At Home with John and Debbie

I should be in Biddulph watching the Brakes, but it’s a very cold day, and the match has been postponed due to a frozen pitch. Instead I’ll tell you about yesterday’s Happy Friday.

Steve, Debbie and I started at The Lounge, where there is a new cocktail menu. Now, I’d yet to find a decent short cocktail in Leamington, but Steve described the daiquiri he’d had last week as “rocket fuel”, and “served in the gayest glass you’ve ever seen”, which sounded promising.

There seems to be some problem with consistency though: my daiquiri was a frozen daquiri served in a rocks glass: nice enough, but a sweet long alcopop rather than the mouth-puckeringly sour fresh lime and rum experience I was after. All our cocktails were made with lime cordial instead of fresh lime juice. Debbie’s Mojito was very nice.

With that, we moved on to the Leamington Bar and Grill. The bar was packed — I felt like standing on a chair and telling people they could get beer for under half the price in the Jug — but we were led straight through to a table, had our coats taken away (how posh!), and had wine ordered in no time.

I had mussels to start (the menu says moules, but I’m not one to use a French word when there’s a perfectly approprié English word), while Debbie had bread and olives. Steve just watched. My mussels were in a delicious creamy sauce, and the waiters did an excellent job of bringing a fingerbowl, poubelle de table etc. before I needed them, in contrast to the last place I ate mussels — good attention to detail.

For the main course, I went for rump steak. This was served on a portabello mushroom and a bed of dressed salad with cold boiled new potatoes. It was terrific steak, and the pettiness of my only complaint will probably tell you how good it was. The complaint is this: the pat of stilton flavoured butter served on the steak came straight from the fridge. Since the steak was rare (as I had requested — good work!) it wasn’t all that warm, so the butter would not melt. That’s it. I ended up leaving the butter; never mind.

Debbie had steak and mushroom double crust pie — essentially a sandwich of pie filling between a shortcrust pastry base and a puff pastry lid, all served on delicious crushed potatoes with leek — I had a taste. Steve had a burger, but wasn’t able to find anything gushing to say about it — it was just a burger, he said.

The dessert menu had Welsh Rarebit on it. This seemed terribly odd to us, so I asked the waitress about it. She said people ask all the time, but that apparently some people like Welsh Rarebit as a third course. Weirdos.

When I ordered an espresso, Debbie and Steve caved in to temptation and shared a chocolate fondue — melted chocolate with a collection of fun things to dip in — strawberries, meringue, little squares of brownie, amaretti biscuits etc. I may have snuck a few nibbles myself…

The whole lot, including two bottles of wine, came to just short of £80, which for three people seems very reasonable considering the very pleasant surroundings and the level of service.

We popped back to the Lounge for another cocktail, then moved on to The Well, where we found Blair watching Carol and her Samba band, The Sambassadors of Groove, drumming up a storm in aid of Children In Need. It was loud and very entertaining.

At only 11:20, we called it a night. We wanted to be fresh for Biddulph. Bah.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 19th, 2005 at 16:59 and is filed under Food, Social. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.