Gratinated?

Beyond the fact that all the obvious / good names for a food / service blog were taken, my folks and I used to marvel at the mangling of the English language, particularly when it came to menuese...there he goes again, you'll say

Fact is, menu English or French or...isn't like regular language. It's as descriptive as the chef / author wants to be, and as commercial as any marketeer wants to make it. So I'd be willing to bend. But "gratinate" an Anglicized gratinee as in Gratinee a l'oignon or French Onion Soup seems to have migrated its way onto a menu one day, and Alan Lewis and I would laugh ourselves silly for at least twenty years.

So gratinated the blog is...food, wine and service under the bright light of the salamander, tasty but not burnt

You always remember your first time

I will have a lot to say about Westfield and the restaurants there. Let's just leave it for now at a giant leap for mall feeding in the UK let alone Europe and maybe the world though the sum is probably greater than the parts.

We haven't really made it further than Kitchen Italia (not wanting to deal with the queues at Wahaca). This is an ambitious Italian Wagamama style and bless it most of it works. Bare wooden tables and benches - ask to sit side by side as facing each other is just too wide to be intimate - with some flavoured olive oils and Alessi cheese graters handily in the middle. Some drinkable wines by the carafe with quite ok glassware for the price, and tasty Forst lager.

The menu is fun, authentic enough, with enough individual touches to remind you you're here and not in Carluccio's or someone else's pasta shop - Taglierini with Black Truffles, Capelletti filled with Duck Confit and Sage Butter and a heroic Polenta with Wild Boar Ragu served in a wide shallowish wooden bowl. With two nibblies or sides, two pastas, and a dessert between the two of your, beer, wine and water you get out for £40 before the tip which is very very user friendly.

Now the rub...my first polenta was brilliant, warming, brave and as good as anything that might come out of Theo Randall's kitchen on a good day. This week's was ok...good enough...just not killer

All of which leads me to the critical question, is any dish ever as good as the first time you've had it?

When you least expect it

Sometimes, our practioners of customer service actually get it right and make your day. It's really small stuff that takes split second thinking and most importantly empathy.

Case in point, Chelsea & Westminster Starbucks, Saturday November 29th 9:00 am before my annual visit to my cardiologist, I get caught in a queue behind someone collecting a dozen or so capuccinos (all different of course) for some newly transposed sheikdom. My tea was waiting as was my £1.50.

Twenty seconds or so, a lifetime on a Saturday morning, I'm thinking please, take my cash even it if means giving me the change from the tip box...and miracle or miracles that's what happens.

The 5p should have gone right back into the tip box...and will soon enough. I'm getting over the shock and reveling in the pleasure