York and a pub crawl 4

The Dean Court Hotel in York has a location no more than a stone's throw away from one of the most beautiful cathedrals in Europe and is in itself a period building.  Whoever was commissioned to undertake their recent interior design project therefore, should be shot.  It is a travesty of modern refurbishment over ambience, taste and style.   Let me not dwell on it because I feel my blood rising at the thought that somebody has been let loose on such an important landmark in York with only the most rudimentary sense of style and elegance and the B&Q version of interior design as their template.  Just to say I was mightily relieved not to have been relieved of so much money and I was doubly pleased with my little find at the Coach House.  That was until I got back there for dinner.   When you travel alone, as I do much of the time, you get used to the blank stare and the furrowed brow that accompanies your request for a ‘table for one’.   And that is what met me when I arrived back at the Coach House ready to eat a horse and speculating about the menu sufficiently deeply enough to get my stomach grumbling with the prospect of a fine meal ahead of me.    Now, I had not raised my expectations too far – this was a pub after all – but it advertised its Carriages Restaurant independent of the pub/hotel and had a Head Chef who they cited on their business card so I expected some moderately good things.  Coming back down from my room however, I was shown to a table squeezed right up into a corner.  It’s position made me wonder if they’d just whipped a vase of flowers off it and were giving it to the poor sap (tee hee) who was eating alone (tee hee hee) on a Saturday night (tee hee hee hee).  But I settled in, ordered a pint of the local real ale to get my evening started and then perused the menu. Being as hungry as a horse (as mentioned previously) and having moved on from fantasies of eating a horse to something more socially acceptable (in this country at least) I ordered haddock and chips with mushy peas as the best possible lining for a stomach ahead of an extended (I hoped) pub crawl around the town. Having placed my order and no sooner having settled down to read my paper and enjoy my beer, my food arrived. In fact, it probably arrived in the space of time it’s taken me to write the last three sentences.  Now as we all know, sometimes food arrives too quickly and this was one of those times.  I eyed it with suspicion.  Then I poked it a bit and then I took a bite and it was clear, very clear that for whatever reason I had before me a re-heated haddock and chips.  It looked reheated, it smelt reheated and it tasted reheated.  Now, I was in a quandary.  In thirty minutes I was meeting the boys, I needed to eat and I needed to conduct at least some basic ablutions and definitely put some more lipstick on.  I could send my food back and take the risk that with the restaurant filling up it would take much longer to arrive leaving me in the kind of rush that results in a skirt tucked into your knickers or lipstick smeared all over your teeth. So, weighing up the options and with a disheartened sigh I started to pick my way through it. Now, let me ask you a question.  Say you owned a restaurant and you employed people in that restaurant as waiters and waitresses and as part of their ‘training’ you told them to ask the customers if the food was all right. Now, hypothetically speaking, if they said yes then as a waitress or waiter you would smile, say you were pleased they were enjoying it and then go onto the next one. What if they said no?  What if the customer said as I did “actually it’s average.  Very average.  It tastes like it has been reheated.”  As a waiter or waitress what might you do then?  Perhaps ask them if they would like something else or tell them you would get the restaurant manager/ess to speak to them or even offer to reduce the price or take the meal off the bill?  Any of these things would be better than I got which was a mumbled “oh, really” and then a waitress who avoided me like the plague until it was clear that I wasn’t going to eat any more.  And even then she sent her mate to clear the plate.  Musing on the useless customer service that the UK generally makes its own (why do people go and work in the catering industry who clearly don't like having to deal with customers?  Why employ a Head Chef who will send out food that is so clearly of poor quality? Why, as an employer employ either?), I folded my paper, pushed back my chair and made for the stairs.  And just as I get there, with a virtual rugby tackle, the plate-clearing waitress comes bowling over to me and tells me to pay for my meal. They wouldn't put it on my bill (did they think I was going to do a runner in my socks?).  So, I go up to my room on the second floor, get my purse and come all the way back down again and settle for my meal as I was intending to do when I paid my bill the next morning anyway. I left for my evening out with the boys with overwhelming perceptions of poor food and extremely poor customer service.  My evening, I decided, could only get better.             

York and a pub crawl 3

Evensong at York Minster is a delight and with the exception of Sunday it takes place every day at 5.15pm.  The moderate congregation that gathers is guided through The Crossing and under the 15th century Quire Screen.  The screen is one of the most striking parts of the cathedral and it is hard as you file through not to be aware of the watchful and imperious stares of the eight early Kings of England which are carved into it.  Seated in amongst the choir in The Quire (I think it’s pronounced choir too) there is time before the service begins to settle down and let your eyes drift over the ornate wood carvings of the pews and up to the beautiful simplicity of the cream and gold ceiling a long way above you. Having a choir to sing Evensong with you surely helps it a long and there is another upside – it meant I could sing away to my hearts content without having other members of the congregation looking round to see if someone had stood on a cat.  If you are in York early evening I would recommend getting yourself along to the Minster and for the 40 or so minutes of piety and atonement you get to wander around FOC for about 45 minutes afterwards. That trade-off certainly gets my vote. Having had my spiritual fill more practical needs took over and I suddenly realised I was very hungry indeed. My plan was to have something suitably hearty to set me up for the evening ahead. I had taken a few moments now and then during my stroll back from the Jorvik Viking Museum on Coppergate to stop and look at a menu or two but nothing was really engaging me and so I decided I would go back to the Coach House and eat in the restaurant there.  But before that I wanted to wander over to the £210/night Dean Court Hotel and see what I was missing.  The Dean Court Hotel does have a very fine location – right on the Minster plaza and a step away from the Shambles and other tourist attractions.  It has a fine and imposing Victorian red brick exterior and over the course of 140 years has been transformed from three separate dwellings into one 4* hotel.  The inside, though, is a tragedy.