Smallman1
Giles Coren’s ‘anonymous’ review of 3 Gorges:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/de44aedf-498d-45a4-8634-7ce4e8bfedc0?shareToken=c9fac64b6ad24f4fe7b931fefbb8c6f1
Reader, I have had a rough weekend. On Thursday I went to a new Chinese restaurant with a — deep breath — £388 set lunch menu, just to see if it is any good. And it isn’t. I didn’t eat anything worth £3.88, let alone £388. And it’s slap in the heart of the central London office zone, surrounded by Prets and Subways, not Russian Belgravia or Arab Knightsbridge. I honestly don’t know what they are thinking.
And it’s set menu only. I’ve never seen that before. Aside from the £388 menu (which was off the table as, with the 13.5 per cent service charge, we’d have been £880 down before we’d had so much as a cold lager), there are sets at £49, £69, £79, £89 and £139. That last is a duck and abalone menu, which sounded grand. Alas, what we got for our money was dull spring rolls and dim sum of the “Mum’s gone to Iceland” party pack variety, a boggy soup and a whole duck with the head on, presented at the table, which they then took away and brought back only a very small portion of.
Dish of fish in a brown sauce with fried leeks.
Monkfish, leek, XO dashi. “Three little discs of fish — but droolworthy”
“Where’s the rest of it?” I asked.
“You don’t get the whole duck,” they said. “You only get half of it.”
“I’m sorry, what? £278 gets me half a duck? You want £556 for a whole one? Plus £75 service, that’s £631! At Lidgate’s £631 will get you 21 of these bastards. A whole flock. And they’ll be Gressingham too, not who knows what from God knows where.”
And it wasn’t nice anyway — the meat horribly overcooked to a sort of sponginess and the cavity stuffed with all sorts of wrongness. But there was a very polite, rather nervous-looking fellow there who kept thanking me for coming and asking if everything was okay, which must have been because he knew it wasn’t. And I felt bad thinking about all the terrible things it would be dishonest not to write in my review.
And then an old pal came and sat down at another table and texted me later to say I mustn’t be too mean, because the PR is a very nice man. So I thought, okay, I will do her this favour for old times’ sake (even though it was she who was getting the free lunch, not me): I will sound a very loud warning shot across their bows, as professional integrity demands, but not name the place.
This way, nobody will know where it is except the trade, my opinion won’t show on any online searches and there will be no public humiliation. But if they don’t sort it out soon, there will be. And I’d start with an immediate change of name if I were them, because calling this place after one of the great Chinese environmental and human catastrophes of the 20th century is like opening a sushi bar and calling it Fukushima, or naming a burger joint Three Mile Island. And I swear, to crueller, clumsier critics than me, that may prove a slam-dunk too tempting to ignore.
