The most surprising meal of my life
Have you ever been pleasantly surprised by a meal out? Here our own Charlotte and Simon share their unexpected experiences.
Charlotte's surprise
Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, my boyfriend and I practically skipped all the way to London City Airport, hardly able to contain our excitement for a long weekend in Venice. One hour later we were shouting, crying, and pleading with British Airways, who had cancelled our flight and couldn’t get us Italy bound until the next day.
I’ll skip the ensuing stress and upset (we’ve all been there), and instead fast forward to the Premier Inn at Gatwick Airport, where we were forced to stay the night in order to catch our sick-o’clock plane the next morning. We arrived dishevelled, hacked off and very hungry indeed, so abandoned plans to try and find decent food in the North Terminal and went down to the Premier Inn ‘Thyme’ restaurant instead (pictured above). Already grumpy, I was determined to be snobby about it.
On the walk to our table, however, I could find nothing to criticise. Because Premier Inns are so cheap (well, great value for money), I was expecting to find strange marks on the restaurant’s carpet, greasy cutlery, terrible furnishings, wobbly chairs... but just as the rooms are always immaculate, so was Thyme. What’s more, our table was far away enough from other patrons to share a private conversation, but close enough to people watch; our waitress listened politely to our moans about British Airways; and the drinks were served cold, the food piping hot.
Even the menu was surprising. It catered for vegetarians better than most London restaurants, and although I was supposed to be dining on Venetian cicchetti and Bellinis at the time, my chestnut, mushroom and goats’ cheese wellington was a happy enough substitute.
Sure, the food was simple, perhaps a little under-seasoned, and nothing we couldn’t have made at home. But there was something about the atmosphere which kept us sat at that table for over an hour and a half. It was warm, comfortable and un-imposing – it felt ok to slouch in my seat, and there was friendly banter between waiters and guests. Maybe it was the large glass of Argentinian wine that I treated myself to, but I can’t remember feeling so relaxed at a restaurant.
Indeed, so pleasant was my experience that I purposefully dined at the restaurant when I recently stayed in yet another Premier Inn (officially my chain of choice), just to check that it wasn’t a fluke… it wasn’t; in fact, I even stayed for a drink at the bar that time.
Simon's surprise
If you've been to Japan you'll know that, unless you can read kanji characters, you're sailing blind when it comes to picking a restaurant. You're often reliant on pictorial or plastic indicators of what the establishment serves, which admittedly also come in handy when it comes to ordering.
In Tokyo, my wife and I took that Russian roulette approach to eating out by picking a cafe-style place where you ordered by computer. The waiting staff were there simply to bring your food and drinks from the kitchen to your table and remove the crockery and cutlery at the end. I don't expect their English stretched to describing ingredients in detail anyway.
So we examined the display case of plastic food models, which gave us very little to go on as they all looked pretty much the same and the bowl was by far the biggest part of the model. We then made a note of our numbers (thankfully not just written in kanji) and punched them into the computer.
A short while later and two bowls (not plastic) appeared at our table. Mine was a steaming, oozing mass of
curry, as I'd hoped, with a brown sauce covering the meat (some sort of beef, I'll wager) dressed with the ubiquituous bonito fish flakes.
I dived into the slightly sweet, thick gravy and realised this was Japanese comfort food. Food for filling up on before or after hitting the neon-lit streets of downtown, or for those people enslaved to their desks for so long they didn't have the time or inclination to prepare anything when they got home.
I was fully expecting it to taste something like those plastic bowls flanking the door and as lacking in soul as the computer that took our order. Instead, it was a most unexpected culinary highlight in a country where the extraordinary is the norm.
What's been the most surprising meal of your life? Share your thoughts in the Comments box below.
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