Home....

...not this place, I hasten to add!

I'm lazy and I was stopped at traffic lights at an opportune moment.

Somehow managed to book myself on two nights out - a fortieth birthday celebration with workmates and a catch up with friends.

Ate my first meal at Papa Joes - the Caesar Salad with Chicken. Nothing to write home about, but a clean restaurant, snappy and efficient service and a lovely salad. Off to Malmaison for cocktails and then I sloped off for meal two (hey, I missed lunch, so two light suppers are allowed!).

Meal two took place at a newish restaurant called Kobee. They need to get a grip. I hadn't wanted to go there as I'm always put off by somewhere that serves too many choices (Papa Joes wasn't my idea either). Find something you're good at and bloody stick to it, don't try to please bloody everybody as you're only going to fail to deliver something well!! So, back to Kobee - they do teppanyaki, and the first thing I noticed on walking in was the smoky cooking smell (silly me for bothering to wash my hair!). The order was taken relatively quickly, but the food took half an hour plus to arrive. Arrive it did with no comment as to why it had taken so long. They were then reminded that there was another bowl of rice due. This was brought out fairly soon, but had quite clearly just been bunged in a microwave for far too long as the rice almost immediately became dried out and crispy.

The meal itself tasted nice (chicken teriyaki and prawn tempura, but the scallops were hideous to look at and mediocre to taste).

So afterwards we requested just the bill and while we waited for that one of the 3 or 4 managers that were on came over to finally apologise for the delay in getting the food. She blamed it on the table behind us for them turning up late. I didn't bother to mention that we knew someone from that table who'd just told us that they'd had a terrible experience there on a previous visit....so were quite clearly being molly coddled tonight!

The bill came, but we wanted to pay separately (which I know is annoying, but also not usually a problem to split a bill 3 ways!) so that manager went away and another manager came over. He was silly enough to ask us our opinions on the place....and so he got them. His excuse about the fans over the teppanyaki grills was that they couldn't be put to a higher level because they would then put the gas burners out in the kitchen!!

....and now I've bored myself and have nothing else to say on the matter!

Happy weekend everyone x