Faketown

Last week saw what has become one of our regular visits to the Duchess of Cornwall, the rather grand public house in the centre of Poundbury. A Hall & Woodhouse operation, under the patronage of HRH the Prince of Wales.

Greeted in our room by a good quality, wall mounted television, which offered us a live feed from the cameras on the roof above us, which meant that we could watch the goings on, such as they were, in the square outside, without bothering to get up.

Snap 1 - the enamelware

To start, we took beverage in the bar downstairs, in order to soak up the ambience. Table decorated with a nice bit of retro blue and white enamelware, rather different examples of which I remember from my childhood. We still have the large plate from that time, still used for baking things like apple pies and syrup tarts.

Upstairs to dine in their handsome restaurant, high ceiling'd and with high sash windows looking out over the square. I was pleased to find that the sashes were properly fitted, were well balanced and needed little effort to shut them, the evening having turned cool.

My dinner at least was an affair of sauces. Cool sauce to start, then rich sauce, then sweet sauce. Before that I had a small basket of bread, all brown and all rather stale. For some reason, despite all the loving care expended on the bricks and mortar, they cannot manage to serve decent bread, other than in toast form. Same thing last time around.

Starter was described as mushrooms on toast, with sauce. Toast too thin, mushrooms too chewy and sauce too cold - although, to be fair, the mushrooms were much better when one hit the odd bit of warm sauce.

Main course was the medallions of lamb that I had on the last occasion, noticed at reference 1, but for some reason not nearly as good this time around, despite scraping off the sauce. The modest helping of some kind of greens was fine and the little castle of mashed potato was misleadingly described as Dauphinoise.

I made the mistake of taking something called a chocolate brownie for dessert, thinking of the regular, tray-baked brownies which I used to like. This brownie was mainly a very sweet chocolate goo, covered in more sweet chocolate goo. Not very nice at all.

Maybe the problem was the wine. I started off by asking for the Chablis which had gone down well before. Access denied. Then tried for the Sancerre, slightly cheaper. Access denied. Settled for an adequate 2017 sauvignon blanc from the Sileni Estate of New Zealand.

All of this was in large part made up for by an older waitress-in-charge who really knew her stuff, that is to say how to make her customers comfortable. Along the way we learned, when we commented on the number of stairs involved in serving food to the bar downstairs, that while there was a dumb waiter, it was no use for anything except moving the empties back upstairs, as the cold draught did a very good job of cooling down hot food on its way downstairs. The hazards of badly positioned dumb waiters.

Upstairs to discover that the television in our room could manage ITV3+1 but not ITV3. I forget how much of a disaster this was. Wifi similarly wobbly - which I thought odd in a new build hotel in a new build town; one might have thought that it would have come with the finest broadband service to be had. Perhaps the bit missing is the finest to be had in Dorset: definitely out in the sticks and right on top of several very ancient monuments.

The next day, at breakfast, we had another older waitress-in-charge who really knew her stuff. She and BH discussed grandchildren. Scrambled eggs on toast for me, nicely presented but the scrambled eggs had too much milk and too little egg. Plus they were mean with the toast - although, to be fair, it was good toast, not even cold. It remains a mystery why places such as this cut corners with the materials, the cost of which cannot be a very large proportion of the total.

Heritage items included an enamelware hot water jug for the tea and small Duralex glasses for the water. These last being entirely serviceable - and something from BH's childhood rather than my own.

Snap 2 - steel work

The view from the stair well windows included this building going up behind the main square. Only slightly fake, in that steel frame buildings, some of them very grand inside and out and common enough by the end of the nineteenth century, had not really come in at the beginning of that century. Note the interesting window frames being put into the building in front of the crane.

A large extension is underway to the north of the existing town, and this may be what is visible middle left. It all looks very raw from Poundbury Lane, confusingly running along the northern boundary of the extension, but providing no access, at least not at present.

Snap 3 - fake door

One of the doors in our large and comfortable bedroom is snapped above. So while they have gone to the bother of including a bit of moulding in the door frame, they have also used the same moulded door that you or I might use in our humble abodes. Both faces have been moulded from or stamped out of something, probably plastic, then stuck onto some kind of chassis, probably wood. All neatly enough done, but definitely fake. We shall be back!

PS: the day after we left we got an email asking us about our experience. I may get around to moaning about the bread.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/fine-dining.html. If I had bothered to read this post before the visit noticed here, I would have spared myself a second helping of mushrooms and I would have remembered to ask for the sauce for the medallions to be put in a jug.

Reference 2: https://www.sileni.co.nz/. Never knowingly come across them before.