I had previously had dinner at the Rat and remember reasonably good steaks in a nice setting, so on a recent trip to Northumberland, we decided to stop by for lunch to see the view that everyone had talked about and try more of their menu. Unfortunately, our lunch was a huge disappointment made worse by the fact that the staff did not seem to care at all about the work they were doing.
The view was indeed worth the drive up. Stunning. They have a charming garden with a big willow tree and a pretty good selection of local cask ales. We looked out at the view from the car park and went in, feeling happy. However, it all went down hill from there. The menu changes every day, but our dishes were poorly executed, culminating in two mains rendered inedible due to extreme overcooking. To start, I had smoked salmon and my husband had onion soup. The salmon was basically from a grocery store and not particularly high-end. It came with some salad and strangely, a big pat of butter but no bread. The onion soup was OK - not memorably bad, not memorably good. The salmon rubbed me the wrong way because for basically the same price, actually a bit lower, I had had a delicious gravlax-style sea trout at the Feathers Inn, another Northumberland country gastropub, at dinner the night before that came with house-pickled cucumber and a delicious potato salad - someone had clearly put thought and effort into it. This dish basically took no effort from the kitchen and was more expensive.
The mains really made me angry. I ordered coley and my husband, pheasant. The vegetables that came with the both mains were pretty good and it was clear that both used good quality protein, but both proteins were so overcooked we could not eat them. The pheasant was so dried out and tough we could not cut it with a knife and the coley felt like chalk in my mouth.
It was carelessness on the part of the kitchen staff that ruined both dishes. Since the kitchen had already closed for the lunchtime service, they were not willing to fix our dishes, and they refused to bring a side of chips for my husband, who was quite hungry. It reminded me of David Chang's exhortation not to ruin good meat in his Momofuku cookbook (he's talking about dry-aged rib eye, but same principle with good fish and game): "If you f*ck up, you f*cked up a piece of meat that costs a lot of money. That somebody took care to raise and slaughter and dry-age and butcher. That makes you an asshole."
Fine, the kitchen screwed up - irritating but not the end of the world - but it made my blood boil when, at the end of the meal, our server, clearly seeing that neither of us had eaten our proteins, asked us how the food was. I told her that it was inedible due to overcooking. She basically smiled and said "Well, thanks for telling us what you thought," with no offer of doing anything to fix the situation. No offer to take anything off the price. A total "f you." When someone clearly has not enjoyed their meal, d2o not ask how it was if you do not intend to try to remedy the situation. Clearly, neither the kitchen staff nor the waitstaff cared about serving us a good meal. Still, being starving and not having time to stop at another place to eat, we ordered some chocolate cake for dessert. It was edible, at least.
I dislike, but am not necessarily enraged by, a restaurant with poorly executed dishes, and pubs that doesn't care about the food don't necessarily make me angry if expectations are low. But the Rat infuriates me because their website boasts about the quality of the food and all the local produce they use etc. Perhaps they assumed that since we were clearly not from there, it didn't matter if we liked our meal. Also, the owner flames people who write them bad reviews on TripAdvisor. This should have been a tip-off.
It's a shame because the setting is so nice, but the bottom line is that these are not the kind of people to whom I want to give business. read more
