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There's no way I could walk past a restaurant calling itself "Biguns" without wanting to know more. Under the eaves of a strange 60s red brick condominium on the corner of Warwick Way and Vauxhall Bridge Road, this strange place appears to be a throwback to the What's Cooking? style of UK/US eateries, back in the days when spare ribs and nachos were an outrageous novelty. So accordingly, the menu travels a bizarre mid-atlantic route between fish and chips and cajun chicken, with peppered steak and "meat" lasagne thrown in for good measure. There's even an "unlimited" salad bar, where you can pick up a bowl of iceberg lettuce and e-coli bacteria from underneath a heat lamp.
It is, of course, all pretty mediocre. We went for the 'Platter for three' (between four of us), which consisted of tasteless ribs, wobbly chicken, soggy mushrooms in greasy breadcrumbs and oily onion rings. That's a whole lot of brown food. In addition we ordered a plate of Nachos, which were OK, and the platter also included a few skinny fries which I defy anywhere to mess up too badly.
To be fair, it was all just about edible, and along with a couple of beers and a lemonade the bill came to about £7.50 each. There was plenty of food here - plenty of crap food, yes, but lots of it - and at this price you don't have a whole lot to complain about. As a US-style diner and grill, Biguns fails on almost every level. As a mid-80s themed restaurant specialising in retro gastro-kitsch, I'm sure it has a long and happy future.
4/10
According to Giles Coren, Times restaurant critic and scourge of sub-editors the world over, "the application of superlatives to food is a terrible, terrible mistake". I suppose you can see where he's coming from - declaring anything to be the best, whether it's a burger or a restaurant or just some gin and vermouth in a glass, is pretty unhelpful and I can't help getting the feeling that most of the time these grandiose statements are deliberately made one week only to be ripped down the next. It does make good copy, after all. But where I can appreciate that an over-enthusiastic restaurateur may declare his spag bol to be "the best in London" to drum up some interest and get bums on seats, even if said spag bol turns out in the end to be awful, it's the use of superlatives in other weirder areas that I take issue with. Take, for example, Bank in Westminster, which proudly declares itself to have "the longest bar in Europe". Why should we care, exactly? Does the length of bar have some correlation with the skill of the bartenders or the freshness of the mint? Of course not - it basically just serves as some pointless extra trivia to stick on the website, as if punters are going to be racing up and down the length of the room, warm martinis in their hands, crying "Well the drinks are crap, but look at all this space!".
Fortunately there is another reason to visit Bank other than to gaze in awe upon the length of the bar - it actually hosts a rather nice restaurant towards the back. A starter of "Fresh Whitby crab salad" was not actually the freshest I've ever tasted, as both the crab and the bread could have been in better condition, but was redeemed by a generous lump of crab meat and a nicely seasoned salad. A companion's duck spring rolls were somewhat less successful, greasy and leaden with sub-par duck meat and standard bought-in sweet chilli sauce.
Mains were a world away in terms of quality. My Whole Brixham Dover Sole was gorgeous - rich and meaty and cooked to crispy-edged, buttery perfection. Not quite as breathtaking as the one I had at Scott's, but half the price and only slightly smaller so not much to complain about really. The only downside was again the bought-in tartare - if you're going to serve a whole Dover Sole and cook it so well, why not spend a bit of extra time making a nice homemade tartare to go with it? Lamb chops with summer vegetables also disappeared quickly and were served with good fresh veg, although there was perhaps slightly too much fat and gristle on the chops to justify the £19 price ticket.
My passion fruit sorbet was just that - uninspiring but edible and fresh-tasting. However the Crème brûlée was a really good dish, generously speckled with real vanilla seeds and topped with a still-warm crunchy sugar crust.
It's very hard to give an objective appraisal of restaurants in this part of town as there are so few that are any good, but while not stunning in any particular respect, Bank nevertheless provides decent grub at only slightly inflated prices, and for that the civil servants and office workers of Victoria should be grateful. In fact, I'd go so far to say that it was the "best" mid-range hotel restaurant in the Buckingham Gate Road area. And they have my permission to add that to the website.
7/10
I blame myself. I should have known that drawing attention to my recent run of what I will call, for want of a better word, "luck" with budget restaurants that I was only setting myself up for a fall. But then complacency is never a good thing, and having an unpleasant dose of reality does occasionally help give you a sense of perspective. In other words, it will be a lot easier to count my blessings at the end of the next bad meal knowing that, all said and done, at least I'm not eating at Grumbles.
