More than 100 of you entered our ‘Service Included’ competition (for which I asked you to describe, in 250 words, your worst-ever experience in a restaurant). Never have the entrants of a newspaper competition been so deserving of the prizes on offer, not so much because of the luminosity of the prose - although there was a bit of that - but because of the sheer hell endured in order to produce it. My God, but the things that have been done to you lot in the name of hospitality! And which you then paid for.
That was what staggered me most: that so many of you described horrible experiences at the end of which you merely reached for your wallets. Bad restaurants will not change unless you kick up a huge fuss. There are also a number of you who deserved everything you got for going into the (so-called) restaurant in the first place. As a rule of thumb, if it smells peculiar, if the matre d’ looks like the Robert Mitchum character in Cape Fear, if there is livestock in the dining room, Carmina Burana on the stereo or anybody playing an electronic organ, DO NOT GO IN THERE.
Many of you recognised that a bad experience in a restaurant is not always the fault of the place itself. Thus I loved Sharon Pemberton’s description of a jolly meal in a place in Venice where ‘in the midst of some witty retort, a torrential arc of blood sprayed from my nose, across our table and food and on to that of our dining neighbours’.
Then there are the outrages committed by the restaurants themselves: the place in Fulham, London, that refused to serve Graeme Livingstone-Wallace’s friend with a glass of tap water despite the fact that he had spent £170 on champagne; the Chinese restaurant that served Caroline Price’s partner with two scoops of margarine rather than ice cream; the restaurant owner’s dog who crapped on the floor beside Paul Glover during his meal. All of these are great tales, but they are not winners. Competition in the horribleness stakes really was seriously tough, you see.
My first bottle of Glenfiddich whisky goes to Ian Russell of Tenterden for his loving description of a bizarre meal where ‘assuming there actually was a cook, the staff outnumbered us three to one’. He goes on: ‘I immediately recognised two of them as hash dealers from the local nightclub. It took the manager and three waiters an hour to produce one small, frightened burger, a dog bowl of mussels and a retired baguette. My girlfriend ate all her mussels in defiance of the reek lifting from the hissing puddle of Blue Nun in which they lay.’ The organist - of course there was one - played the theme to The Deer Hunter during pudding and, early next morning, ‘I was cradling my girlfriend’s jerking head over the toilet bowl where the mussels appeared for an encore, having failed to eat their way out through her belly.’
Talking of mussels, Fred Sedgwick of Ipswich gets his bottle for describing the seven specimens he was served with as looking ‘like the diseased scrota of the Seven Dwarfs’. Bravo! Sue Kichenside is honoured for her loving description of a family meal at Oslo Court, a curious and rather grand place in London’s St John’s Wood underneath a luxury mansion block. Sue describes beautifully how her father, a wayward spirit who could always be relied on for a good dose of embarrassment, asked the maitre d’ if there were any empty flats in the block above because he had failed to book a hotel room. One was indeed available. ‘After coffees, liqueurs and more scotch, my father announced he was ready for bed and retired to the flat, only to reappear a little while later to ask us where his overnight bag was. Unfortunately, he came back into the restaurant in his vest and pants.’
Liz Corlett of the Isle of Man wins for a truly bizarre experience in a restaurant called The Talk of the Island which looked like ‘a chapel of rest designed by David Lynch and run by an elderly couple who should have been resting themselves’. They did, however, manage to rustle up a birthday cake: ‘a doughnut suffocating under an immense quilt of aerosol cream, with one shrimp-coloured candle flagging help’. And a bottle for Jenni Johnston of south London for her description of projectile vomiting by fellow diners at one of the capital’s greatest restaurants (which must remain nameless), who then returned, apparently oblivious, to their brandy and cigars.
But the one that stayed with me, which described the true awfulness that can occur in restaurants, was this from Ruth Atkinson. As she makes clear, there was nothing wrong with the venue. ‘My father chose Rules for our reconciliation after five years,’ she says. ‘It’s the oldest restaurant in London. I was 20, tall enough to look him in the eye, old enough to wash water under the bridge with the best bottle of red I had hitherto encountered. And then another. The long, traditional menu confirmed the existence of an England I had only encountered in Dickens. Water and wine were poured. Courses came and went with unctuous organisation. My father chewed crispy black pudding, steak à point, the liver and lights of so many splendid things at London’s oldest game restaurant. Their stuffed heads stared back as every corner of offal was put to savoury service. I finished the red as my father tackled his last lonely cheese round. I can’t report any of the flavours at all: there was nothing for me to swallow during this worst restaurant meal - the vegan daughter among taxidermy, her eyes shiny among the glass ones.’
