Tuesday 26 November 2013
GUERNSEY PRESS PROMOTION
GUERNSEY PRESS
FOREST PARK HOTEL
Perked-up Park The name may not yet be familiar but Damian Wrigley can vouch for one thing: the food at Forest Park Hotel is memorable. So much so that he’s on a mission to tempt you there...
I
REALLY want you to try this place. And I have to be honest: ‘Not exactly a glamorous assignment’ is what I thought when told where I was to eat: the equivalent of becoming a travel journalist, then being packed off to Milton Keynes. But I couldn’t say no. Well, I could have, but then I’d have been fired, defeating the point. So on a wet, windy and distinctly miserable night I headed off to Forest Park Hotel. And while some elements are still a work in progress (the place is being extensively remodelled, so be open-minded about its current appearance) the restaurant – my very reason for being there – has been ripped out and replaced. In my book the new cream carpet is a brave choice for a restaurant (think of the footfall), but it looks great. The place feels like a giant living room. One with a water feature, but a living room nonetheless. As I said earlier, I really do want you to try this place, so it’s straight down to the business of food. That is, after all, the reason we’re here. Salt and pepper calamari opened things for two of us. The homemade
chilli sauce had that even keel of spices, totally unlike the cheap, shopbought stuff that often overloads on the heat to compensate for the lack of flavour. The others began with deep-fried Brie, which is a Guernsey menu classic and done very well here. As gooey as that final scene from Ghostbusters, it smothered the tongue like a comfort blanket.
A
s part of the complete reboot, we were dining in the Maid Marian restaurant. Yes, everything here is Robin Hood themed and given the prices – three courses come in at £15 – it isn’t a case of robbing the rich and giving to the poor, rather a decent bit of fare for not much of your wages. Which brings me back to the mains. It was more cheese for some, with a chicken breast served in the chef’s self-styled ‘seriously tasty’ Stilton and mushroom sauce. And here they’ve actually done themselves a disservice. To call this sauce ‘seriously tasty’ is like calling the south of France ‘a bit lovely’. It was staggeringly good. Incredibly rich, it utterly trumped everything else on offer. If you don’t like chicken but for some odd reason find
yourself forced to eat it, have this. Smother anything in this sauce and it will be the best meal you’ve ever had. As cheesy as pantomime – except this was enjoyable. But emince de porc was my dish of the night: fresh linguini (how many places offer you that?), pork fillet cut into strips, wholegrain mustard for the foundation of flavour on which the mushroom and cream sauce was built, elevating to a platform of delectable brilliance with perfectly stringy pasta that didn’t stick together. If they’d thrown in some comfort TV, it would have been perfect. Salmon with a crust as light as a kitten, served on mashed potato as smooth as a George Clooney chat-up line, had an orangey zest. Not unlike mulled wine in flavour, this was salmon – but not as you know it. Desserts came in the form of a homemade apple pie that really was as homely as a hug from your mum, and a chocolate brownie that arrived in chocolate sauce with a million WeightWatchers points. Liberation ale washed down some of the meal and a decent coffee the rest. And the moral of this story? Don’t judge a restaurant (or hotel) by its past.
guernseylovesfood.com
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