Great Food Places

The International, Saint Martins Lane, London

We didn’t visit the bar, but have now been to the restaurant upstairs all of three times, including once with a group of about 12. Food here is really good, with a busy, lively atmosphere. The ‘pan-Asian’ food works well, with a number of interesting dishes. Service was fine too, with staff being happy and helpful. We’ll go back!

Ho-hum

Papa Johns, Dubai

We just have to work out 'value' by taking things to an extreme. This time around, the debate was between the 'family feast' or two large pizzas. Well, here's the calculations for the family feast:

• Pizza 1 (medium Garden Special) = 634g
• Pizza 2 (medium Garden Special) = 646g
• Chicken strips = 265g
• Papa's Club Salad = 475g
• Total = 2,020 g (plus some drinks) for AED 65 or 33.6g for every dirham.

Two large cost AED 80, and assuming a Garden Special, the weight is 710g each or 1,420g. This works out to 17.8g for every dirham. Clearly, the family feast is superior value. However, we have decided that the chicken strips are pretty crappy and fatty and the salad is mostly lettuce and onion so yuk. Now we just get two medium. But our latest complaint is that that they aren't cooking their bases for long enough so they come out a bit sloppy: more heat on the bottom boys!

Junk

Andiamo, Grand Hyatt, Dubai

Well, we really don’t want to say a lot about this lot. The first time we went it was good, food was nice and service responsive. We were impressed enough to want to make a second visit. So we did, with a guest in tow. We lucked upon a ‘pay what you like’ night too, which we thought would be fun. Everything worked out fine, until our guest’s main arrived. It was a grilled salmon cutlet. Our guest tasted it, and thought it tasted funny. So we each had a bit too. It did taste strange, like the pepper/seasoning was totally over done or plain wrong. It made the fish taste odd and what we can only describe as burnt-bitter. So we asked the waitress to take it away (no point having it on the table). No big deal, except the waitress was a bit gruff so probably had not been trained well to handle these situations. She came back several minutes later and said they were sorry it did not taste good and if we would like something else. But we had enough so did not need to take them up on this.

Then came paying the bill. Well, while in the process of paying, the chap asked if it was all good. We said, well yes except for the fish which tasted too strange to eat. He then said well, he and chef had tasted it and thought it was fine. We retorted and said all three of us tried some and thought it was crap (in between this we were debating between ourselves what to pay them). He then said that our pallets must be ‘wrong’. Well, that’s a Faulty Towers’ Waldorf Salad moment! So I paid them AED 300 (not unreasonable). He then had the nerve to ask if we wanted to know the real cost of the meal. We said why not, just to show we didn’t care! And we didn’t bat an eyelid when it was AED 450.

The upshot of them not being customer focused (telling us our taste buds were wrong!?) is we will not go back there!