La Sapinière, Center Parcs Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire.
Open to non-guests on Saturday evenings (08706 009 900). Meal for two, including wine and service, £90
There are lots of good reasons for booking a holiday at Center Parcs; dinner isn't one of them. Yes, there is something distinctly chilling about these vast holiday villages, with their forest settings abundant in wildlife so tame you can't help but wonder whether it's been drugged. True, both the 1,000 or so identical 'villas' (which are really chalets, but they can't call them chalets because that would sound like Butlins) and the gargantuan indoor 'Sub-Tropical Swimming Paradise' recall nothing other than The Truman Show. But hey, anywhere that can get me on a bike has to have a lot going for it, and my kids enjoyed themselves, which is what matters.
Then again, our kids didn't come out with us for dinner so what do they know? We'd already had a dismal experience at the bistro Chez Pierre, one of a clutch of restaurants that surround the village square at the heart of the Center Parcs outpost in Sherwood Forest. There, one lunchtime, we were served one of the nastiest bowls of mushroom soup any of us had ever tasted: watery, underseasoned, and grey as a winter's day. (The service was so poor, they forgot to bring a spoon.)
Just across from Chez Pierre is La Sapinière, which Center Parcs describe as the 'culinary jewel in our crown', and which is open to non-guests on Saturday nights. Well chaps, you should demand a refund because this jewel is paste. The food is clumsy, amateurish and in places just plain nasty. Which is a shame because the staff, though hardly polished, are genuinely warm and obliging. The problem is everything you put in your mouth. There were the insipid olives and the orange juice that tasted as if it was made from concentrate, and the amuse (because grown-up restaurants have those): a cup of - hurrah! - mushroom soup that was a clear sibling of the one endured the day before.
The menu - a wipe-down affair - carries descriptions in overwrought English and overwrought French which didn't make the dishes read any better. I know, for example, that I should have tried the roasted sea bass with beetroot dauphinoise and horseradish cappuccino, specifically because it sounded so unappealing. But I couldn't face it. Instead I started with a scallop ravioli on a 'raft' of asparagus with coral beurre blanc, and didn't fare any better. It was just the one, meagre-sized and overcooked scallop between two sheets of thick, flavourless pasta, on three thick spears of asparagus of pensionable age, the whole slathered in a tasteless white froth. My wife's starter was an open tart of goat's cheese and caramelised red onions which had been grossly over-sweetened. She said it was 'really, really unpleasant'.
Main courses were no better. For Pat, underseasoned lamb chops, on lumpy saffron mash with an indeterminate sauce. For me, a rip-off of a Gordon Ramsay signature dish: venison, with buttered spinach and bitter chocolate sauce, which was just plain clumsy, a nine-year-old's copy in crayon of an old master in oils. And none of this is cheap.
At this point we should have had pudding, but Pat was feeling unwell (though it genuinely was a bug and nothing to do with the food). This meant I wasn't able to try the 'Mousse au chocolat blanc et au Baileys' with - and I'll do this in English - 'a deep fried chocolate tear'. When even the confectionery is crying you know it is time to leave.
