Marketing null points! The sign makes it look like a Hungry Hippo All-U-Can-Eat Sunday lunch with foam balls and cheap beer. But step inside and nothing could be further from the truth. Fine seafood, fine wine list, fine (but relaxed) service and with just enough quirkiness and kitsch to make you smile.
British MPs are being forced to cut back in anticipation of being voted out at the next election. In the meantime, they are biding time on expense accounts barely adequate for a FTSE executive board member, never mind a potential world leader. Even fresh pilchards for the white Persian cat have been disallowed. Whence does one plot world domination, when one can’t even afford a clean moat?
I think the solution for most bright Members is to reduce the wine Average Bottle Value (ABV).
Château Ricaud Premières Côtes de Blaye 2005 was only £7.50 from the Wine Society and, therefore, well suited to the brave new budget.
La Réserve de Quasimodo is self subtitled: Le plus vieux bistrot en l’ile de la cité.  Seven centuries of history. Did Asterix the Gaul possibly eat here?
Well at first sight, you have to admire a man with cojones the size of decanters. Rowan Gormley, not content with taking on the mighty Direct Wines (owners of the Laithwaites and Virgin Wines brands) at selling wine, is now considering a legal defence in the light of a provocative press release that Rowan put out on behalf of Naked Wines to which DW took offence. Offence that was duly passed to their lawyers who promptly threatened to sue his ass.
Rowan’s blog offers the viewpoint of a man on one side of an argument that is undeniably exacerbated by the fact that the Virgin Wines founder left the employ of Direct Wines last summer under a compromise agreement (another word for a cloud). The word “bollocks” is used to dismiss Direct Wines’ allegations. Maybe storm in a teacup is better phraseology.
But before you dismiss this as a spat between two former lovers and tell them to grow up and get a life, be aware that this is a business tactic straight from the Virgin playbook (remember Virgin Atlantic/Richard Branson’s long term, bitter and very public fight with BA for example?). Rowan certainly learned something from his years at Virgin.
Naked Wines needs publicity and hasn’t got a big advertising budget. If I were Direct Wines, I would shut up and get on with running a successful business and starve Naked of PR oxygen. Every time they react to one of Gormley’s prods they are adding fuel to his fire.
On the other hand, if I were Rowan Gormley, I would probably continue to aggravate my former employer and provoke whatever reaction I could. The general public loves an underdog, especially one that looks like it is being grievously mistreated by the older school bully.
When I bought a cheeky mystery case of red Burgundy “to drink now” from the Wine Society they probably didn’t realise how literally I would take the title of the case.
In barely the time it takes a Tory MP to repay his moat cleaning expenses, I am already deep into my third bottle.
Tonight I am drinking Terrazas de los Andes Reserva Malbec 2006. A very nice wine and worth every penny of the £8.50 I paid Costco for it.
This is one of the staples of the Gaucho Grill wine list, but when average wine markups in the UK are between 100 and 200% (i.e. double to three times the wholesale price) how come Gaucho thinks it can charge £37.50, a 341% uplift, and that is against the RETAIL price. Is this a new British and Commonwealth record?
Just one day after the final match of the season, the 2008/9 FA Premiership is already a distant memory. We now enter the silly summer season where silly sums will be spent on sop soccer stars with scant regard for common sense or the common fan.
If there is one maxim in life that everyone understands it is that money does not guarantee success. I mean, look at Mark Hughes’ under-achievers. Being a long suffering Man City fan, it is no surprise to me that we scraped in mid table a whopping 5 points clear of footballing paupers, Stoke City, even though one of our players cost more than Stoke’s entire squad.
I have to congratulate Stoke on an over-achieving season. Based on the resources available to them and being newly promoted to the division, they were odds on to get relegated. But Tony Pulis had a well thought out strategy and it worked.
Strange game football eh? But the same can apply to wine. This bottle came from a Wine Society Mystery Burgundy Case (average implied bottle price £20 but actually was on sale for £56.75 on the WS website). Ouch! It better be good!
Cafe de Luna, on boulevard de Clichy is a bustling bistro that caught my eye on a cheeky weekend visit. We were staying round the corner in the ninth and needed a reasonably priced dinner. That is a challenge at the moment for Brits in Paris due to the parity of Euro/Sterling.
I started with Bourgogne escargots in garlic and mopped up every last morceau! Eating snails is always a bit like chewing on rolled up condoms but it is the sauce that makes the strange texture so appealing.
Where did all the money go then? In my quest to account for some of the missing credit crunch trillions, once believed to have been squirreled away by bankers, I spotted that £7 billion has been invested in the search for Higgs Boson – the clitoris of particle physics.
But last September, the Large Hadron Collider hit technical snags and some magnets over-heated bringing the search to a premature climax with helium gushing out all over the place.
And so Eurovision has come and gone and, for once, the UK didn’t come last. In fact we made a creditable 5th place, although we had to recruit the noble Lord Webber of Musicals to write us a tune and, predictably, the singer had to come from a reality TV show.
Some have criticised Eurovision in recent years alleging tactical voting as being the cause of the UK’s fall from grace. I say our entries were just pap and wouldn’t have troubled the scorer in a hitting a barn door with a banjo competition.
Highly variable results is something you get used to when you drink Burgundy. Was Jean Grivot Nuits-St-Georges Les Lavières 2004 a “Waterloo” or did it score null points?
Stumble It!
