The sort of situation that must present itself to millions on a Saturday night befell our household last night: too tired to cook, too tired to go and buy some food to cook. The obvious answer was a takeaway delivered to our home.
Monmouth has many restaurants, most of them in Indian/Bangladeshi. Indeed, I’ve wondered, every time a new Indian restaurant opens in the town why the owner believes there’s room for just one more Indian restaurant serving the same mid-range Indian food. When I asked one once, he told me, with a big grin, “because we are the best!”.
Anyway, Indian was not on the agenda because there was a new place in town selling Thai and Chinese food from the premises in St. Mary’s Street vacated by the Malt House. I had heard on the grapevine that the food at The Dragon’s Den was “bland” and not recommended. This concern was put to the back of my mind as I picked up the phone to make my order from the leaflet that promised “upmarket” Thai and Chinese cooking.
Achieving payment over the phone in advance seemed overly complicated as I was asked to give my order, then wait for a call back, at which point I could give my card number. The call duly came and I was told the food would leave the restaurant forty minutes later. That was fine.
The food arrived on time and we arranged the lavish spread that was Set Menu A at £16.95 per person. This worked out at much better value than selecting dishes I actually wanted individually, but at about £8.00 for each smallish takeaway container this would been unaffordable.
The grapevine was right.
The starter was a “Thai Platter”- “A selection of Thai starters”. This was a collection of deep-fried items that lacked variety in taste and texture: a spring roll, a wonton, prawn toast and a pureed chicken dumpling that had the texture and taste of a Chicken McNugget.
The main courses were disappointing too. The stir-fried pork, chicken curry and chicken with vegetables all lacked those essentials of Thai cooking: a contrast of flavours and texture that surprise the palate. There was not much evidence of Thai Basil leaves or garnish to give any visual appeal. OK, fair enough, it is difficult to make a plastic container visually appealing, but here they hadn’t even tried. There was just no finesse.
Now to be fair, getting a take-away means we weren’t able to sample the ambience and service offered by eating in the restaurant itself; and the food was by no means inedible.
Certainly serious money seems to have been spent on refurbishing the premises. It may be disloyal to a new business in Monmouth not to be nice about it, but it must stand on the quality of its product. On that basis, I’m afraid I can’t, at the moment recommend the Dragon’s Den’s takeaway experience. Let’s hope the quality will improve as the business gets into its stride. Monmouth needs some good Thai cuisine to balance the surfeit of Indian and Chinese outlets. Monmouthshire is foodie territory and the punters expect better!
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We welcome fair and valid crititism, we rely on customer satisfaction to survive and improve however as you are aware your comments and grossly unfair, we cannot understand your motives, you cannot judge a book by its cover and suggest you dine in house before placing your harsh comments, stand by our till and listen to the praise heaped on us by in house diners, however to adress your points,
1.before taking payment for telephone delivery orders we confirm with our taxi agent they are able to deliver in required time slot(not to check delivery price as these are pre agreed)on thier confirmation we phone you back to confirm time slot is satisfactory to you before takeing payment.
2 we are not jack of all trades as you imply but have 4 dedicated chefs, two for chinese, two for thai.
3.any realistic person would not expect delivered food in plastic containers ( allowing for collection time, delivery time and you puting on table approx 30 minutes plus) to be as visually attractive or as tasty as in house freshly prepaired straight to the table.
4.every thai house in the uk deep frys the starters, it is the only method to prepare them, the quality would obviously decline in 30 minutes plus, they are not greasey when prepared or on leaveing us
5. we use prime fresh meats and vegetables and 99% of customers prefer the natural taste and do not want the natural flavors hiden by excessive spiceing
IF YOU WERE UNHAPPY AND CONTACTED US BY PHONE AS ANY NORMAL PERSON WOULD WE WOULD HAVE GLADLY OFFERED YOU A REPLACEMENT FREE IN HOUSE TO MAKE AMMENDS AND SHOW YOU THE QUALITY OF OUR CUISENE, JOHN
Thanks for your comments. I’m surprised you are taking this blog so seriously – it’s hardly a write up in a national newspaper. Just to reassure you, it gets at most 12 hits a day and none of them are on my posts about food!
My comments were not “harsh” – I didn’t say the food was horrible or inedible, merely disappointing. I was disappointed as your menu claimed it was “upmarket” and in my opinion it wasn’t. I also made the point, *precisely because I wanted to be fair* that I hadn’t eaten in house. I quote my penultimate paragraph as you may have missed it:
“Now to be fair, getting a take-away means we weren’t able to sample the ambience and service offered by eating in the restaurant itself; and the food was by no means inedible.”
The “jack of two trades” comment: This reflected my serious doubt that a restaurant offering two cuisines can really be a master of both of them. I still have that doubt. I’ll concede that that particular expression might have been a bit harsh, so will reword that paragraph without the offending expression.
The payment method seemed overly complicated. I accept your point that the confirmation with the taxi is to confirm delivery time, not price. I want to order and pay in one phone call and know that the delivery will happen on or after a certain time. Pizza delivery places manage this without having to call me back so the precedent set by your competion governed my expectations.
Presentation in containers: Again, you are conveniently missing the concession I made in the article, which I will quote again:
“OK, fair enough, it is difficult to make a plastic container visually appealing”
I had been expecting more though in terms of garnish – perhaps some fresh coriander leaves, fresh chopped chilli, chopped toasted peanuts: the usual suspects.
Yes, you deep fry the starters, but some of them just didn’t taste nice to me. It’s subjective and all I can do is report my experience. Perhaps, as you point out, they don’t work as takeways by virtue of being fried in batter and being cooped up in a sealed plastic container.
“99% of customers prefer the natural taste and do not want the natural flavors hiden by excessive spiceing”: Well, I must represent the 1% who like my Thai food to be as authentic as possible and it makes me wonder if you believe that your clientele doesn’t want to be challenged by spices, in the same way that Brits used to be wary of garlic!
As for your capitalised comments suggesting that I should have contacted you rather than voicing my feelings about a takeway online: let me be clear that I didn’t have a complaint that merited calling you in the hope of a replacement. In simple terms the food wasn’t bad, just not to my taste. I think if I had called you to say that your food was “bland” and “disappointing” you wouldn’t have offered me a replacement and I wouldn’t have expected you to. My expectations of the food being very good had been set by *your own literature* which claimed it was “upmarket”.
If it were truly “upmarket” it would be offering food of the quality found, say, at Nahm restaurant in London:
http://www.halkin.como.bz/eat-and-drink/nahm
thank you, case rested, we do not purport to be a mitchelin restaurant in london but we do not charge mitchelin london prices