Things started going downhill almost the moment we were set down, antisocially close to diners on either side of our pokey table. Finding nothing of particular interest on the laminated main menu, I found myself browsing the specials, which listed items such as Aylesbury duckling and swordfish steak, but at prices more suited to grander surroundings - £16.25 for example, for the duck. Thinking they must have something to brag about in charging that price, I threw caution to the wind and ordered it. What arrived was a sad lump of boiled broccoli, a huge anaemic slab of duck, cooked through to fatty grey oblivion, and a little stack of salty fried potato cake. It wasn't anywhere near as good as the duck and orange dish I was served at the Spaghetti House in Tufnell Park back in March, and cost more than twice the price. There was no excuse for it.
Having skipped starters with the intention of trying desserts for a change, I was therefore left with a decision to make. Should I give Grumbles the benefit of the doubt and soldier gamely on, or cut my losses and have dessert at home? I let my gaze wander to the open kitchen, where a grubby-looking chef was slumped next to a microwave, head in his arms as some unfortunate diner's meal rotated quietly beside him. The 'ping' as the timer ran out roused him just enough to shovel it onto a plate and to the pass, then he went gratefully back to sleep. It would all look like a scene from Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares were it not for the fact that the place was so inexplicably popular - they were turning people away by the time we were halfway through our dinners. Maybe it is after all possible to build a viable restaurant business by relying solely upon tourists and idiots. I necked the rest of my house red and waved for the bill.
It's not that Grumbles is the worst meal I've ever had, or even had this year. No, that accolade is held by Boyago and I don't see it being toppled any time soon. But by serving such a mediocre meal, charging near top-end restaurant prices and having the nerve to slap on a £1 cover charge (as if I needed any more reasons to hate the place), it is doing just about everything wrong.
And there my unhappy story would have ended, were it not for the lovely people at Gü chocolate puddings, who were nice enough to send me some of their latest range to try. And so back in the comfort of my own living room I tucked into a creamy chocolate trifle, which, being delicious, comforting and inexpensive (well, free), was exactly the opposite of my meal at Grumbles. There's something refreshing about a convenience product that makes no pretentions towards health fads - this is comfort eating, shamelessly decadent and all the better for it. And before anyone starts thinking that Cheese and Biscuits have sold out and the age of the independent blogger is dead, I didn't think much of their melty chocolate puddings that you heat up in the oven. And anyway, you just wait until somebody offers you free chocolate and see how you react. I'm only human, after all.
Grumbles 4/10
Gü 8/10
This message is brought to you by Gü chocolate puddings. Other chocolate puddings are available. Cheese and Biscuits is an equal-opportunities chocolate pudding reviewer. All donations gratefully accepted.
You can see why people are talking about dim sum as the "new fast food". It's tasty, cheapish (as long as you're careful) and comes with a dose of far-eastern medicinal mysticism that is as exciting to Londoners in 2008 as burgers and French Fries must have been to a nation used to Spam and Bovril in the 60's. And like the "old" fast food, we are starting to see embryonic chains of dim sum restaurants open up, as I imagine it's quite easy to standardise the dining experience of steamed dumplings and sake. There is Ping Pong, with branches across the city and serving some excellent cocktails, and there is Dim T, comparably represented in London and with a few in carefully-selected middle-class enclaves elsewhere (Maidstone, Tunbridge Wells, you know the kind of places).
As I've said before on many occasions, I don't have any problems with chain restaurants at all as long as they're good. And Dim T stands up incredibly well considering some stellar competition in the dim sum field (Yauatcha, China Tang). The menu is refreshingly brief for a chain Asian restaurant, nothing too unusual but enough to keep most people happy, and indeed this is somewhere that knows its customers well, with "Healthy" salads and soups on offer amongst the fried rice and crispy duck. The only problem I had was that it occasionally seemed a bit too dumbed-down, with "Buns" instead of "Char Sui", but then this is a minor and pretty pedantic (even by my standards) complaint.
I was initially concerned when I asked for the duck dumplings that they were off, even though every other item containing duck on the menu was available. This suggests the dumplings had been made quite well in advance, but then maybe this is normal. Certainly it didn't seem to affect the standard of what did eventually arrive, as everything was at least good, sometimes excellent. My favourites were, after all, the Char Sui, big and fluffy and with nice spicy pig meat. The scallop and prawn dumplings were a strange lurid pink colour but tasted great, and also worth a mention were the spicy chicken parcels which went very well with the chilli sauce left on the table. The only thing you could pick fault with was that some of the dumplings seemed excessively 'sticky', suggesting perhaps slight overcooking, but who cares if you have to prize them out of the baskets with your fingers when they taste so good.
Add in the usual perfect service and the fact that this feast for two (including a portion of fried rice and edamame to start and a couple of alcoholic drinks) came to just over £16 each, including the 12.5%, and you have yourselves a quite wonderful evening out. The décor also deserves a special mention, all dark wood and spot lighting that wouldn't be out of place in a restaurant charging three times the price. Better toilets than Yauatcha, too.
So, another day, another 8/10. We're on a roll here at Cheese and Biscuits. Long may it continue.
8/10
