One upon a time England was renowned for its bad food. Fish in rancid oil; spam fritters; curry with sultanas and everything served with a good helping of greasy chips. The came Egon Ronay to give British food a kick up the backside, giving birth to cookery programmes and a whole generation of celebrity chefs brandishing polenta, sundried tomatoes and rocket salads.
And All Was Light. Or maybe not quite all. Still in some dark deserted corners of this sceptred isle there lurk eateries clinging to the sacred tradition of bad food, bad service or just plain badness.
The worst are not necessarily the cheapest. The most expensive restaurants can really go to town. Nouvelle cuisine is particularly guilty. “Nouvelle” 
seems to be a euphemism for “Empty White Plate” – acres and acres of gleaming china with the food cowering in the middle trying not to be noticed. One of the most memorable meals I had was at one of Exeter’s "top" eateries, the Royal Clarence, run by celebrity chef, Michael Caines. This involved paying £140 for a meal for 2. The vegetables, al dente and nicely cooked, consisted of a small portion of courgettes, a little cauliflower and one single, lonely, embryonic carrot. It takes the gloss of a romantic meal for two to be battling over who gets the carrot.
Large bluebottles
The Royal Clarence has trained their staff to treat you like royalty. I always thought the Queen had a bum deal. Now I’m sure. Why can’t they just leave the wine alone? You order nice bottle of Sancerre; they bring you an ice bucket to keep it chilled and then, the minute the level in your glass drops by a millimetre someone comes and tops it up – letting your chilled wine get nicely warmed in the glass. Some people may like the fuss and attention. I do not. So I ask, politely, for them to leave the wine alone. They go away. 30 seconds later, they’re back, topping up my glass again. I spend the rest of the meal swatting away wine waiters like large bluebottles. Somehow I feel it is not quite done in a fancy restaurant to tell them very loudly to Buggar Off. Maybe I should.
Eat up your swede
Recently on a trip to Braemar we stayed at a traditional Scottish hunting lodge, the Invercauld Arms, which looks very promising from the outside. We were tired after our journey and Braemar does not exactly zing of an evening so when we were asked whether we were eating in, we reserved a table. My heart sank the minute we entered the restaurant. But we had booked a table and we were trapped. Before we had even looked at the menu, the meals of the other diners gave a clue as to out fate. I was instantly reminded of school dinners: tinned tomato soup; cubes of carrot and swede; mince beef in gravy – I’ve not had that kind of stuff since I was 7. And for pudding, a scoop of ice cream. Ice cream is not a pudding. Ice cream goes with a pudding. Evidently not in Braemar.
We ate our gloomy repast. The wine we had ordered came half way through the main course. The portions were so small that we’d finished eating within about 15 minutes, leaving a lot of wine to get through with no accompaniment. But worse was to follow.
Next morning when we came down to breakfast, we picked a nice seat by the window in the vast and almost empty dining room. We were brought coffee and had started on our cereal when the head waiter approached us.
“You must move,” he said. “This table is reserved.”
We looked at the 50 or so empty tables in the room. “But there’s plenty of space.”
“You must move”
“But we’ve started eating now. We’d rather stay where we are.”
“You must sit at the table you were at last night. You must sit at the same table for the whole of your stay. You should have been told that.”
Our “stay” ended immediately after breakfast.
Children's horror fantasy
Restaurants have spent a lot of money in the last decade or so sprucing up their décor. Flock wallpaper or oulde worlde prints no longer cut the sophisticated mustard. The accessory of the noughties is the fish tank. The best tanks are really superb. Others are more hit and miss.
I'm a real sucker for fish tanks, so when we went to our local Indian restaurant, the Crediton Tandoori, I picked the table by the tank. We were given the menu and spent a happy 15 minutes or so ordering drinks and putting together curry combinations, during which time, the restaurant filled up. Completely.
The other diners were mainly families with children and for a while they too were engrossed in anticipatory culinary creations. The business of ordering complete, one by one we started to look around. In the fish tank there was one very large dead goldfish: bloated, white, mouldy and floating. I can't imagine why we’d not noticed it before. We noticed it. So did the children. They rushed en masse towards the tank, crowding round our table.
MUMMMY MUMMY MUMMMY IT’S DEAD. LOOOOOK! URGGH! OOOOH LOOK THE OTHER ONES ARE NIBBLING IT! (which they were).
We were very stuck. There was no other table to move to and we were in the middle of a children’s horror fantasy. There hadn’t been so much in-house entertainment in years. The kids loved it. We didn’t.
Indian take-away
It was at a different Indian restaurant that we had probably our worst experience. We arrived and ordered a meal but it became obvious almost immediately that there was a problem: my husband was evidently going down with a bug. I looked at him. He needed to be at home. In bed. I called the waiter over.
“My husband’s not well,” I said. “Can we turn that into a take away?”
I left my husband to collect the food and pay and went off to get the car. We went home and he went to bed, leaving me to eat my lonely curry in front of the television. He didn’t surface for a couple of days. It was then that he noticed that his credit card was missing. We immediately cancelled the card but it had already been used to do a shop at the local garage. We called the police.
“When did you last use it?” they asked.
“To pay for an Indian take away.”
The policeman gave us a knowing look and correctly guessed the restaurant we had been at.
“I wouldn’t like to comment, sir.” he said “But next time I suggest you eat elsewhere.”
We have not been back.