Dining

Last night to a pub which used to emphasise the family part of its job description - family dining - but which is now putting more emphasis on the dining part - without going quite so far as the public house in Ewell where the sign advertises crustacea among its other delights. There was talk at the bar of both Whitbread and Enterprise, so it is possible that the pub was once part of the Whitbread empire, then moved to Enterprise and has now found a home with Character Inns.

Not for the first time, looking at the rather odd website for Enterprise (reference 2), one wondered what the Tories were thinking of when they thought that smashing the brewers' grip on public houses was the way forward. I suppose they were looking for a world populated by the likes of Character Inns (reference 1): there seem to be plenty of such small pub chains about but I have no idea what proportion of the market they have - it can't be that big with the likes of Enterprise and Wetherspoons knocking about. I suppose also that I am indulging in a bit of older person's nostalgia for the public houses of old, public houses which were never going to make it into the third millennium.

Back with fine dining, we did not do so well. The ambience was fine and dandy, but the grub was not.

BH went for the mussels and got a large plate of mussels in a thin white sauce, a chunk of white bread and a small bucket full of some kind of instant chips. Overall concept of meal good, but let down by execution. The bread while fresh enough was very ordinary. The mussels were quite small inside and near half of them failed to open - in our book not a good sign. They were left.

The plate the mussels came in was decorated with swirls of a sweet brown goo which I think is called balsamic vinegar: the cooks that work the dining business these days seem to be incapable of serving a meal which does not involve the stuff. Perhaps it is a European Union thing, since that is where, I imagine, most of them come from - although probably not on this particular occasion.

I went for the pork steaks, to be served on a bed of mashed potato with mushroom sauce and seasonal vegetables. The pork was quite good, but was actually pork belly and I was rather irritated to have had it described as pork steaks. The sauce was fine but there was rather too much mashed potato, which palled a little as one worked one's way through it. The seasonal vegetables were very bad - small dabs of red cabbage, what passes for broccoli these days, carrots and peas. Much worse than is usual in such places and I suspect that in this case they had been lying around in a bain marie for hours. It is quite beyond me why such places can't just have a pile of crinkly cabbage lying around, and simply drop a handful of it in boiling water each time an order comes around. I also had a small dose of the sweet brown goo. Once again, overall concept of meal good, but let down by execution.

There was a variety of desserts available, including something complicated, something of which just one of the ingredients was Eton Mess. To think that it was only a short time ago that Eton Mess was the must-serve dessert of the moment, a tribute to the Bullingdon Boys of reference 3, rather than just an ingredient in something else. We passed.

Drink: satisfactory, reasonably priced. Decor: junk yard timber with a scatter of bits and bobs.

There was an adjustment of the bill in favour of the missing mussels.

And I should add that on our first visit to this establishment we aimed rather lower and did, as it happens, much better.

Reference 1: http://www.characterinns.co.uk/.

Reference 2: http://www.enterpriseinns.com/.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/bullingdons.html.