I like my food how I like my people: honest. Therefore, nothing aggravates me more than attempted food-dupeage. On a night out recently, I experienced this phenomena in its most outright and enraging form. After our gleeful discovery that The Tower Brasserie in Windsor accepted Tastecards (if you don’t know what this is, shame on you) my boyfriend and I had been looking forward to what we expected to be a top-tier dining experience for half the price. Now, the food in general was resoundingly mediocre; my boyfriend’s pork terrine as hard as a hockey puck and the stew on my plate poorly posing as a pie with the thinnest and flakiest of pastry hats. But this I could bear - though empty, the restaurant had a rather enjoyable ambiance, and we had a beautiful view of Windsor Castle and the chilly-looking high street from our potentially comfy leather booth. For our third course I decided I’d let the very average chefs behind those appalling pastry hats salvage themselves. And when the dessert menu came I found myself instantly drawn to the top option: a hot chocolate fondant with home-made pistachio ice cream. Bloody lovely! Or so I thought...

Finally! My stint of shabby and steep dining experiences seems to have finally come to an end this fateful Friday. After weeks, nay months of planning and looking forward to my respective dinners at the Tower Brasserie and The Fox and Hounds (still too raw a wound to divulge) only to be sorely dissappointed; I looked for a spot of lunch on Notting Hill with an air of wizened despondency. After a day of hungrily haggling with vintage vendors to wangle the last of my Christmas gifts at Portobello Market (to marvellous success might I add), we were spent and effing freezing. We tried to make it to Ottolenghi, the highly acclaimed Italian eatery on Ledbury Road known for its killer salads, but found ourselves too cold for the trek and decided to get a pie for a fiver at a slightly dingy-looking pub we’d seen down the road. This may sound a bit out of character for the self-acclaimed food perve, but I’d grown cynical of late in the light of recent events and did not expect anything from this very average looking pub and therefore could not be let down like I had been so many times...