One of the things I enjoy most is a trip to a nice restaurant. I appreciate so much having the money to do it these days, and the sometimes overwhelming choice on offer. Things have certainly moved on since my childhood, when a trip to the Harvester was considered a treat (have YOU been to a Harvester before?) garlic bread was considered exotic and an espresso or other such foreign beverage after your meal was positively decadent.

I have only very gradually dipped my toe into the more upmarket restaurant experience. My first date with my now-husband was at Pizza Hut, and post-pub-crawl spot of choice with Northern Soulmate Pete is still ICCO. Over the years I have branched out a little, eating in the likes of Archipelago (an “experience”, i.e. "expensive gimmick" frequented, apparently, by Prince Harry and his chums) and a very expensive Seine Dinner Cruise, where the main course was pan-fried duck breast with popcorn. I have travelled around the world, eating everything from dim sum to durian to parts of a chicken I don’t even want to mention.
Duck with "popped corn". Yes. Really.

Last week we were in a restaurant overlooking the Thames, making use of what seemed like a pretty good offer: £28 for a 3-course meal and a bottle of wine in what turns out to be the worst sort of restaurant: that middle-of-the-road restaurant in a perceived high-class area, with a high opinion of itself but no Michelin stars or anything to back it up – the kind of restaurant that serves your meal with “jus” rather than “gravy”, where the staff look at you as though you’ve defecated on their grandmothers if you ask for ketchup with your – ahem – “skin-on” fries (made presumably from potatoes they couldn’t be bothered to peel.)

Upon arriving and presenting our deal voucher we were immediately treated with the contempt we deserved and shooed to our table. Next to us, the waitress was presenting huge menus to the each guest one at a time with an elaborate flourish while we sat and twiddled our thumbs. After a while she came and unceremoniously deposited an A5-size bit of card to each of us, as if hoping nobody had seen: our menu consisted of two choices per course: Meat or Not Meat. We ordered two gin and tonics and were told curtly this was not part of the deal. We know, we said, but we would like them nonetheless. We assured him we would pay for them, and he studied us closely, clearly not confident that we were telling the truth, before shrugging and disappearing. When he returned he took our wine “order”, informing us that we could only have “house” wine on our deal, and regarding us with positive contempt when we smiled enthusiastically and said that was fine.

This restaurant was, it turns out, one of those places where you are not trusted to pour your own wine. Following the ridiculous pretence of “tasting” the wine the bottle is placed tantalizingly close to our table, but not quite close enough for us to retrieve it without presumably committing some terrible etiquette faux pas, and consequently we spend much of the meal gazing into empty glasses whilst the staff attend to the more up-market clientele on the next table.

When the food eventually arrived my starter was the wrong one – an impressive feat given they had a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right without even listening to my order. Upon pointing out the mistake, the waitress looked at me as though I was being damned inconsiderate: first I pay them money upfront for the service, then I have the audacity to want to choose my meal! I tried to placate her, saying it looked lovely and I didn’t mind swapping, but she whisked the plate away, waiting until my husband had quietly finished his soup before returning with a plate of melon and two paltry slices of parma harm rolled up on the edge of the plate.

Another trait of this type of restaurant is the portion sizes. Served on huge plates presumably to create some sort of illusion that you are being fed a human adult’s rather than a doll’s meal, you need a magnifying glass to identify what you’re eating. The potato looks like it has been cut out using a biscuit cutter, and the fish presumably suffered from the marine life equivalent of growth hormone deficiency. Still hungry, I ordered the cheeseboard, which was not a board so much as a saucer, the content of which was underwhelming: a piece of cheddar, a sliver of generic blue cheese, and some brie which had just come out of the fridge and tasted (if one can be generous enough to attribute taste to it at all) of rubber.

I would perhaps be less cynical about it had I not shivered throughout, having been sat next to an open door at 8.30pm. I did ask if this could be closed, but my request was immediately snubbed on the basis that “somebody might want to go through it.” So the door remained open. They didn’t.

We left cold and not quite full. Next time I’m in ICCO I will truly savour and appreciate my Four Cheese pizza.