A Long-Promised Lunch-With-Former-Work-Friend – LPLWFWF -sounds like a YouTube-y acronym for the latest, most sordid way to describe how funny you are finding a particular funny thing: “Laughing, Puking, Laughing with Farts while Fighting”, perhaps.
But this wasn’t funny. As the virulent tone of voice might suggest, it was a disaster.
I don’t live in London, so trips to Town hold such promise: all those marvellous things, thrillingly within touching distance, available to the metropolitanite (hang about, what? This word doesn’t exist, right? So I should delete it, yeah? Well, fuck you). So, what’s it to be – the Giaconda, maybe, or 32 Queen St, or one of those Shoreditch-ish hotspots – Princess, or Prince William, or something like that – or maybe the newly-insufferable Broadway Market? There’s loads of top scran to spunk that overdraft on, surely.
It looked a bit like this. A bit. (Thanks, Mr A. Guindani).
Oh. Oh right. The friend has called up and asked to go to a place named after A POSTCODE. Oh no. Relations aren’t quite at the easy situation where you can tell them to just shut their deluded mouths and speak sense. In fact, it’s worse than that; despite this obscenity-laden rant, your reviewer is actually a pathetic wet fish, who daren’t hurt the feelings of their friend, so GAH! goes along with the whole thing. And so finds herself, on a bleak, grey midsummer’s day, finding out just how quickly the Greenwich tourist throngs dissipate once walking down the main road to Deptford , and how ominous those enormous tower blocks look on a grey, sullen day, and how quickly one is bustled off the pavement by multitudes of striped barriers, the ones denoting the fact that a whole load of sod-all will be going on, to your general inconvenience, for the foreseeable future, and, well, lions and tigers and bears have nothing on a dank South London estate on a grim winter’s day.
In the middle of which stands a pissy yellow breeze block of a building, all crumbling paint and weariness. Oh. My. God. Here we are.
There are doors, at least, rather than pull-down metal shutters. But that slightly gnawing, tense sensation doesn’t dissipate on entry, where we are greeted by a room devoid of animated chatter, warming kitchen smells or indeed, anything bar the smell of mouldy tobacco given the two-squirts-of-Haze treatment, and a grumpy barman. Hey, at least he’s cleaning glasses. Not that he’s got any customers to serve. Well, not until we walked in, dopes that we are. A quick table count – that’s 30, 50, what, about 60 covers in the whole place, it’s 1pm, and we’re the only ones in. I’d say it was a sign from God, if it wasn’t totally obvious that it was a sign from the rest of the known dining world, perhaps screaming ‘No chance’ at the top of their voices with their arms folded.
And thus to food – and here is where the grating takes on a more penny-pinching, tedious air, so you may want to skip off while I mither about whether a restaurant with such a vulnerable grip on its potential customer base can seriously get away with charging £19.50 for a ‘prime Scottish Fillet Steak ,Served with a flat cap mushroom, grilled plum tomato and a green peppercorn sauce and SE10 chips’. So, that’s steak and chips with grilled mushroom and tomato, for just shy of twenty quid. And for christ’s sake, how does anyone think giving their chips the branding treatment is going to make them any more appealing? Agh!
Still, it had an ok wine list, which was studied, and ordered from, hastily. Anything to dull the pain. Poor precious creatures that we are.