As promised!

The Venue – Metropolitan Bar, Baker Street.

I suspect one of the nicer venues in the Wetherspoon chain, the bar is in the old refreshment rooms of the Metropolitan Railway. While the stucco work is pretty and well lit the drab patterned carpet and dark wood tabled and chairs look a bit incongruous. Clientele was largely single or small groups of men in sportswear with red top tabloids and a smattering of families with prams. Pretty confident I was the only one there with the Guardian and Economist as my lunchtime reading!

Taking my table I perused a long, laminated menu of dishes – no seasonal eating here. To enable some easy cost and taste comparisons I opted for a burger with chips and onion rings – specifically a burger with cheese and bacon – and some prawns with sweet chilli dip to start. Ordering is at the bar where I was also informed that my ‘meal deal’ also included a free drink. A pint of Ruddles was taken as one with JDW do well is decent ale.

The prawns arrived promptly, still dripping with oil from the deep fat frier. They didn’t actually taste of prawn, just a pillowey nothing coated with sharp, bitter ‘batter’ more resembling waste from a chemical plant. Straight from the 3663 lorry to the freezer and then the chip pan. The dip in a paper cup was a lovely touch. As was the sad, wilting, browning shreds of iceberg lettuce as ‘garnish’. Oh dear. Still, at least the ale was good though as it was lunchtime I limited myself to just a few mouthfuls.

Leaving most of the prawns I awaited the burger. It arrived along with onion rings in a separate bowl. First, the bad. An overthawed and resultingly tough bun, more bloody browned iceberg, tough, grey bland burger, unmelted plastic cheese and then there were the chips. Utterly revolting – brown on the outside and barely cooked inside. BLEURGH.

However the bacon was nice and the onion rings surprisingly good, being soft in the middle, crunchy on the outside and just the right side of greasy.

Cost – GBP6 for the burger, which would have cost a tenner at the Gourmet Burger Kitchen further down Baker Street. Would the GBK effort be worth 75% more? Yes, because I would have eaten it rather than leaving most behind. The Wetherspoons effort was shocking value because it was – largely – so bad. Poorly cooked, badly prepared, poor quality ingredients and crap ambience. The beer, bacon and onion rings were the only redeeming features.

In summary – utter crap. I stand by my assessment of the food as poor, in fact it was one of the worst meals I’ve had in a long, long time (right up there with the glass noodles and cold fish BD served me on the way back from Tbilisi). I don’t buy food from Tesco very often but I doubt they could have produced something as bad. In supermarket terms, it was more like a microwave kebab from your local petrol station.