the level of prestige surrounding La Trompette, the service is second to none. The moment our water jug was anywhere below a third full, it would be topped up, and the waiters were always offering us more bread (it was too delicious to turn down!). The bread, fresh from the oven, was complemented with deliciously salted butter. 

Everything about the venue was pristine, which meant it fitted in well in the salubrious part of Chiswick.

In part because the bar is so low for me, because I’m used to the attentiveness-levels of central London waiters that can most politely be described as ‘laconic’, and in part because I’m too self-conscious, but the elevated customer service in La Trompette made me a tad uncomfortable. But I don’t begrudge the waiters and waitresses that; they were doing their jobs exactly as they should have. This one’s on me.

The food was far more ornately made and lovingly crafted than Theo Randall, another restaurant of comparable price to La Trompette. For my main, I had the loin of Cornish cod, gnocchetti, chanterelles, cavolo nero and hazelnut pesto.

Bathing the cod in foam was an inspired touch; it meant the seafood felt more textured, despite not actually having much fat on it. My only gripe was that the portion was too small, but people who can afford to dine at places like La Trompette on the regular will understand that it’s the quality of the cuisine, not the quantity. And the quality of the fish was spectacular; succulent, and brimming with flavour. The fact that there was so little of it made me cherish the meal more!

Despite it not being cheap, I can definitely understand the ‘You get what you pay for’ adage about La Trompette, which I most certainly did not feel about Ladurée and Theo Randall, two other expensive London restaurants which charged handsome prices for ugly food. If you feel like treating yourself, you could do much worse than this Michelin starred venue.

Grade: A-

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Restaurant review: MASALA DABBAS (Orpington)

Having just opened earlier this month, Masala Dabbas aims to bring authentic Indian dining to Orpington, on a High Street that is filled to the brim with 'Indian' dishes that have actually been liberally doctored to appease western palates.

Restaurant review: CHAPTER ONE (Orpington)

Chapter One is basically the only restaurant in Orpington to carry any kind of distinction. It used to possess one Michelin star (was sadly stripped of it in 2014), but for Bromley, that's enough to make it stand out. I’d never been there before, but for my 27th birthday, my friend Joy kindly treated me to a three course meal on the lunchtime menu there.

Statistical Analysis of Usage of My Odeon Limitless Card

I went on a 4-hour R course last year, and since then, I’ve just been fixated with adapting the code they gave us to draw pretty graphs with, in order to nerd out over my personal interests (chiefly, films and football).

This post will be much like the one I did six months ago when I analysed my film-watching habit of 2016 across all mediums, only here, I’m just analysing the 69 titles I saw on my Odeon Limitless card with some attempts at ~science behind the graphs I present.

Review: ODEON LIMITLESS CARD

After being underwhelmed by the limited range of films offered by the (ironically named) Cineworld Unlimited card, I voted with my wallet and defected to the Odeon Limitless card as a means of watching as many films as I wanted to in the year instead.

In terms of cinemas, the venues ranged from plush, comfortable and state-of-the-art (the newly renovated Orpington Odeon is as luxurious as any cinema I’ve been to, and one of the finest things about my otherwise fairly humdrum hometown) to scummy and very badly maintained (Birmingham, where I saw Lights Out, had muck all over the floor, as well as brats watching the film who were clearly under-15).

Restaurant review: HISAR MEZE BAR (Orpington)

I took my friend Joy here last month for her 26th as a birthday present, before we watched La La Land together. I'm glad to say the restaurant was significantly better than the movie, which epitomises the song, 'Is that all there is?'

What I go to school for.

I went on an R course recently just so I could produce this rather fabulous graph, of the certificates of films I've seen, and at which cinemas, since procuring my Odeon Limitless card in July.

Statistics can be fun sometimes!

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Level 4 of my BBFC game, by the way, is purposely very very tricky. Match the film to the film which has the identical rating and short insight as it.

(Note: the short insight of the pairs don't have to be in identical order, for example, one might say 'strong language, violence, sex' and the other 'strong language, sex, violence'. That would still count as a match. Also, because the BBFC are inconsistent with 'ands', some might have an 'and' linking the reasons and others won't).

Restaurant Review: VIBE GELATERIA BAR (Orpington)

Me and my friend had an hour to kill before Bridget Jones’ Baby last week so we gave Vibe, the latest dessert parlour to open in Orpington, our patronage. (To be quite honest, there are now more ice cream places than Orpington needs. After all, the town only has a population of 15,000!)

I complained about one of Vibe’s main competitors, Cream’s, for having idiots for sales assistants, but at least the quality of their ice cream was infallible. The same cannot be said for Vibe, which was selling something as crap as this for £5.50:

It probably looks harmless, but the ingredients had a distinctly C-list taste to it, as opposed to Cream’s, where I was wolfing down my ice cream due to the moreish components of the inventions. Also, if you just peruse over the menus of the two parlours, you’ll find that you’ll get much value for £5 at Creams’ than you will here. And the banana tasted off. Just saying.

The main thing that irritated me about Vibe, however, wasn’t the below-par ice cream, but the ‘service’ (if you can call it that) that we got from the pushy waiter. Because Vibe has just opened, they were doing a deal, which was all cocktails a fiver. Normally, I’d be all over that; there are precious few things that make me happier than a good cocktail. But, like everything in life that I enjoy, there’s a time and a place for everything. A weekday where both of us had work the next day wasn’t the time for a cocktail, so we politely declined. Yet, he still kept trying to pressure us into buying one.

