Rating: 1.75/10
Telephone: 01761 416884
Address: The Old Priory, Church Square, Midsomer Norton, Somerset.
Open: Mon-Sat, lunch, noon-1.30pm (last orders), dinner, 7-9.30pm (last orders).
Price: £60-70 a head, including drinks
Wheelchair access and disabled WC.
The friend who joined me on a trip to Bath and I share a love of gloriously awful movies, known to us as "Hawks" since the 1988 shocker of that name starring Timothy Dalton. After this outing, however, the likes of Ishtar and Blame It On Rio will henceforth be called "Geese", in tribute to the Moody Goose for providing a meal that ranks among both the worst either of us has ever had, and the most hilarious.
This restaurant moved a while ago from Bath to the Old Priory Hotel, a beautiful, ancient building with a charming walled garden. It was in the sort of sitting room in which you imagine Mr Collins oiling up to Lady Catherine de Bourgh that it started, when a very young waiter unveiled a verbal tic. "Can I offer you two gentlemen a drink this evening?" "Would you two gentlemen care to see a menu this evening?" "Can I show you two gentlemen to your table this evening?" Eschewing the obvious response ("If it's all the same to you, we'll hang on here until tomorrow afternoon") placed such volcanic pressure on us that it inevitably found release in an eruption of adolescent giggling that endured for hours.
Things took an unfortunate turn in the dining room, an appealingly plain, low-ceilinged, stone-floored room largely devoid of the twee horror evident in the lavatory - or "The Abbott's", as the sign has it - where the bog roll was adorned with a pink bow. Even the stale canapés had offered little warning of a meal that raised the question of how even those arses from Michelin could have given this place a star.
That the menu was the usual country house hotel paean to fussy pretension was no surprise. What startled was the cooking. "What do you think?" I asked, passing my friend a forkful of smoked salmon bavarois. "Poisonous," he snapped back, clearly irritated by the obviousness of the question. Vile it was, a hemisphere of salmon filled with a viciously bitter mousse, the ensemble garnished with halved baby tomatoes and fine beans, and surrounded by a ring of green blobs suggesting that a small mollusc, mortally wounded in the dish's creation, had voided itself as it circled the plate in its death throes.
With such friendly staff, leaving the dish almost untouched seemed too callous, so I scooped it up in a hand, covered it with my jacket and took it to the Abbott's, returning to find my friend gazing confusedly at his starter. "Can I have a taste?" I asked of his Brixham crab tartlet with poached duck egg. "Good luck," was the laconic reply, and he passed over a forkful with a flavour I couldn't pin down - a faint tang of Parmesan and burned pastry, with possibly a hint of sump oil. "I think Meredith Merridew would have preferred his doggy-woggies," said my friend, referring to the Robert Morley character in Theatre Of Blood (most definitely not a Goose), force-fed poodle pie by Vincent Price in a pastiche of Titus Andronicus.
We surveyed the (Peter) Allissian clientele, and wondered whether this was the annual convention of the Society For People With No Tastebuds, whether they were pretending to enjoy their food in that English middle-class way, or whether somehow they actually were. Our main courses seemed to rule out the latter. "How much paper have you got?" asked my friend of the small pile of A4 on my lap. "I want this duck in the Abbott's as soon as possible." His "assiette" of Gressingham duck was most notable for a flabby confit of leg stuffed with strange, pink cubes redolent of Winston Smith's canteen stew in 1984. He made a move toward the leg. "Not that," I warned him. "If they think you've eaten a long, sharp bone, they'll call an ambulance." Eventually, he fetched a carrier bag from the car, filled it, covered it with a baseball cap and removed it, leaving me alone with some roasted squab pigeon - or slices of flaccid, fatty, acrid meat swimming in exactly the same cold, Marmitey gravy as the duck, served with a slightly burned potato cake above a slew of what struck the naked eye as hot dog onions.
"Can I get you two gentlemen anything further this evening?" asked the waiter, as he removed the empty plates (the pigeon having made its way to the Abbott's as well). Boldly resisting the urge to request a stomach pump, we asked for coffee in the garden with the bill, and were gone.
