Okay, I wasn't going to blog this, but then I found myself browsing Joel Spolsky's site, and found he'd come across the same problem. Bizarrely, he chose to draw attention to it in the introduction to a book on tracking software quality issues, but I don't think that takes away from the universality of the experience. The problem is that virtually all restaurants are buggy. Not in the environmental health sense, I should point out - more in the sense programmers mean. They have niggly little glitches in their service, atmosphere, food... something they don't always get right. In his foreword, he writes about one New York restaurant, Isabellas, which bucks this trend:
In ten years I can't think of a single bad thing that ever happened to me at Isabellas.
Nothing.
So that's why its so packed. People keep coming back, again and again, because when you dine at Isabellas, nothing will ever go wrong.
Isabellas is thoroughly and completely debugged.
It takes you ten years to notice this, because most of the time when you eat at a restaurant, nothing goes wrong. It took a couple of years of going to the curry place before we realized they were always going to make us miss our movie, no matter how early we arrived, and we finally had to write them off.
[Via Joel on Software]
I know exactly the feeling.
Last week, Chris and I reached the tenth anniversary of when we first started going out together. Terrifying milestones of this sort, which demonstrate beyond all doubt just how old you're getting, need to be celebrated properly, so we decided to hit the town for a nice meal.
On the night in question, we wound up - for our first time - at Malmaison; an expensively decorated dark-wood-and-mirrors hotel-operated bistro in the Mailbox complex. The experience was - although it consisted mostly of individually pleasant elements - somehow unsatisfying, and we spent some time trying to put our fingers on it. In the end, I can only think that it was the little contradictions in the presentation which pointed to a slight unease about what the restaurant was trying to be. The menu was an unbalanced mix of high cuisine and something perilously close to pub grub; the waiters were wearing t-shirts with slogans on them that were totally at odds with the dinner jacketed sommelier with his 50 page winelist; the staff were polite, but disconcertingly eager; the food tasted good, but the prices were hard to justify.
We've been living in Birmingham for most of the ten years we were attempting to celebrate; the city's changed in innumerable ways in that time. The Arcadian in the Chinese quarter was new when we moved here. We've seen the arrival of the Brindleyplace development, the gentrification of the Jewellery Quarter and Moseley, the rise of binge drinking on Broad Street, the Mailbox and Gas Street Basin developments, the apocalyptic Back To The Future set that is Star City, and most recently the Bullring and Eastside developments.
While each of these changes has taken place, we've tried out restaurants new and old all over the city. At a rough guess, I'd say we've probably eaten at over fifty different restaurants in Birmingham. I'm not saying that's a lot; we could easily have managed more if we'd really been trying; the point is more that we've sampled a fair selection.
We found ourselves, after identifying the bugs in the Malmaison experience, trying to think where else in the city centre we'd rather have eaten. Denial? Served some of the best steak I've ever eaten. Cool atmosphere. Friendly staff. Closed a year or so ago. Bank? Please - full of suits entertaining clients on expenses. Zinc? Got taken over by Bank. Zizzi? We once waited an hour and a half to get served there. Green room? too much of a smoky bar atmosphere for a romantic meal. There are many many others, of course, but...
...There's only one restaurant in Birmingham, in my experience, that is 'completely debugged'. It's Henry's Chinese Restaurant on St Paul's Square, and I'd not hesitate to recommend it to anyone, if you're in the mood for Chinese. In ten years, I can't think of a single bad thing that's ever happened to me at Henry's. I'm just disappointed that we seem to have lost the most promising city centre restaurants - they're all catering for a business dining audience, and not even doing that particularly well. For a better quality evening, I can't help thinking we'd be better off abandoning the city centre and heading out to Harborne or Moseley (Ponta di Legno on Woodbridge road, f'rinstance), which seems a shame.
Ah, what do I care - with the baby on the way, the next chance I'll get to go to a nice restaurant will be in the 2020s *8)