Some white rosed bugger has given me a cold. I’m all bunged up and feel like my head is full of stewed apple.

In other news, the wife and I dined at the Woodlands Restaurant of the Burntwood Court Hotel last night. It was in aid of Mitch’s 19th birthday. The wife’s boss was there. As was the wife’s boss’s wife and a chap from Albania called Artan. Artan likes to sing Albanian folk songs when he is pissed.

You can see the sparse timewarped menu here. Personally I thought the menu was a bit shite. Dishes I might have been excited by in 1990 were on offer and when they arrived they looked and tasted as if they had been cooked in the 1990’s. Maybe that is a bit harsh, but I really wasnt that impressed. My palate is refined and the food on offer didn’t immediately leap out and have me salivating. Anyway, for starters I had :-

Button mushrooms & sliced chorizo sausage baked together in a tomato sauce,
glazed with mozarella, served with lemon and cracked pepper bread. –

This was more of a soup than a starter. The sauce was watery, as should be expected with button mushrooms. I felt that had it been slices of button mushrooms with chunks of chorizo rather than slivers of chorizo and whole button mushrooms, the dish might have been ok. As it was it was a thorough disappointment.

For mains I had

Fillet of lamb wrapped in bacon served on a bed of mash with a red onion and port jus –

I felt that the lamb was tough and too chewy for my liking, the mash was substandard (i suspect SMASH may have played a part) and the gravy was nothing special. Don’t get me wrong though, it wasn’t fucking awful, but for the price I was paying I could have had 2 meals of higher standard and more variety in the hotel bar, granted those meals would have been tower burgers, but realistically the bar menu has more variety than the hotel menu IMHO and really that isn’t right.

Otherwise, a very pleasant evening. If I’d have treated you to a meal out there….. What would’ve you had?