Turkey & Beef @ Toby Carvery, Reading 28/09/2014

Roast Dinners In Reading is back.  There will be at least one roast a month from now on.  Maybe.

And a real domain name.  Maybe a Facebook/Twitter page too.  I might even amend the name slightly.

So after a nice walk near Ascot on Sunday just gone, I decided that I required a big pile of food on a pre-payday budget.

Toby Carvery was the choice.

It wasn’t as cheap as I had thought it would be - £9.49 for a carvery and an extra £1.50 to go KING SIZE.  I went KING SIZE.

KING SIZE gets you two chipolatas, an extra Yorkshire pudding and a bit more meat.

Either normal size or KING SIZE gets you up to 4 different meats – turkey, gammon, pork and beef were the choices.  The pork didn’t looked like it had been there for a few hours, so I chose beef and turkey.

The vegetable choices were pretty basic – carrots, cauliflower ‘cheese’, peas, runner beans, onions.  There were 3 different types of gravy – vegetarian, mint and meat.  I drenched my plate in meat.

So onto the food.  And boy was I hungry.

The beef was ok, it tasted like the turkey, which was so thinly sliced that the server should really have a job at Bernard Matthews doing their wafer-thin turkey slices.  The potatoes were ok, they tasted like the turkey.  The stuffing tasted like the potatoes, but at least had a different texture.  The sausages did taste like sausages but the cauliflower ‘cheese’ tasted like the beef, or the turkey, or the potatoes.  Certainly not of cheese.

The gravy was brown water.

The crackling was inedible.

Thankfully a dining experience isn’t all about the food.

The waitress was very helpful (and quite hot), the wait for a table was just 10 minutes or so and the clientele were friendly, though the two ladies near us seemed a little confused as to why Muslims tend not to have western names such as Harry or Fred.  I considered suggesting that neither do the French or Germans but decided against.

The beer choice was not great - I plumped for Amstel but it tasted of chemicals.

Thankfully the company was excellent.

Things can only get better.  Malmaison next weekend?!

A more-generous-than-their-meat-serving score of 3.5 out of 10.

Oh wait a minute, the Yorkshire pudding were pretty good.