Recently I have been to a couple of restaurants at either end of the fine dining spectrum, which appear to have a very different outlook on fine food and what makes a good restaurant.
The first of these was a restaurant I have been meaning to go for for quite some time, the Oxo tower. With its panoramic views of the Thames and the city of London it has long been a favourite of business groups and people visiting the city. The problem is that because of this many people would go regardless of the quality of the food and sadly this showed in what we were served and the prices they are able to charge. Food wise we were on a lastminute.com set menu which cost 28 pounds for 2 courses, this seemed like a reasonable deal, but this failed to include the side dishes (which were necessary for several of the main courses) and would also ignore the biggest expense which was the drinks. Even the cheapest bottle of wine came in at around 30 pounds and to be honest this was not necessarily a wine that should be complimenting a decent meal, in the end we settled on a lower end wine (in terms of their wine list) which was a Chilean pinot noir which cost us just over 50 pounds.
The service, as you would expect was very efficient but the food itself was nothing out of the ordinary, either in terms of quality, taste or presentation,my duck was a touch on the dry side and I got to try my girlfriends starter and main, a sure sign that all was not well. Having looked at the prices on the a la carte menu where a main is 20-30 pounds if this was representative of the quality you could expect we won't be going back to sample it any time soon.
The other slightly weird thing about the oxo tower is the lighting, to make sure you get a good view out over London they seem to have lit the dining area with a blue light, which was very much like one of those toilets in a night club, designed to stop drug addicts form being able to find the vein in their arm to shoot up. It didn't really add a great deal to the way the food looked either.
As a counter point to this we then headed to a completely different area of the country, to a restaurant that didn't rely on its views and high honed professional levels of service, but instead has built up a great reputation based on the quality of its food. 99 Station Street in Burton on Trent is not somewhere you would expect to find an award wining restaurant focusing on local produce, I was certainly surprised when my brother who lives in the area suggested it, but I am glad he did.
In stark contrast to the cold iron feel of the Oxo, which is full of chrome and glass the restaurant itself has a nice wooden feel, the tables aren't crammed in despite the fact it isn't blessed with a massive amount of floor space. I am not going to pretend that the service was anywhere near as professional, but to be honest that added to the home run feel of the place and also made us feel less frowned upon as we exchanged food during the courses. This was not because we didn't like our main courses but because the food we had was so nice we felt that everyone should try it.
I started my meal with the salmon, which was brilliant, beautifully cured and served with an excellent dressing, this was complimented by an excellent Chapel Down wine from the small but beautifully formed wine list. Unlike the Oxo the wine was not stupidly expensive with most bottles coming between the 12 and 35 pound mark. I followed the salmon with the Packington Pork, which was also very good, I also sampled the steak and the lamb shank, both of which would usually have made me jealous but my main was excellent. The desserts were also very good, I had the orange posit which tested great with the chocolate topping.
I have to highly recommend it if you are in the area as an excellent place to eat at very reasonable prices.
