High Road Hotel Bistro

When the High Road Hotel remodelled a few years ago it was great. They built the Bistro and Beer Garden and they had great food at great prices, we locals were stoked.

Well, they've remodelled the remodelled Bistro area, and the menu. And the prices. Look, I'm not a pennypincher but paying $16 for a burger is bullshit. Or $18 for fish and chips. Total bullshit peoples!

I picked up my burger and tried to take a bite. Yeah it's a very full burger (kudos for that, it is F-U-L-L) but there's that first WTF moment, when you realise that the burger bun is solid as a rock and all those piled ingredients shoot out the other side. Then the unmistakable taste - who the hell puts a full-on burger into a Turkish roll? Come on! So I settled down to a painful session using a knife and fork.

There is the second WTF moment. Have you ever tried to cut a dried-out toasted Turkish roll with a bread and butter knife? They should have supplied a frigging chainsaw! The burger mince was pretty close to concrete in texture, almost as hard to cut as the bun. Draped across the egg though, was a slice of that plastic singles slices cheese. So the egg became a bit of a proposition to cut too, once that cheese had set...

Yes the salad on the side was nice. I'll give them that, they had fresh salad ingredients. But whoever decided that this is what a burger needs to be, needs their head examined. And the kitchenhand's offsider that grilled the meat to a rocky lump, they just need to get a job making road mending supplies.

So after the meal I was trying to explain my disappointment to Trish, and said something along the lines of "you know, if you go to a restaurant where the steak is tough you can make allowances for maybe a difficult piece of meat, but I've never been to one where the mince was tough."

Trish had had the fish, and she summed up her meal this way: "Well yeah, but this is the first time I've been to a restaurant where the fish was tough." Just then the waitress walked by to pick up our plates and asked if we wanted desserts. Almost in unison we chorused "No thanks - couldn't stand having to hack apart the custard!" and got up to leave before we burst out laughing...

And that kind of says it all, actually. The High Road Hotel Bistro is total crap now. They are overpriced, underskilled, their menu has been designed by a walking a culinary occlusion (also known as a clot in the kitchen) and even if I was pissed I wouldn't make the mistake of eating there again.

It's on High Roa... Oh stuff it it's just not worth it... Forget about it! Go get a pizza instead!