Keat's Kitchen

Out from the Mikado, to try the wine at the 'Mad Cow', an establishment without customers when we arrived and with no choice of white wine. The place had been a bank and had the look of a place which could get busy, so perhaps that was later.

Took a look at Daish's Hotel over the road, which had caught our eye on previous visits, but which turned out to be an establishment which mainly catered to coach parties, with coaches, as google now tells us, being very much a part of the Daish empire.

So back across the road to 'Keat's Cottage', a place which BH had noticed in magazines. A place which rather fancied itself, but which did us quite well.

Started off well by being able to offer us a gewürztraminer, or at least something involving that sort of grape. An excellent crab starter, essentially a dollup of white crabby stuff with a few light trimmings. But I came unstuck with the main course, a crab linguini ('crab and prawn linguini in a creamy garlic sauce served with fresh salad'), which was substantial but which was far too rich and saucy for me: I like my linguini to be pasta, a few bits and pieces, the whole only very lightly dressed. I should have been warned off by the qualifier 'creamy'. Nevertheless, despite all the creamy, I thought I would give an interesting sounding cake a try for dessert, but this turned out to be rather too damp for my taste. Possibly involving polenta.

The bread was entirely ordinary, appearing to have been bought sliced. Which I thought odd for a place which clearly thought it was the business.

Brandy satisfactory, from Rémy Martin.

BH did rather better with her 'pan-fried fillet of seabass with rosti potato, asparagus, green beans, carrots and homemade hollandaise sauce', although she did say that she thought that she did a better job on rosti.

Just caught the train home, with the rather pleasant and relaxed attitude of this part of Southwest Trains serving us well on this occasion. Plus there was a young Polish couple with a very cute baby - I no longer remember the sex - who were able to provide in-train entertainment.

PS: I was convinced that the proprietor was the chap who played the struggling antique dealer in Morse's 'Dead on Time', David Haig, a stalwart of ITV3 drama. But while the proprietor is also called David, I think I am now sure that he is not the same person, not least because his wife is Polish. They do occasional evenings with more continental food and I am sure we would support them if we lived nearby.

Illustration provided by google, of what the place was before it was a restaurant. There is a real connection with the poet, with an estate agent through which the property went when it was still a gift shop having this to say: 'John Keats stayed and wrote at 'Keats Cottage' in the room named 'Keats Room' for 3 months in the summer of 1819, completing works such as Otho the Great, parts of Lamia and some of his famous odes'. While wikipedia says that Otho was badly mauled by the critics and languished in a drawer for more than a hundred years, but the estate agent does not go into that.

Reference 1: https://www.keatscottage.co.uk/.

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