Ad's eats: Bavarian Beerhouse, 190 City Road, London

Possibly the hardest working in London, these waiting staff are in danger of heading for deafness at an early age. They should be awarded with medals for their top service in the face such a racket.



German food, like British native food, does not seem to travel well internationally, at least not without being first maligned for being stodgy, porky and plain. Nothing wrong with any of these qualities if the food is prepared well. I've never quite understood why us Brits, of all people, should snigger at German food. We invented the pork pie after all. If you're a veggie, granted, you're going to stuggle a bit with Deutsch grub, at least with the pub grub type menu Germany is most famous for.

It was this kind of pub food we sought out when a eight of us headed into City Road for Mrs Dukc's birthday do - no, I don't reveal her age, though she is considerably older than me.

The restaurant's website describes the Beerhouse thus: "Bavarian Beerhouse is an unique
combination of excellent food, outstanding service, great German beer and fantastic atmosphere."
The description is oh so accurate, but for one thing. We'll get to that later.

Let's start with the good bits. The food at the Bavarian Beehouse is pretty authentic. I'm not exactly the widest-travelled wanderer, but I have been to Berlin twice and the food served at at the Bavarian Beerhouse tasted very much like the real deal to me.

My starter was a cheese special "Obazda Cheese" which consisted of a soft pretzel with a mixture of different cheeses which tasted like a grated cheese mixture bound together with mayo. My main was about as typically German as you can get, Munich Roast Pork. Four thick slices of butcher quality pork, in rich beer infused gravy, served with a large, gravy-soaking potato dumpling and piles of delish sauerkraut. For dessert, I had a light cinnamon-y pancake with spray-on cream. Cream aside, the cake itself was light and tasty. All in all, the food was fairly close to the perfect German experience.

After not such a promising start with the service, it got better and better, and the German waitress serving us became more efficient and polite as the evening went on. She deserved a medal for staying calm as this was one of the noisiest restaurants I've been to. I was with a bunch of blindos and therefore, only two of us could read the menu. After being told the music could not be turned down (the music being a loop of the ten "best" Christmas tracks in the world...ever" (special limited restaurant edition), I had the bellow the menu to my friends like a crazed market trader. To be honest, I was glad to get away from the noise.

The restaurant has a wide range of German beers on tap too, which I'highly recommend, the dark wheat Pauliner beer being my favourite with a rich, fruity taste, and one suspects, rather higher than you'd expect in alcohol content.

So, overall I would give this restaurant a "wait and see" verdict. I can hardly fault the food and happily give it an 8 / 10 mark. The service was pretty good too, at 7/10. I think even the world's best waiting staff would struggle under these conditions. Tables were set out five-aside 'stamtisch' style and the main clientele on the evening we appeared seemed to be office Christmas partygoers simply having a wonderful corporate time. By the end of it, I was beginning to hope that the guys sharing my air were all employees of Woolworths having the last fling before receiving their redundancy notices.

To conclude, this is s a restaurant let down by its customers. I am going to give this restaurant a "recommended" rating because I really want to like it and intend giving it another bash in January when hopefully things are back to normal. It does exactly what it says it will do on the on the tin. But Christmas party season isn't the best environment in which to relax with friends, unless the Christmas party is your own.

Information about the restaurant and its menu can be found here:

http://www.bavarian-beerhouse.com/

Food: 8/10
Service: 7/10
Environment: 2/10
Value for money: 7/10

Water Gardens, Harlow

Rather liked the way this pic I snapped of Harlow Water Gardens yesterday turned out. The big and over-bright setting sun really brings out the starkness of the “spirit of optimism” 60s buildings to the right. Wish I’d got it when things were a bit more orange later, but that’s mobile cams for ya.

It was nowhere near as dark as it looks here, but I tried to force my camera’s processing thingy to behave rather like how the old fashioned recording level control in cheap radio-cassette players worked. That halo effect around the sun I only noticed on the big monitor. Absolutely no idea what that’s all about, Alfie – some kind of lens distortion maybe?

I go, we go, Yugo. Yu-gone.

The final Yugo car is rolling off the production line today. Apart from the fact I didn’t realise these were still being built, I tried in the mid 80s, unfruitfully, to persuade my dad to buy one of these with the idea that having such an unhip car would actually make you rather hip – this does, in my experience, work, as people are secretly rather curious about things they sneer about without knowing why.

Sadly, he didn’t buy one (or indeed, a Skoda Estelle which I was equally keen to promote). However, my parents managed to own two 2CV during the late 80s/early90s so my campaign was not entirely lost, and yes, people were impressed by their flaky flapping windows and the starting handle potential of it.

MOOG PARTY TIME, or Test Card tale

As a tot, which indeed I was in the early 70s, watching the test card was about as exciting as TV got.

Well, no, that's not quite true.

There was Bod, Mister Benn, Jackanory and a shedload of BBC kids TV. Television which the Beeb at the time thought very important, so lavished millions of pounds at making pretty decent. However, on those luxurious days where you were either sick/pretending to be or for when friends weren't around, you could sit, preferably huddle, under a duvet - and watch, or rather listen to - the Test Card. This was a thing which I doubt exists anywhere in the world today. There is no need. Tellies are too reliable for their own dang good.

Also known as "trade test transmissions" these were pretty un-entertaining, in that they featured a series of coloured vertiicle lines, dots, grey squares and a coloured picture of a girl and her clown doll, playing noughts and crosses. I believe their intended purpose was to assist TV service engineers adjust colour, tint, line-roll fiddle-di-doodahs or whatever engineers did with old valve monostrosities made of finest ticky tacky wood effect. In fact, here is one:

What I most remember about test cards though was the accoompanying music. This ranged from elevator classical to orchestrated film sound tracks to the synth-tastic sound tracks by Harry Breuer, Mort Garson and other mainly unknown, unsung heroes of the synthesizer.

I can't tell you how pleased I was then I my auntie Pat (known by me since as as "Gundigatt" from the days where I could genuinely not speak, resulting from age rather than level of drunkenness) came back from a trip to Woolies with a strawberry Mivvi and this little gem. A very, very fine album it is. The thrid track, Coconut, was one of those test card tunes! Joy - I recognised it and knew, in my smug five year old brain that NO ONE ELSE had this record, or would know from whence the track came!

I can't tell you much about this album's heritage. Even the website I managed to track a copy down from has the artist as 'unknown'. According to this site, I now know it was made in in Italy in 1973, and was on the Contour record label at least in the UK, a very cheap imprint if I recall. Most of the tracks were duds and made with a simple raison d'etre: "Moogs are in and cool, let's make some contemporary rock tracks with a MOOG in them ". Simple thought process, and mainly duff songs, though no less charming for their duffness On this album was a half decent version of "Son of My Father" and a version of Popcorn which in my opinion is better in atmosphere than the Hot Butter original but whose drumming is beyond bad. Where Wendy Carlos is regarded by some as a bit of a novelty artist (but isn't) this music is also regarded as a bit of novelty (and is). But how cartoonishly glorious it is too.

Other superb synthesizer remaindered and charity shop specials can be found at this website:

http://www.basichipdigitalgold.com/moog/moog.htm