Had a terrible meal last night and as I was a guest and didn't want to make a fuss, I didn't, so I'm going to do here in the traditional British fashion, a dolorous post-match analysis to follow a 3-0 defeat. The starter was whisky-marinated salmon, which I thought would be thin slivers of salmon, but it was big flabby chunks, and if they'd been near whisky, their hangover was a week before and they'd become beacons to sobriety in the meantime. They sat there like beached cetaceans in a broth that was supposed to whisper something other than dead whales about Japan (they offered me chopsticks, why I don't know, actual Japan is a lot closer than that broth was). Ginger, after the first mouthful, I was. I'll take one for the team though.
The main would be better, slow-cooked beef, what can go wrong with slow-cooked beef? A lot, I discovered. I could write books about the subject now. On experimentally poking the first piece, my fork skittered off in stern rebuff into a pile of sauce (not the worst thing, if you've mixed wallpaper paste with despair and bisto and left it to self-recriminate for a week or two, you'd be there, a reduction of self-loathing). There were dabs of mustard that tasted merely of yellow and the two loneliest potatoes in the world (well, they were basically reconstructed potato balls) – those potato balls were by far the best thing in the meal, but there are atomic nuclei that are larger. There were two entire baby courgette but it's if you're trying to get excited about courgette, it's time to find a new hobby. But anyway, the meat, it's time to bring in the knife. Have you ever seen the adverts where they demonstrate chainsaw-proof Kevlar trousers (I have no idea why YouTube presents these to me, I do nothing online that would identify me as a lumberjack)? I may have been slow cooking wrong, but isn't the result supposed to be tender, to fall apart if I so much look at it sharply? This piece of beef had fight in it. This was a bar-room brawler. I was forced to saw it in half while trying not to look like I was trying to saw it in half. I had become the tabletop lumberjack. Finally halfed, with a resolution of Captain Oates, into my mouth I sent it.
Then I chewed. And chewed some more. Imagine if you tried to eat an armchair and yet it didn't taste nearly that good. An epic of chewing and then I had to do that thing and perfectly judge the social moment to spit it out unnoticed and deposit it on the floor. There was no dog to attempt to chew it further, had there been, I suspect it would have handed itself into Battersea and claimed asylum
Initially, I'd been disappointed with three pieces of beef, now looking at two, I was deluged in thick gravy of elation and despair. Only two. But still two. After a tentative poke to determine it too was stabproof, I nudged over to the side of the plate, but given the general sparsity of the meal, all I had was one baby courgette to hide it behind. Needs must. That left one piece that miraculously yielded to my fork in a manner that might have been close to intended. It was the only thing to save me from having to claim I'd turned vegetarian mid-meal. It was a tempting and enticingly miraculous conversion.
On the plus side, the wine was good, but I mostly drink Chateau Sainsbury out of a box so I set a low bar (I'm not bunging the extra two quid on a Waitrose box), and they did manage a decent negroni. I wouldn't have minded but the starter was £14 and the main £40. Had I been footing the bill, the chef would have needed a vest made out of that beef to save him for the wrath of my butter knife (the bread and butter were quite nice too, but really it would take a special effort to fuck that up).
I declined the dessert, it seemed too apt a way to declare myself a glutton for punishment. I have no idea what they did with that beef. Some kind of reverse wagyu? Was the beef cooked in 1899 and stored since then? Was the cow born in 1899 and only recently died? So many questions. The cheese sandwich that my growling stomach forced me to eat when I got home was ambrosia.
