574. An Autumn Week In Weston, Part 1.

 

  The dog and I were taking our usual autumnal break in what once may have been reasonably and accurately called Birmingham-on-Sea viz Weston-super-Mare (or any combination of hyphens or capital letters you may wish to use) and having braved ferocious winds and torrential rain blowing in from the Bristol Channel caused by one of those named storms which are so trendy now, for the first couple of days of our visit, were now relaxed and comfortable in the milder, kinder state of weather which had settled in the town. Having dined for two or three days at the very pleasing Old Thatched Cottage on excellent grills and Greek dishes and also having visited Bristol to lunch at Michelin-starred Wilson’s it was time for a change of dining venue back in Weston.

  And so, at the end of the week, a Friday evening visit to what has long been my favourite modest little dining spot in modest, little Weston super Mare - The Ginger Pig Kitchen. I had tried to make a reservation the week before and been told in a somewhat irritatingly phrased e-mail that none was available but subsequently another e-mail revealed a reversed decision and so off I trotted the short distance to the usually busy restaurant. It was early evening and it was getting busy.

  All the front of house staff appeared new and so did the diners - they all looked, judging by their clothes, very middle class and local whereas in the past there had been a good number of holidaying West Midlands and Welsh workers tucking into their pork belly starters and generously portioned pies and fish and chips. Hipsters had penetrated the place I noted and the menu had changed - some of the eternal former dishes were still there but suddenly French cuisine was getting a look in and I was lured into ordering ‘French onion soup’ from the main menu and coq au vin which the waitress determinedly pronounced as cock o’ VIN as though she had never heard the pronunciation of cock o’VAN. I thought, perhaps patronisingly with the benefit of hindsight, that this was rather sweet and charming  and therefore pronounced it Cock o’VIN to save embarrassment and afterwards, when I discovered that the dish was definitely NOT coq au vin, I conceded that the unusual pronunciation of the dish had in fact been appropriate.

  It was a fairly disastrous meal about as Gallic as a plate of faggots and peas or cheeseburger and fries. It had the air of having been prepared by a chef who knew nothing about peasant French cuisine or who was cynically just trying to use an exotic name to push some English dishes with a mild twist on to an ignorant collection of diners.

  The French onion soup was pretty awful and suffered from a relative dearth of onion in it. The scanty onion slices were not tender enough and there was no real onion sweetness to it. There was a moderately sized crouton floating on the surface of the thin liquid which had a little too much oil swishing about and of course there was the inevitable garnish of the ubiquitous pea shoot to ensure at least one element of predictability.

  The coq au vin was probably illegal as a contravention of the Trade Descriptions Act, if that law is still in force. This was not an alluring piece of braised chicken, the lovely meat falling off the bone, the flavour robust and hearty, bursting with the taste of shallots and mushrooms and vin, but nothing more than a supreme of roast chicken only mildly over cooked and perfectly edible if it had been sold as roast chicken rather than as an exotic and Gallic coq au vin. As well as its again inevitable pea shoot garnish, it was accompanied by a good portion of green beans which I would have liked to have been a little more tender, a very toothsome potato gratin and a thin broth containing carrots in three ways - a Brunoise, baby carrots and large carrots - what was that all about? a parsnip and, outrageously, silver skin pickled onions substituting for the shallots, there being no hint of bacon nor mushrooms. This was an outrageous spoof and I can only conclude that Chef was ‘havin’ a larf’. The limited wine menu offered nothing fully relevant to coq au vin but I did have a glass of a nice Merlot and this was about as good as it got.

  I finished with an affogato as I so often do - it’s hard to do anything too bad to a cup of espresso and a bit of vanilla ice cream though the dish is always served at the Ginger Pig Kitchen alongside a lonely strawberry be it seasonal or not.

  What’s in a name? Quite a lot I think.