The more eagle-eyed among this page's regular readership, should such a mythical-sounding entity actually exist, will notice that the photograph accompanying this week's review isn't the conventional one of the restaurant's interior, but rather a shot of its frontage. So before I explain this one-off break with tradition, let's plug this visual gap as best we can.
The tiny strip of Dorset coastline known as Sandbanks is, as viewers of a recent three-part ITV series may recall, the fourth most expensive area for property on the whole planet thanks primarily to such picturesque vistas. For the slew of long-forgotten minor rock stars, retired jewellers and Portsmouth FC footballers who dwell here, a home wedged between the natural harbour on the one side and the perfect, sandy beaches and expanse of English Channel on the other is compelling reason to spend millions on procuring a home here.
Arriving in the car park opposite Cafe Shore one pleasingly drab and drizzly day (I love the melancholy of coastal resorts out of season), I couldn't at first see why the lure of Sandbanks kept Harry Redknapp from leaving the manager's seat at Portsmouth FC for the one at Newcastle. All I could see, in fact, was a truck belonging to 3663, market leader in delivering pre-prepared meals to catering outlets, and the metaphorical alarm bells duly clanged.
Yet once we'd been taken through to the restaurant, the sight through enormous windows of a huge sky, of boats wobbling gently from side to side and of Poole Harbour opposite made at least some sense of such demented house prices. With its zebra-print chairs, wiggly, spermy little fairy lights and mauve-dominated colour scheme, the room may be a little too directly modelled on the sort of film set on which Joan Collins might have anticipated a rigorous seeing-to from Oliver Tobias in 1976. But there was no gainsaying the splendour of the view.
The excellent service evident from the bar - where sweet young women brought my two-year-old niece, Ellie, crayons and paper, and smilingly mopped up her orange juice puddles - continued when a request for tap water was uncomplainingly met with a jug laden with ice and slices of lemon. For all the Eurotrashy horror of Sandbanks itself, I said to Noel as the literal alarm bells of an ambulance filled the air ("Oh God, no," he observed, "a footballer's wife must have chipped a fingernail"), I think this place might actually be all right.
Then my starter came, and the full horror began to unfold. The arrival of a crayfish risotto within five minutes of its being ordered wasn't encouraging, given the conventional cooking time for risotto rice, and so it proved. Even more disconcerting than the Batchelors Savoury Rice twang and cloyingly garlicky afterkick, not to mention a langoustine with the texture of porridge, was the astonishing heat emanating from this calamity. Only a microwave, or possibly one of those particle accelerators that synthesise the first nanoseconds after the Big Bang, could render rice hot enough to blister one's tongue.
After sampling the risotto, and then gargling for several minutes with the iced water, Noel was content to return to his potted shrimps and salmon, which were fittingly buttery and came with good, crunchy toast. But his main course was another shocker, in which tough and gnarled slices of pork loin nestled in the middle of a mound between onions and potato, the ensemble having a notably boil-in-the-bag aura. As for my "monkfish in the style of coq au vin", again unnaturally hot, this neatly combined the texture of overcooked fishfinger, an all-purpose, Marmitey and congealed gravy and a stale, oily potato cake that, together, put us in mind of galvanised trainer. Less coq au vin, it seemed to me, recalling that 3663 vehicle, more coq au van.
It was from this apparent nadir that things took a sharp southerly lurch. When the waitress asked if we'd enjoyed our dishes (somewhat needlessly, perhaps, given the quantity of food that had been left untouched), I asked her if they had been cooked from scratch on the premises? She thought they had, she said, and soon enough the chef appeared, wearing a soiled white jacket but without the meat cleaver, to insist - with amazing good grace and dignity in the circs - that the only pre-prepared items he uses are croissants and chips. I am happy, of course, to take him at his word.
After that, we rattled through some mediocre puddings and scarpered. And while it came as small surprise when the restaurant later refused permission to take a photographic seascape, I think this was an error of judgment. For while Cafe Shore may remain a destination joint for the WAGs of Portsmouth FC and the moneyed of Dorset, the solitary thing in its favour so far as prospective punters whose tastebuds haven't been cauterised (by the way, anyone interested in that procedure need only order Cafe Shore's risotto) is the glorious maritime view that this gruesome paean to the victory of money over sense so richly undeserves.
