Norwegian Blue, Riverside Leisure Park

15 September 2007

The Cumbersome Gift sounds very exciting. I’ve not received a truly cumbersome birthday present since my Action GT Crossbows and Catapults Battleset, and if this is fifty per cent as exciting, it’ll be, well, *very* exciting.

It’s virtually 4 o’clock by the time The Cumbersome Gift arrives home. Sure, it may have kyboshed our Plan A lunch date, but having (I’m told) been approvingly cooed over by shoppers with Less Cumbersome Items, I am quite prepared to forgive it.

With the Cumbersome Gift safely docked in Mrs Wifey’s wardrobe, Plan B demands somewhere (a) prepared to provide lunch and (b) willing to let us soak up the last drops of sun. We stumbled to Norwegian Blue.

The next half an hour held interesting times: either we had breached our credit at the Bank of Karma, or the chef was too busy pining for the fjords to concentrate on the task in hand.

Mrs Wifey’s roast chicken arrived in an unconventional form, namely a butterflied, griddled breast. With a moisture level of zero and the structural integrity of HMS Belfast, any bacteria it may once have contained had quite certainly ceased to be.

Primary school dinners excepted, it was the third worst meal I’d ever seen. (The worst was a chicken sandwich on a Ryanair flight; the second worst was the burger sitting in front of me right now.)

Like the ‘roast’ chicken, my burger was as dry as a prohibition desert rat gorged on silica gel. On the plus side, at least I had a tablespoon of warm coleslaw to help it down.

Getting it down would of course assume that one could dissect the food into bite-size chunks in the first place. In the present instance, the outside of the burger was scorched solid, like a leather pasty. It would have been simpler, and no doubt more tasty, to tuck into my wallet.

With so many urban myths about kitchen staff vandalising food, I prefer never to send back my meal (being more an E. coli culture than a foodstuff, the aforementioned sandwich doesn’t count).

Exhibit A crossed that line. I got a refund instead – they couldn’t tamper with that.

Although if they did, it’d still be tastier than their pre-match menu.

Keywords: dead parrot
Eat here: if you’ve been nailed there