13/01/08

On the whole, I try and avoid bitching about stuff here. I don't think it's a great idea to bitch too much on record. But today I'm going to have to, because last night I had the most hilariously bad meal I've had in a long, long time. This was right up there with the Nando's chilli-sauce-on-the-salad, eating-in-a-canteen-full-of-screaming-children level of badness. It was just ... god, it was just so bad.

This new Italian place has just opened near the Gerard's flat. And as the local area is pretty much devoid of anything except bog-standard curry houses, we thought we'd check it out. It was part of a chain - Bottelino's, if you've heard of it. I hadn't. Maybe if I had, I wouldn't have been quite so keen to hand over my money.

But anyway, we went. And we had trouble getting a table because they were all booked up, something I now find unfathomable. I guess they must have been people who hadn't been there before, like us. Either that, or everyone else has had their taste buds surgically removed.

The staff were quite friendly, but you got the impression they had no idea what they were doing. Twice during the evening they were in the middle of serving our table when they wandered off to speak to some other member of staff. The first time, the guy had carefully laid out our glasses and then buggered off with our bottle of wine. He's lucky I didn't rugby-tackle him.

But really, they weren't too bad. It was the food. Man, the food ...
I ordered clams and spagetti in white wine and tomato sauce. Sounded quite nice. I don't buy clams myself, so it's nice to get them in a resturant. Which makes it a bit of a shame that they apparently served me pickled cockles. You know, those cockles you get in a jar in the chippy? Now, I like those a lot. I'll happily eat them out of a plastic cup at the seaside. But there's a time and a place for everything, and they made the rest of the dish taste like brine. And what, seriously, what was that layer of orange fat doing on the sauce? I swear that was beef fat. That's the fat you get when you buy really cheap mince and make spag-bol at uni. What the hell was it doing on seafood?

Gerard ordered a four seasons pizza. I think maybe everything that went on that pizza came out of a tin. Even the cheese. We kind of helped each other out eating this stuff, and I pretty much had to scrape the topping off to be able to manage any of it. Of course, the base was burnt. As in, it was actually black on the bottom. Still it was quite nice in comparison with the topping. It's a bit much when you're sitting in a resturant thinking 'I could be eating a Pizza Hut takeaway right now'.

Then there was the dessert. Yeah, we ordered dessert. Stupid, I know. They carried on with the seaside theme - I ordered gateaux, and they covered the entire thing in that crazy-making red sauce you get on Mr. Whippy icecreams. And it had these strange biscuits stuck in it that I don't even want to talk about. Gerard had profiteroles. Now, they were just weird. They looked like balls of ice cream, and even the waitress was a bit confused when she bought they out. Turns out they did have cream in the middle, but ... well. He didn't finish them.

We were actually laughing by the end. It just seems so ridiculous - how could absolutely everything they served have been that crap? It's not like my standards are that high - I've eaten rubbish like everyone else, and we weren't exactly paying through the nose for a top-notch meal. But man, they only thing they got right were the breadsticks, and they came straight out of a packet.

So, there you go. Bottelino's. Don't do it, kids.