The Lemon Fool

Why do pubs think it's OK to serve food on make believe pieces of wood or in metal baskets! I want my food on a plate not in something that looks like a cage for catching rats or a slice of tree. The Jolly Sailor in Craster is now off my list of places to eat,

R6

Just ask them for a spare plate and unceremoniously tip everything over onto it, then take a photo for instagram - worth it just for the look of horror you will get from the server.

It all started with 'chicken in a basket' in the 70s...

Planks, slates, chips in wee galvanised buckets. All ghastly.
Then you get the posh places serving tiny dollops on a massive square plate -usually involving a coulis, tian, foamed something or other , and drizzled with who knows what ..

AleisterCrowley wrote:It all started with 'chicken in a basket' in the 70s...

... ..

After which there was decades of normality (albeit some square plates), then "gourmet" burger fad kicked off. You get a burger on a scratched and stained old chopping block.

I just go to mickeyD's and get two double cheeseburgers.

*shrug*

It all goes down the same hole shortly after arriving, and env health wouldn't permit it to happen if it wasn't "OK".

Just request a plate when you order.

didds

I'd rather restaurants refuse service to people wearing over powering perfume/cologne, or stinking of the fag they've just had outside than worry about whether my food was on china, porcelain or slate which isn't offensive per se.

didds

I'm no fan of the wooden chopping boards either. All right, they used to do the job back in the ancient days when you could generally expect to die of food poisoning anyway, but in this day and age?

The advantage of a ceramic plate is that you can get an idea as to whether or not it's clean? Whereas serving a craft burger (artfully skewered by two wooden hat-pins) on a rough lump of wood that bears the scars from other people's steak knives does raise a few questions as to the bacterial content of the food in front of you.

Food hygiene officers? It's a good job that people don't know what they're prepared to pass as OK. They might visit once in six months, and as long as there aren't any dead mice on the kitchen floor, or cockroaches in the sink, the worst they're likely to do is issue a "must improve" notice and come back in a month for another look. I wouldn't go near any take-away establishment, for exactly that reason.

BJ

didds wrote:I'd rather restaurants refuse service to people wearing over powering perfume/cologne, or stinking of the fag they've just had outside than worry about whether my food was on china, porcelain or slate which isn't offensive per se.

didds

Oooh, don't get me started on those stinks! Worst case is someone wearing them for a concert, so I have to try and sing while struggling to breathe! Another is when you have to move away from someone, and it looks bad to a roomful of people out of range of the stink. On the other hand, a generation or so back it was infinitely worse when some of them were actually smoking, and even today we sometimes suffer incense, which is just as foul (and much more carcinogenic than tobacco).

But that's really orthogonal to the purpose of this thread. The fact there are worse things out there doesn't excuse serving my dinner on an irregular-shaped thingummy with no hint of a rim whatsoever and no chance of keeping the food from going places it becomes just a mess.

I'd rather restaurants refuse service to people wearing over powering perfume/cologne

This applies to aftershave too. I once had to have a tete a tete business dinner with a visitor who had just showered (plus point), shaved (excellent) and liberally administered Givenchy Gentleman aftershave (ahhh....) which, unfortunately, is the one aftershave I can smell a good 15 minutes after someone has been in the room. Totally spoiled the dinner for me - to the extent that afterwards I bought a bottle and slowly desensitised myself to it!

Worse, though, is a acrid perfume I have never identified (Christian Dior's Poison perhaps ?) - fortunately not as common now as it was in the 1990s - that I could smell on passers-by in the street. In a restaurant it would be intolerable.

Rhyd6 wrote:Why do pubs think it's OK to serve food on make believe pieces of wood or in metal baskets! I want my food on a plate not in something that looks like a cage for catching rats or a slice of tree. The Jolly Sailor in Craster is now off my list of places to eat,

R6

Ooh! One of my pet peeves too!
You need to look at this Twitter feed - https://twitter.com/WeWantPlates?ref_sr ... r%5Eauthor
We Want Plates!

bungeejumper wrote:Food hygiene officers? It's a good job that people don't know what they're prepared to pass as OK. They might visit once in six months, and as long as there aren't any dead mice on the kitchen floor, or cockroaches in the sink, the worst they're likely to do is issue a "must improve" notice and come back in a month for another look. I wouldn't go near any take-away establishment, for exactly that reason.

