The third degree

by Chris Losh

Whenever my missus and I go out for a meal it’s like a scene from When Harry Met Sally.

No, not THAT scene. My wife has never noisily faked an orgasm in a restaurant in her life – at least, not with me –  though memories of a plate full of crevettes in the Scottish islands still elicit slightly woozy sighs from her even now, 20 years later.

No, it’s the way in which the Meg Ryan character can’t just look at a menu, decide what she wants and order it. She has to give the waiter an extensive interview about each and every dish, before custom-making her order to such an extent that she is, in effect, asking the chef to create an entirely new offering just for her.

This might be a male/female thing. I’ll ask the waiter one or two questions about the stuff on offer, but I make my mind up pretty quickly. Bola, though, will grill the hapless staff member for 20 minutes on how each dish is prepared. This, inevitably, will narrow it down to a shortlist of two, equally inevitably one of pork, duck or lamb.

‘Ooh, it’s so hard to choose,’ she’ll say coyly. And then just as the waiter is about to offer to come back in five minutes, she asks the killer question.

‘Which would you have...?’

Along with ‘We’re from the Revenue’ and ‘You’re screwing my wife’ it’s hard to imagine four words more guaranteed to send your average waiter the colour of upside down crème brulee.

I understand their quandary. If they suggest one dish, Bola goes with it, and then is somewhat underwhelmed, it will reflect badly on them rather than the chef. And, presumably, they must be thinking, this could impact on any tip-making potential.

But also, by choosing one of the two dishes being placed before them with such sweetly poisonous ingenuousness, they are, in effect, saying that the other one isn’t that great.

They have nothing to gain, and everything to lose. Unless they’ve sat us by the bathrooms I always feel sorry for them.

But Bola’s single-handed Paxman-like interrogation does have one useful purpose: it allows us, at an early stage, to see how clued up the staff are.

Maybe we just eat in better places than we did 15 years ago, but for the most part it seems to me that front of house staff nowadays are pretty good at explaining the food (and admirably patient in doing so) – certainly better than they were. I can’t remember the last time we asked our waiter to walk us through a dish to be met with a panicky incomprehension and the line ‘I don’t really know, I’ve only just started...’

Recently we went out to The Ginger Pig gastropub in Hove – part-owned by Fatboy Slim – and despite arriving late, hot and flustered after bombing down on our bikes, the staff couldn’t have been sweeter. Or more knowledgeable. We knew the food would be good, because we’d eaten there before. The service then had been good, too, but that was a quiet Tuesday lunchtime, and this was a busy Friday.

Anyway, they took our tardiness and our dishevelment in their stride, dealt with queries efficiently, and happily moved us from outside (next to a rather overpowering extractor fan) to inside. We had a great night, and, as always, I learned a lot about the menu.

Whatever the more fundamentalist food critics might say rather sneeringly about the gastropub concept, good service, decent food and the kind of relaxed environment where you can stagger in red-faced and wearing a cycle helmet, work for me nine times out of ten. 

Oh, and if you’re interested, after much deliberation, Bola had the steak. But it was a bad choice. She should have had the duck. Or pork. Or lamb...