Usually when I travel for work I get excited to try out some fun new restaurants in town that I ordinarily wouldn't get to try and put it on the corporate card. Unfortunately this time, I was in London for such a short time and was visiting my new team that I let them pick a place. To make things easy, we just went to a local restaurant across the street from the office.
The setting is lovely as they have a nice roof top with a view of the wharf. Yelp categorized their food as "New American" and I guess it's 50% accurate - it's American with a British twist and I'm not saying that in a good way. The menu was a random mish-mosh of things like lamb kofta, pizzas, surf and turf and of course fish and chips. I started with the Thai Crab Cakes (7.5 GBP), which is hardly an American dish and settled on their "Famous" Rare Beef and Chip salad (18 GBP). Please note this main dish was described as a salad - this will come into play later.
The crab cakes was definitely NOT up to my standards - it was mostly filler and not much of any real lump crab meat in it but to be fair it was described not as a MD crab cake but a make shift Thai version so I can't rag on them too much. As for my entree - so remember how it was described as a salad? Well I don't know how Brits categorize salads but this one was unlike any one I had seen before. Granted it was described as having chips (aka fries) with it which I had assumed would be on the side of the salad but no, this had thick cut steak fries and thick cut medium well steak piled high on top of a teeny tiny bed of arugula and then drenched with a very heavy black bean dressing. It came with a side of mayo for the fries - how healthy. I have no idea how this is considered a salad as it was possibly the most unhealthy thing I've ever seen. If these were served individually (a steak with a side of salad and fries), it would have been a much better dish but put together and covered in what was essentially gravy was not doing it for me at all. I ate most of the steak and some of fries but couldn't come close to finishing it. I hate to say it but this meal totally re-enforced the stereotype of terrible British food. It feels like their answer to everything is to throw "chips" on everything - good grief.
Luckily I was so jet lagged and tired that I didn't really care about dinner too much to be disappointed. The culinary theme of this trip for me was to just eat so that I wouldn't pass out. Total bill: unknown since it was paid for by co-worker on corporate card
Photo Credit: Yelp
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