The Rose and Crown

It's bank holiday Monday - bless this country's random holidays - so we held off on doing the grocery run until today. Since it is a very bad idea to shop hungry (is my excuse and I am sticking to it) we dropped by the Rose and Crown, half way between us and Sainsbury. It is a great pub. Lovely setting on a hilltop with views across a horse-inhabited field, great food, good beer, nice staff. Just what you want as a local, even if it is a teensy bit far to walk. The restaurant was absolutely heaving.

We'd just planned to have a steak sandwich (they do the most gorgeous steak sandwiches: sliced, perfectly cooked ribeye with fried onions and mushrooms, on granary or ciabatta) but discovered that they were running the Sunday menu. And before they seated us we were warned that they were out of the fish & chips, the fish of the day and the other fish dish, but we could have one of the roasts. Fine by me. I had beef, my husband had lamb.

We had to wait a bit longer than I would like in a perfect world but that was OK because they were clearly frantic. At one point we could see the waitresses hand-washing teaspoons because they'd run out. We also got to watch some jumped-up, small-penised, wannabe hardman getting stuck into the poor girls and shrieking through the pass that he had to see the chef because his tuna was raw. And when they tried to make amends in an appropriate way, he turned into a martyr and did the big sighs and "No, I'll go without". There is an art to complaining about food and he clearly doesn't understand it. Fine, he wasn't happy about his food but sticking his head through the pass (over someone else's food) to bitch about it and refusing reparations is no way to behave. I would say, based on A.A Gill's theory of British complaining, that he hasn't complained about anything for a long time and it is suddenly all too much. Hope he doesn't go back. I don't need people like that at pubs I like.