Dressing for dinner

The hotel is very pleased with its restaurant, which "retains the beauty of the gracious Victorian era". So pleased, in fact, that guests are asked to "compliment the setting by dressing appropriately for the evening". Meaning no jeans, track suit bottoms (as if!), trainers, T-shirts or polo shirts.

Which would be much easier to accept if the place wasn't painted like a (modern era) pub, complete with "witty aphorisms" all over the walls. The food, too, is the wrong side of self-satisfied; the dinner menu begins with a message from the chef, stating his position on the use of local seafood and seasonal vegetables.

None of which seems to bother the assembled diners - all dressed appropriately - and all at least 2 full decades older than us.

Semantics for Breakfast

One piece of brie does not make a "selection of cheeses".

Well, I guess it does, kinda. But it's a limited sort of selection.

Attack of the Tartares

Due to translation failures, I ordered steak tartare for lunch, mistaking it for another dish.

I was, consequently, surprised and disturbed to be presented with a lump of pale, mushy meat: clearly - stomach turningly - raw.

It was also surprisingly tender and tasty. I polished off the lot.

Implicated by inaction

"Are these yours?" I asked the colleague in the kitchen, indicating the dirty plates and cups in the sink.

"No," he replied, a little defensively. "I didn't leave them there."

I raised an eyebrow and drew a breath. He withdrew, my feelings on work kitchen hygiene having been often, and strenuously, aired.

But technically, I found myself thinking at his retreating back, you did leave them there. You saw them, and you could have cleared them away. But you didn't. You're as guilty, as responsible, as the people that used them, implicated by what you didn't do rather than by what you did.

Then I sighed a little superior, self-righteous sigh, and put the dishes in the dishwasher, and said my little Thank-You-For-The-Chance-To-Make-A-Positive-Difference.