Nouvelle Cuisine is bollocks

The main distinguishing feature of the course, or at the very least the most contentious discussion point was the food supplied by the hotel.

Nouvelle Cuisine.

You see, this hotel is in a provincial market town, somewhere in the home counties. It thinks it's the Savoy or the Ritz, but this is an achievement it can never gain because it isn't in The Smoke. Only ridiculously overpriced hotels in London should attempt what this place did. Because only in London are there people who are rich enough and stupid enough to eat this Nouvelle Cuisine, and remark on how "marvellously presented it was dahling". It's the "Emporers New Clothes Syndrome" applied to food. However the food they served us was the abomination called Nouvelle Cuisine. Art on a plate. If I wanted "aesthetically pleasing" food then I would buy it and then frame the fucking thing. What I wouldn't do was to serve it up to 18 people on a course who were hungry because my own incapable staff couldn't do their job properly and supply any biscuits at break times.

So on the first day i selected the Roasted Guinea Fowl, with the "legumes de jour". The Guinea Fowl was obviusly a bit under nourished during it's life because it was the size of a sparrow - a sparrow in need of a good few worms. If this is the correct size for Guinea Fowl then I apologise for my ignorance....but for fucks sake give me 2 or 3 of them then! The vegetables were.....pathetic. Two strategically placed "baby" leeks - barely past the foetus stage in my view, with 2 newborn carrots the diameter of a pencil and the length of a Nokia 3330 mobile phone (someone used theirs to measure them!). As for the potato....well it was the size of a BABY cup cake, should such a thing exist. All drizzelled with some tasteless goo sauce. Oh my God! We communally sat there for 5 minutes waiting for the extra bowls of veg to arrive...but no...this was it. No starter, and this was the main course.

We had all eaten our miniature, but freshly heated Bread roll (white or "less white"), so when the offer of a second came, the staff could barely match the demand. You see , they had to go back and cook some more rolls, as they hadn't catered for the number of apparently heathen like guests who need more than 1 roll and some minute portions to survive an afternoon of performance coaching.

Get this as well - we had to pre-order the meals at 10 in the morning. Why then did the lunchtime meal of 2 courses, orange juice, bottled tap water and 2 bread rolls take an hour and a half to serve? Why was the orange juice freely available in jugs, but the water served in wine glasses, by a wine waiter, bottle in hand, cloth draped lovingly around the bottle?

The evening meal was more or less the same (allegedly it was chicken, but one guesses it was the cartoon variety such was the paucity of the portion available). Thje potato had changed though! No more cup cake for us. No - they had replaced it with what can best be described as a "skid mark" of potato.

Seriously.

It was like someone had dipped a paintbrush into the potato, wiped off the excess and then artistically brushed it over the plate in a painterly style, perhaps like early Picasso, or Van Gogh. What an absolute crock. Then there was the Cheese and biscuits. Biscuits again is a moot point here. They were of that nature, only smaller, more like Young Baby Ritz to put it in the correct parlance.

We got 7 of these alleged biscuits between each pair who ordered the Cheese and biscuits. Further orders for more biscuits were merely met with confused looks.

Yesterdays meal was a "rack of lamb", which is one of the most interesting uses of the word rack. Perhaps if the rack was new, and had been boil washed so as to shrink it to magnifying glass proportions I could accept it. Or perhaps theses artiste chefs have found some cunning method of cloning lambs into dwarf lambs. The lamb version of Mini-Me.

Pocket Lamb.

25 minutes from ordering the wine to the delivery of it. Were they treading the grapes freshly for us? Was the stuff being personally imported from the vineyards of Southern France? Someone actually had the temerity to complain about this for which they were rewarded with a bollocking from the Hotel Manager! Customer Service taken to new levels of rudeness. Our company pays £650 each delegate, you deliver shit, we complain even though it's not our money, and you bollock us! Basil Fawlty eat your heart out.

Is this what the rich and famous get when they eat in The Ivy or similar. If it is then thank God for Little Chef. It might be shit, but at least it's filling shit.

Later, Grocerjack