Working Lunch
Here's what he found . . .
It was almost enough to make me retrain as an IT consultant: there, on the counter in the staff restaurant at software giant Oracle in Reading, was a magnificent rib of beef. The quilt of luscious fat was amber and crisp. The meat was pink. The juices ran - both mine and the meat's. It was only a little later that Rob Mercer, executive chef for contract caterers BaxterStorey, admitted - or, to be generous, explained - that the rib roast was there for my benefit. Not that they never put one on at lunch. It was just that they had done so today because they knew I was coming. There was also, among other things, one more dish than usual over on the international station, and three kinds of pie rather than just one.
Oh well. At least he was honest. Then again, I knew when I was invited to review three in-house staff restaurants that this sort of embellishment was a real possibility. When I review restaurants for the Observer I book under a pseudonym and, while I accept that courtesy of a gruesome picture by-line I am increasingly hard to miss, there's not much the joint can do to change the menu once my knees are under the table. Here, however, the three contract caterers had to agree to let me in, confirm a date and issue me with a pass.
So let's accept that BaxterStorey had rolled out every bell and whistle in the marching band purely for my benefit. Even so, theirs is a class act and, happily, nothing like what I had expected. I work for large media businesses, have eaten in their canteens and have nearly completed the course of counselling required to deal with the trauma; too often I have been faced by grimly overwrought dishes, way beyond the skills of the "cooks" involved, left to fester under pass lights.
Clearly, the bosses at Oracle hold their employees in higher regard than do most of Britain's media moguls. The Oracle restaurant is a serious operation. There are in excess of 2,000 people working on the campus in Berkshire, more than 900 of them in the shiny glass-and-steel building where we ate, 600 of whom eat lunch there. That presents both the benefits of economies of scale and the challenges of volume. The solution is a horseshoe of stations - grill, say, or deli - the most impressive of which was called the International. Here they offered seared scallops wrapped in pancetta, cooked to order in front of you and served with a tomato concassé, crushed new potatoes and a herb foam. There was also a bavette of beef, served rare, with - deep breath - fondant potatoes, carrot purée, confit shallots, buttered cabbage mined with strands of slowcooked rib and a soubise sauce. Yours for the silly, hyper-subsidised price of £3.60. Both dishes were impressive. If there's a criticism, it's only that the pancetta on the scallops should have been crisper, but that's to take the caterers at their own standards.
DEPTH OF FLAVOUR
The Mamma Casa station, which changes its offering weekly, was today doing Indian food with about as much aplomb as most Western chefs usually manage. Yes, the onion bhaji may have been a sad, floppy, greasy thing that deserved to be taken out and shot to put it out of our misery, but the rogan josh had a real depth of flavour and spoke of long, slow cooking. Next to that, smoky pieces of chicken breast were coming off a charcoal grill for a more-than-passable, if bastardised, Caesar salad. There were nine types of bread on the deli counter; a salad bar with goats' cheese, Stilton and bacon wrapped chicken; and, over to one side, a cheerful woman enthusiastically flogging made-to-order crêpes with the kind of sweet, luscious fillings that type two diabetes is made of.
What was most striking was the sense of purpose. These cooks wanted to be here serving this food, which isn't always the way. The one overambitious offering was asparagus with a hollandaise sauce, which had to sit amid the heat of the pass lights. Naturally, it split, and when it did the cook looked genuinely bereft, like a relative had died.
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