AFTERNOON TEA

CROWNE PLAZA HOTEL

Buckingham Gate, St James, LONDON

It's been a while now that I've been wanting to have Afternoon Tea and in conversation with Mr G and Jeffo they expressed an interest in joining me, we had pencilled in January, but things conspired against us, then we pencilled in March, but the date we picked happened to be Mother's Day so Jeffo couldn't join us, and though Mr G and I were still going to go, a freight train shed it's load all over the line near my place, so we had to postpone that too, but eventually on 6th April 2008, we made it and had afternoon tea together.

Was it worth the wait, to be honest it was.... kind of... it had been a while since Jeffo, Mr G and myself had hooked up for a proper chinwag so in that respect it was great. Afternoon Tea is a great way to meet friends and have conversation, I would even say it may even make a great first date, but if you do decide to have afternoon tea, I'd suggest you avoid the Crowne Plaza Hotel, as the quality of the eats, just wasn't that good.

Since the days of Anna the 7th Duchess of Bedford, who is reported to be the instigator of the Afternoon Tea tradition, it has consisted of a pot of tea and sandwiches....over time cakes were added, but bearing in mind the Duchess was pretty loaded you know that the ingredients would have top quality produce, but alas at the Crowne Plaza, it wasn't that.

Now the price was £16.50 each....now I fully understand that we're paying for the privilege to sit in a hotel tea room and have eats, but when you can clearly see that they have scrimped and saved it's annoying...for the tidy sum of £16.50 we each got four finger sandwiches, two small scones and a couple of cakes.... the thing is you could tell that they had taken two slices of what felt like Tesco value bread and made a sandwich, cut off the crust and then sliced it into three... so basically between the three of us they use 8 slices of bread.

The slices of cake, was clearly a Mr Kipling style small circle cake with a quarter cut into three and as for the other 2 cakes... it was the same cake but turned upside down... they must have thought we wouldn't notice the cake tasting the same. But the major disappointment was the scones, they were tiny and cold and from the texture, I'd say they were rock cakes in their former life.

Even though it's called Afternoon Tea, they do serve coffee, so I have coffee, but Jeffo and Mr G both had tea and they assured me the tea was really good, as was the coffee, I did like the teapots, they were clear glass, so you could see the leaves enthusing the water, the one good thing was the tea was made from proper looking leaves, as in not the refined Typhoo or Tetley Tea you pick up in a supermarket, but proper looking, straight from the hillside chunks of leaves, so that was refreshing.

All in all it wasn't the fantastic afternoon we'd hoped for, as it was spoilt by the..... afternoon tea, but the good things that came out of it included, catch up with Jeffo and Mr G, finding a cracking pub called "The Albert" right on Buckingham Gate and doing something different from being plugged into the PS3 on a Sunday afternoon.

Would I recommend afternoon tea to anyone, absolutely, in fact we plan to go again in July, but we def won't be going to Crowne Plaza, Buckingham Gate, because it just wasn't anywhere near what I'd expected afternoon tea to be.

Mr G is down for picking the next venue, no doubt we'll up the budget and see if buy paying more, we'll get more quality, after all, Afternoon Tea should have looked like this according to the Crowne Plaza Hotel's picture of their afternoon tea..... but I shall post picture in the website gallery and you see what we got served up....

Oh and I mustn't forget to mention the Afternoon Tea website, which if you plan to ever do an afternoon tea, is a great website to visit as they list most of the places in the country who do afternoon tea and you can actually get them to do all the booking for you, and they will confirm it for you, the only thing I'd say is that they will send you a map, if you don't know where the hotel is, then make sure you secure yourself a better map as the afternoon tea website's map is pretty poor.

The Handmade Burger Co.

The Waters Edge, Brindleyplace, Birmingham, B1 2JB

Now this eatery I'd been told about a fair few months back by my pals Abbs and Nas and basically the average person has got to like a burger every now and then, so when they guys told me about this place and the fact they made the burgers from scratch with 100% pure beef and I thought to myself I got to get there at some point, and Abbs and Nas promised they'd take me there.... that was about 8 months ago if not longer. Well on Monday 19th November I managed to get there with my man The Mag, here follows my thoughts:

We got there at about 2115, so this could have had an influence on my findings, but bottom-line I wasn't overly impressed with this place. Yes it was a Monday night, but there were only two other couple in the place and it really didn't look like the staff had been rushed off their feet. We were greeted and asked if we'd been before. We were given the nod to pick our own table, we sat on a two sofas by the window. Having the sofa area was kinda cool I guess, especially for that homely feel when you consider in this day and age the average single person or non married couple often eat supper in front of the telly in their lounge, so I did like the sofa area, as it made it all very informal.

The menu had a very wide selection of Burgers, in fact it reminded me of Grubbs Burgers in Brighton, where they have about 15 different types of burgers. The average price here are Handmade was £7.50 for just a burger. Then the side orders like Chips or Salad average price was £2.80, when you throw in a bottle of Gaymers total bill for two people was £24.40... which ordinarily I'd say was burger bar extortion, but Abbs and Nas had raved about this place so I bit the bullet and paid up the cash, as you pay when you order, very pub and Nandos like...

As by this time we were the only customers who weren't eating in the place, my expectation was that the service would be pretty quick, and it was, but considering the burger was meant to have been made from scratch, and I've made homemade... sorry attempted to make homemade burgers, I felt the service was a little too quick, so my guess is the burgers are made in batches. To be honest I was very disappointed with my Italian Burger which consisted of a luke warm, has been sitting on a hot plate (McDonald type) 100% Beef Burger and a 2mm thick slab of Pesto with a couple of fibres of Rocket...served between a dry "been sitting in a bread basket since 6am" bun.... as I said, maybe going after 2100 could have affected the quality of the place, though a piping hot burger and pesto spread thinly with a few leaves of rocket.... shouldn't have been affected.... the dry bun, I let slide for now.

The chips were pretty good actually and they were hot and looked very much homemade so to speak, but that said doesn't Auntie Bessie do frozen homemade chips.... On talking to The Mag, he wasn't overly impressed either...

In conclusion and based on this experience, I won't be recommending this place to anyone who fancies having a burger style meal, especially at the price of £24.40... though I will go back and try the place on say a Thursday mid evening, though I'm sure if you went to say The Ivy, Claridges or Browns the food would be of the same quality no matter what time of day you went.

Out of 10, this place get's 6 subject to a revisit

Nandos... Wow, what a place to eat. Hot (excuse the pun) write up on the way.