BJ

Many years ago I worked as a waiter in a reasonable restaurant. One day, when the dumb waiter was out of action, we had to climb the stairs at the back thru the owner's flat. Going up the stairs I tripped and dropped 2 steaks . . . . onto the owner's dog. Which bit one of them. I scooped them up quickly and went back to the kitchen to ask chef to make another 2. What chef actually did was wash them under the tap, bung them back over the grill to 10 seconds a side then put them back onto the plates, redressed them and told me table 20 away.

I looked at him and pointed out the teeth marks in one of them

Good catch he told me, and poured peppercorn sauce over the steak.

Customer ate it happily.

What really worried me (and still does to this day) is that all the professionals in that kitchen told me that it was easily the cleanest and more hygenic any of them had ever worked in.

I still eat out mind you.

wheypat wrote:What really worried me (and still does to this day) is that all the professionals in that kitchen told me that it was easily the cleanest and more hygenic any of them had ever worked in.

A schoolfriend once spent several months washing the dishes in one of the most expensive Michelin-starred restaurants in Paris, and he confirmed that George Orwell's old stories from the 1940s about terrible standards and resentful, vengeful communist waiters were still pretty much bang-on in the seventies. Sometimes, he said, the kitchen staff would think up "accidental" things to happen to the food if they didn't like the customers.

One day, he said, the boss of France's biggest arms company came in, and - naaaah, maybe we should gloss over that one.... But Fools of a certain age may remember Barry McKenzie's encounters (Private Eye) with the French chef who would threaten to point percy at the patisserie?

Won't name the restaurant, because I've just checked and it's still got its Michelin stars and its top-class reputation. Least said, soonest mended.

I still eat out mind you.

So do I, but not from cheapo takeaways.

BJ

Rhyd6 wrote:Why do pubs think it's OK to serve food on make believe pieces of wood or in metal baskets! I want my food on a plate not in something that looks like a cage for catching rats or a slice of tree. The Jolly Sailor in Craster is now off my list of places to eat,

R6

Yes, a bit of a sore point of mine too, although a friend of mine thinks they're 'characterful' , hygiene is a concern, as mentioned before, but who am I to say that? I, who have a resident spider in my bathroom. Those of us who were there at the time, will remember chicken in a basket, how did they clean them? And of course the joke at the time, soup in a basket.

dp

scottnsilky wrote: Those of us who were there at the time, will remember chicken in a basket, how did they clean them? And of course the joke at the time, soup in a basket.

At a "night club" in Southend back in the early 70s, turned out that the baskets were plastic and they just chucked them in the dishwasher.
They made an interesting noise as they bounced around inside, but they seemed clean when they came out

Slarti

Yes, of course, they changed to plastic, they were wicker, I think, originally......

dp

Well our local here in Eglingham is the Tankerville Arms and today we sampled Sunday Lunch which was up to good pub standard with proper plates. It's only 200yds from the cottage and we call in most days. I think they might have recognised that we like a bevy ot two because when we arrived for lunch we were told to go to "our" corner table We only picked that table because we can keep the dog hidden, they do allow dogs in but she's so friendly she thinks every customer needs to be greeted personally.

R6

Rhyd6 wrote:Why do pubs think it's OK to serve food on make believe pieces of wood or in metal baskets! I want my food on a plate not in something that looks like a cage for catching rats or a slice of tree. The Jolly Sailor in Craster is now off my list of places to eat,

R6

Just realised where you were eating.
Should have gone to http://www.kipper.co.uk/ or more precisely, their restaurant https://www.crasterseafood.co.uk/ the source of the best kippers in the country!

I'm drooling at the thought of them

Slarti

Hi Slarti, the kippers are indeed first class. We bought some to have in the cottage along with some kipper pate both of whch were so delicious we're going back for more The food was very good at The Jolly Sailor but I'm slightly nervous about making a fuss about plates because I too have heard how some chef's react to the slightest soupcon of criticsim (spelling!) and I didn't want my food defiled in any way.

R6

Take you own plate and ask it to be served on that?

Though I can see a call about they don;t know how clean the plate is in reality and so wo;t serve on it lest there be some food poisoning from it which would inadvertently point a finger at them.

didds

Or order the soup or something with a lot of gravy/similar - that would have to be a bowl... or at least a lipped plate

didds