I FEEL like a moaner at the moment, a food curmudgeon.
The first half of the year was full of pleasant surprises. I've enjoyed really good food in 2012 at Livebait, Podium, Teacup, Almost Famous Burgers, Gorilla, 63 Degrees, the 'real' menu at Great Wall and Solita. It's all been satisfyingly different as well.
But lately, honestly.
It's like the management has given up and simply aim to please the dribble of custom that comes via the shows. Can't they shake off the municipal small minded offer they currently deliver and think bigger, try harder?
39 Steps was an overpriced disappointment and now the Lowry Restaurant has taken the bloody biscuit.
As the pictures show this is the restaurant in the Lowry not the hotel. The Lowry self-describes itself as 'a spectacular waterside building housing theatres, galleries, restaurant, café/bars, gift shop and Tourist Information Centre'.
Panoramic View Of The Quays
I love the place and I love visiting it.
Michael Wilford's building is spectacular yet also very human. It's a fine modern arts centre. It's uplifting from the start and that's a rare quality in buildings.
Also on the www.thelowry.com website they say 'Our Vision is to be the most successful Arts Venue in the world'.
The Lowry
Good job they don't mention the food.
On our visit to the flagship restaurant with its lovely site overlooking the water and the Imperial War Museum North, the food was terrible.
The menu was two courses for £19.95 and three for £22.95. The dish descriptions were fancy dan and the aspiration and presentation underlined the fine dining pretensions.
But there's a thief somewhere in the building. Someone's stealing all the flavours from the food.
Dramatic dining at The Lowry
I started with 'the slow cooked Loch Duart salmon, lentils, pickled beets and Little Town Dairy sour cream vinaigrette'. Thank God for the beetroot as it was the only thing with any taste.
The rest was plain strange. It did not contain a scintilla of flavour aside from the lentils, it had all been snatched. I could see the salmon but I couldn't taste it, the vinaigrette was a watery whiteness, a Ship Canal sludge.
Who's stolen the flavours?
Another starter of 'dry cure Upholland ham, summer melon, rhubarb, cress, hazelnuts and Lancashire cheese' also suffered from the curious case of the vanished flavour. The ham was vaguely decent where it wasn't old, hard and curled at the edges and tasting of Biltong - one of the most pointless foods ever created. I like the tiny bits of cheese too.
There was a vegetarian dish called summer vegetable strudel with 'buttered carrots, broad beans and herb sauce' which featured lentils (again) and so many raisins that it resembled fly paper on a particularly productive insect killing day. The veg was awful. The broccoli was solid, not al dente just under-cooked. This could have been a creative and very good vegetarian dish, instead it was nish and tish.
Strudel fly paper
A mullet main came with crushed new season potatoes, Cheshire tomatoes and a basil and rapeseed dressing. It was another void. The mullet was grey mullet from Morecambe Bay. It was as grey as the towns in Morrissey's 'Every day is like Sunday'.
Worst off all it was so very very dry. All moisture was sucked into the dead fish and into the potatoes so that the food clagged up the mouth. The Ship Canal shimmered to our left, there was water water everywhere but a desert on the plate. The mullet was mullered.
Mullet about to dry
And there we were with a Californian sun setting like glory in the sky. There we were in a big-boned exciting building energised by that absolute atmospheric clarity that the onset of twilight can bring when water and open skies come together. It was beautiful folks.
Sunset from The Lowry Restaurant
Except for the food, and the fact that the restaurant closed at 8pm when the theatre shows started. And there was a general air of let's get this done and get home. And the lovely space was almost empty.
The Lowry Restaurant is a missed opportunity. A massive missed opportunity. Another of the dreary food and drink venues in a thousand otherwise excellent galleries and museums across the country.
I rang back the following day for the official opening hours and was told that "these vary, they're a bit random really. If there's a show on the restaurant opens, but it always closes when the show starts, so the kitchen shuts by 8'o'clock anyway. It's normally open for lunch."
How can they run a serious restaurant along these lines?
Terrace schmoozing at The Lowry
Sat there as the day burned into evening I dreamt of this restaurant as a proper grill with decent steaks, crisp salads, fresh fish, oysters, lush desserts. Easy, quick, dining with a splash of quality. Forget all that fine dining fiddle-de-dee.
Given the location I was dreaming of this as the region's OXO Tower, filled with people, life and excitement. The evening was very beautiful, you know. Maybe it had turned me giddy.
But why can't we get these places right?
As stated I love going to shows in The Lowry, the gallery does a good job too, but the food and drink is poor especially in the restaurant.
It's like the management has given up and simply aim to please the dribble of custom that comes via the shows. Can't they shake off the municipal small minded offer they currently deliver and think bigger, try harder?
Imagine a tourist from say France, Germany or Italy, visiting for a game at United over the Canal, or coming for one of our festivals, or having made a diversion to The Lowry for a show and getting served that food. It would turn their whole day into a three quarters experience. It's embarrasing.
Back to our visit.
I've left out mention of some spectacularly poor carrot and rosemary soup, and steak that was anything but the medium rare asked for and came with a dry salad. We were also asked if we wanted desserts. But we just wanted to get out and take a walk around the building and then onto the Quays.
Not medium rare
The only decent food came on the kids menu with a good tomato soup and bangers and mash. If you're going, go with that.
Nice bangers and mash from the kids menu
The very pleasant waiter asked me if the food had been ok. Normally on review visits I mumble something indeterminate but this time I told him what I thought.
The concession given by the management to my words was to take the 10 per cent service charge off. Brilliant.
There'd been nothing wrong with the the waiters, so I had to give them the service charge in cash. It wouldn't have been fair otherwise.
On the far bank of the Canal, the Trafford side, a newish scheme called Promenade Park has been installed that's quite excellent. There's a climbing frame, sculpture and also landscape features too. It's good quality and tasteful.
Promenade Park
Unlike the food at The Lowry Restaurant.
No inland UK city has anything like the Quays, a collection of landmark buildings and water on an epic scale. It's impressive, something for us to be proud about and show off to visitors. Apparently a million people visit every year.
So is it too much to expect just one decent restaurant?
You can follow Jonathan Schofield on Twitter here @JonathSchofield
ALL SCORED CONFIDENTIAL REVIEWS ARE IMPARTIAL AND PAID FOR BY THE MAGAZINE.
The Lowry Restaurant, The Lowry, Pier 8 Salford Quays, Salford M50 3AZ. 0161 876 2057
Rating: 10.5/20
Food: 4/10
Service: 3.5/5
Ambience: 3/5*
*This is a compromise figure. The place was beautiful in terms of the views and the perfect evening, but in terms of human ambience it was bland.
The late sun creates a pattern on the chairs of the items on the table
The Imperial War Museum North from The Lowry
Strolling the Quays
