It's almost a fortnight since I got back from Edinburgh, but I still haven't totally recovered. I am trying to press on with stuff, but on a day off like today I realise that I am still knackered. I slept in until nearly 2pm. I have been overdoing it a bit I guess and didn't get in til late after my gig in Cranleigh last night. Still, impressive powers of sleeping.
Tonight I was out with a friend and we decided to go for dinner without having made any reservations. We walked along the road passing a Thai place, a Tapas restaurant and a pizzeria, but none of them were tempting us in. Then we saw a curry house and it was just what we fancied, so we went for it, though neither had been to this particular place before.
It was down some stairs and once we got down there it seemed as deserted as the Marie Celeste. There were no customers, no waiters, no one behind either of the bars, no on to greet us at all. That's quite unnerving in a restaurant on a Saturday night. It was only 7pm, but evenso you'd expect someone to be there. I thought I heard a sound from the kitchen and shouted a tentative "hello", hoping I was not about to draw the attention of the murderer who had killed everyone else in the place. A startled young woman came out after a few seconds, as if customers were the last thing she was expecting to see in her restaurant. "Can we get a table for two?" I asked. It seemed unlikely that she was going to claim things were too busy.
So we sat down in this eerie eaterie and were given some menus. "Would you like some poppadoms to start?" the waitress asked. "Yes please. We'll have two."
We looked at our menus and I wondered whether I was going to order a beer. I had been thinking of having another month off drinking and have only had one glass of wine all week. But a curry without lager? It seems a shame after a hard week, especially given that I have nothing to do in the morning.
I had plenty of time to make my decision, because the waitress, as far as we could tell, the sole occupant of this establishment had disappeared into the kitchen and was there for several minutes.
Eventually she came back, looking sheepish, with a basket with three poppadoms in it. "Sorry," she said, "We're having trouble making regular poppadoms, I hope these spicy ones are all right."
It wasn't a great sign and perhaps an indication as to why the place was empty. An Indian restaurant which isn't able to make poppadoms. I didn't mind. I like the spicy ones. And there was an impressive range of seemingly home made chutneys which were delicious. I was able to overlook the fact that the spicy poppadoms were not completely cooked either.
She took our drinks order. I had decided to go for a pint of Cobra. It seemed rude not to.
We'd been in the place for fifteen minutes now and no one else had arrived. The phone had rung a couple of times and I guessed there were some takeaway orders being taken, but there was an air of sadness that the place was doing so badly on what should be a big night. Credit crunch? The other restaurants we'd passed had had plenty of patrons. Something weird was going on.
I wondered if we'd stumbled across a robbery and all the restaurant staff were bound and gagged in the kitchen, then we'd arrived and for some reason the criminals had decided that rather than blow their cover or take extra hostages, they would try and pretend that they ran the place and do their best to serve us. It would explain why there was a nervous Eastern European woman serving in an Indian restaurant. And why she couldn't make poppadoms properly.
The drinks took an age to arrive, which would have been understandable if things had been more busy, but finally I had a pint in front of me. We were ready to order, though this also took her by surprise and she had to go and locate a pad. But within a couple of minutes we'd ordered our food and she had gone to the kitchen - was she really alone in there, trying to do everything, like some kind of Basil Fawlty.
As I raised my beer to my lips I could smell an odd sourness to the drink. And it tasted bitter, maybe slightly disinfectanty. I wondered if my pallate had just been affected by the lime pickle, but my companion agreed that the beer had at least an odd after taste. I didn't want to create a fuss, especially as it had taken us nearly half an hour to get this far and thought about just drinking the detergent flavoured drink. But I realised it was best to ask for a replacement. Not that that was easy to do. Our waitress/hostage taker was back in the kitchen. Finally I took the pint to the bar. She was now on the phone. I waited for her to take the order. "There's something a bit odd about this beer," I said, "It doesn't taste right."
She took me at my word very quickly. Almost like she knew she was selling a barrel of tainted booze. She was very sweet about it all and apologised and said she'd get me a bottle of Cobra instead. Perhaps she was feeling a bit embarrassed that so far absolutely nothing had gone right.
More minutes passed. Finally I could see that she had located a bottle of beer and brought it into the bar. She took the top off, put it on a tray, lifted the tray and the beer fell over. She was surely having the worst day of her life. Only a small drop of beer had spilled, but she was clearly off to get me a fresh bottle. She was gone for some time before finally coming back with what looked like a champagne bottle. She brought it to my table and explained that she had been unable to find a cold Cobra bottled beer, but that I could have this special large bottle of double fermented King Cobra beer at the same price. She didn't know how to open it though. I wasn't sure that she'd ever done this job before. But she was really doing her best and I was quite enjoying the experience.
A subtle smell of burning was now permeating into the empty restaurant. It reminded me of times that I have been cooking rice on a stove and forgotten about it, allowing the water to boil away until the rice is sticking to the pan. It could well have been this.
Ten minutes later the flustered lady came out with two more half cooked spicy poppadoms, explaining that it was taking a long time to cook the King Prawns that my friend had ordered. But I don't think that was true.
By now I had seen another man coming out of the kitchens to deliver a takeaway. So she wasn't totally alone. But it was still odd to be in an empty restaurant having to wait ages for our food.
Finally our main courses arrived and though the pillau rice looked a bit like boiled rice with a few of the grains hastily coloured in pink with a felt tip, everything tasted really good.
And I enjoyed the experience immensely. It was like there was a little play going on as we waited, though most of the action was taking place in the other room. But perhaps better not to know what was going on and having to fill in the gaps.
The waitress seemed surprised when I left her a tip, but I think she deserved it. She had tried her best. She also apologetically spluttered that it was usually busier than this. Which made her waitressing less impressive as this clearly wasn't her first day. And I wondered how they would cope here if they had more than two customers to deal with. Rather optimistically she also gave me the restaurant's card. Though I can't imagine why they thought I'd want to return.
Though I am tempted to name them, only in the hope that some more people might go along to experience this Balti Towers dining experience.
I won't though.