This man seriously needs a lesson in consent. No means NO. A fiver isn’t much money by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s still OUR money, and up to us how to see fit how to dispense the money. If we said we didn’t feel like a cocktail, he shouldn’t have been so damn persistent. Especially when, in a desperate attempt to stay relevant, the cocktails were named after films, and the Word Art job on the menu was not the most enticing: -

‘Godfather’ is one word, just saying. And maybe they should have named one of the cocktails 'Enchantress', given that if this gelateria were an actress, it would be Cara Delevingne.

Something else which irked me was that when I got my phone out to take a photo of the creation, to point out how poor value for £5.50 it offers compared to Cream’s £4.75 creation, the waiter asked me to check into Facebook, to ‘raise publicity for Vibe, as it had just opened’.

Mate, do I look like a shill to you? And even shills get paid. If he wanted me to check in, he should have said they’d waive the fee of the (crap) ice cream, or throw in something free for us. I sure wasn’t going to publicly acknowledge I’d been to this hellhole on Facebook for free. Nothing for nothing in this world, mate. Nothing for nothing.

Final part of the rant: the manager of the restaurant was working that evening, cruising each of the tables to ingratiate himself with the punters. He spent more time with tables which were larger, which is completely fair enough, as by Law of Averages, there’s more people on that table that are likely to generate word of mouth about Vibe. But when he came over to our table, all we got was a brief ‘good evening?’ and before we’d had time to give a decent response, he’d bounced onto the next table.

I am not impressed with that. We may have been but two mid-20s girls who seemed reluctant to part with our money, and sharing one dessert between two of us, but we were still paying customers like everyone else there. The manager made a huge oversight by ignoring us. I can generate word of mouth too, mate. Ever heard of a blog?

It’s probably a tad injudicious of me to keep reviewing places in Orpington, and being a Jennifer Lawrence-in-American Hustle-esque cow in my appraisals, given I can see myself slowly talking myself into being a persona non grata in most restaurants in this suburban town.

But I’m not the type of customer who takes being mistreated lying down. And when I can pop to Tesco’s and buy myself a tub of Neapolitan ice cream and dust some sprinkles on top, why would I want to visit Vibe again? My own makeshift dessert would be infinitely more delicious and substantially cheaper than the crap they offer at Vibe, and graciously not come with a side order of ‘bad attitude’.

#ByeFelicia

Grade: U

Brief reviews of two fast food places, QUALITY FISH CHIPS N KEBABS and MORLEY'S (Orpington)

Quality Fish Chips N Kebabs

I'm not sure why I willingly opted for kebabs when I was sober, but I decided to get my Sunday junk food from somewhere other than McDonald's for once (which is situated across the road from this place).

The combo pictured above was £5.90. I enjoyed the chips - chunky chips that you usually get with your fish and chips are my favourite kind, but the kebab didn't seem to have any flavour, and the salad and sauces that were added to it weren't very well distributed. There was too much in the way of cabbage and barely any onions (a much preferred ingredient).

Overall, not a big fan; don't think I'll be going back.

C

Morley's

My brother swears by this place, and as I'm always keen to give patronage to local fast food joints in Orpington rather than the big multinational companies (McDs, KFC), I was keen to give this place a try.

Quite the opposite of Quality Fish Chips N Kebabs, Morley's chips disappointed (stale, made me pine for McDonald's fries), but the chicken completely hit the spot. I wolfed mine down. 

I've since been to Morley's several times (you can get lunch and a drink for £3) and in terms of cheap, cheerful, delicious junk food lunches, it does exactly what it says on the tin!

A-

Restaurant review: CREAMS CAFE (Orpington)

As part of Orpington's attempt to make itself more attractive to property buyers, the town is undergoing something of a revamp. It now has a bright, shiny new Odeon (super-handy for me as I have an Odeon Unlimited card!) as well as a whole array of recently-constructed restaurants and cafés. I decided to give the Creams Café my patronage one Saturday evening, pre-Bad Moms.

I've been to one Creams Café before, in Wembley, and in terms of quality of the dessert, I'd say the north-west and south-east London venues are comparable. You get plenty of bang for your buck at Creams Café - the bubblegum sundae pictured above was only £4.95, and in addition to being delectable, was more than even I could hope for; I wasn't able to finish it all. 

And it's not just bubblegum sundaes they do, there's a wide range of dishes offered on the menu, from waffles to sundaes, with every ice cream flavour you could possibly want. Multiple kinds of chocolate flavours, some with chips in, some without, fruit sorbets, etc. When trying to decide on a dish, I felt, quite literally, like a kid in a candy store.

So purely from a food and monetary point of view, Creams Café certainly suffices. Why anything less than an A-grade rating, then? Well, I'm sorry to report that the quality of the service was just not up to scratch. My friend ordered both mine and her choices, and for her dessert, they brought the wrong order to our table. 

What had happened was that when ordering, she had pointed to her choice on the menu, and the inattentive sales assistant had keyed in another choice. After taking the wrong order away, they insisted on seeing her receipt, which made us very anxious, because they were treating us like criminals for their mistake. They finally made the dessert she had originally ordered, which was 20p more than the dish they charged her for. My friend offered to foot the difference, but the manager said 'don't worry, it's on the house'. 

It's not really 'on the house' when she paid for 97% of it, and had been delayed in receiving it due to the sheer incompetence of the sales staff who couldn't be arsed to listen in the first place, is it? So stop pretending you're doing us a massive favour pal.

Creams Café do a bomb sweet treat. This I'm not refuting. But if you go to the one in Orpington, I'd just warn you keep your eyes open and check that what you ordered is what the teenagers who work there keyed in. They don't seem to have much in the way of Quality Control at this place; you'll have to do it instead.

Grade: B