Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Cruel and unusual

I tried out the new-ish Tapas Café in a nicely renovated siheyuan at the bottom of Nanluoguxiang yesterday (since it was about the only place in the neighbourhood that was open).

The food was a bit of a mixed bag: the patatas bravas were foul (nuggets of deep-fried styrofoam, presumably shop-bought), the chicken wings indifferent; but the Spanish omelette was excellent (if somewhat untraditional, very mushy in the middle), as were the lamb chops (although staff defied requests to cook them anything other than very rare; fine for me, but one of my companions wanted a little less blood). Service was good (although there was no-one else in the place, so...), and the prices not unreasonable. I think it's worth giving another go.

However, the worst - almost intolerable - aspect of the evening was the music playlist: it was the most cheesy, pappy, horrendous, middle-of-the-road romantic mush - 90% boy bands. On the rare occasions when a half-way decent song came up, it was invariably in a mushy boy band cover version rather than the original. They even managed to find a "re-mix" of Louis Armstrong's What A Wonderful World with Kenny G saxophone ladled all over it - which is a crime against humanity.

Really, we would have been quite happy to hang out and drink some more there, but the muzak was offensive, insufferable.


I am hoping that they'd just forgotten to take off their 'Valentine's Day Mix', and that we might get something less AWFUL next time - but I'm not that confident.

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