Our mouths have been work­ing over­time this week, with all the Wel­ling­ton on a Plate action going around. Of course Tues­day had the abor­ted attempt at Lager­field and then eat­ing off the reg­u­lar menu at Fra­telli. Tonight we’ve got reviews of Mon­soon Poon, Atlanta and Bettys for you, which to sum up were DREADFUL, decent and divine, in that order I have so much to say about the awful­ness of Mon­soon Poon that I don’t have time to write about the oth­ers. Tomor­row (edit: here they are!)!

Let me start by say­ing I have nev­er been a fan of Mon­soon Poon, although I have nev­er been as good as express­ing it as Tze Ming did twice. In the past I’ve found their ser­vice to be aver­age, and their food way too dumbed down and way too expens­ive for what you get – it’s the sort of place someone who lives in Churton Park might see as being edgy. But when a friend sug­ges­ted we go there, I looked up their offer­ing and was intrigued by the sound of the Roy­al Indi­an Curry Ban­quet. Our invit­a­tion spread on twit­ter, so I called them on Tues­day after­noon to see if I could reserve a table for sev­en people at 6pm. “Oh, we don’t do book­ings,” I was told, “but we’ll have no trouble seat­ing you when you come in”. Okay, sweet. So I got there a little bit before six, and the res­taur­ant was just about empty. I asked for table for sev­en people, and was told “oh, we don’t seat you until your whole group is here, you can go wait in the bar”. Um, what the fuck? I know this is some­thing that hap­pens in very busy and pop­u­lar res­taur­ants in oth­er cit­ies, but I haven’t seen it hap­pen in Wel­ling­ton – espe­cially not IN AN EMPTY RESTAURANT. So I was mad. I like get­ting to res­taur­ants when they’ve just opened and hav­ing a drink and per­haps order­ing nibbles and get­ting a moment to myself before catch­ing up with friends. It’s not some­thing I’d do at 7.30pm, or on a Fri­day, but it seems per­fectly accept­able to do it at 6pm on a Wed­nes­day. Appar­ently not.

I went to wait in the bar (and refused to order a drink until I was able to sit down at my table) and dis­covered that Laura had already put her name down for a six-seat­er, so by isol­at­ing us from the action, it was actu­ally mak­ing things more com­plic­ated for them. We all uni­ver­sally agreed that this seat­ing issue was fuck­ing bull­shit, and I was pretty temp­ted to actu­ally walk out, but instead we went and asked (prob­ably not very politely, to be hon­est) if since the res­taur­ant was­n’t actu­ally full if we could go and order some appet­isers before the last two got there. Sug­gest­ing we might actu­ally want to spend some money appeared to be the magic word, and as soon as we got to our table, the oth­er two showed up. We all ordered the ban­quet, and sus­pi­ciously quickly, bowls of curry star­ted show­ing up at the table. The bowl seemed too small for sev­en people, even giv­en that there were five cur­ries, so I checked – yup, one bowl between sev­en. Okay then. The waiter told us we’d be get­ting four bowls of rice. We received two, after enough time had passed for us to pass around all the cur­ries around the table so they all mingled on our plates without rice bar­ri­ers. Even­tu­ally we man­aged to get the atten­tion of a wait­ress. She said that the chef had run out of rice (I guess that shows how authen­tic­ally Asi­an the place isn’t), so we’d get dripfed rice. We got one more bowl, and that was it. You know how Wel­ling­ton on a Plate is all about show­cas­ing Wel­ling­ton ingredi­ents, and most res­taur­ants cre­ate new dishes in order to do that? Mon­soon Poon serves five cur­ries that are usu­ally on its menu. The only uniquely Wel­ling­ton ingredi­ent men­tioned was the Zany Zeus raita. Guess what our serv­ers did­n’t bring us until we asked for it?

Oh, the wine we picked – Kahur­angi Gewurztram­iner from Nel­son – was deli­cious and a very reas­on­able $35 a bottle. We wer­en’t asked if we wanted more when we ran out, but I would­n’t have ordered more any­way. The $25 was already far too much to pay for such sub­stand­ard ser­vice and bor­ing food. As I was pay­ing, I was asked how the meal was. I said it was really really aver­age, and explained. She said she’d pass on my feed­back but I don’t think any­thing will change. When we tweeted about our exper­i­ences, we received a lot of sim­il­ar com­ments from oth­ers. Skip Mon­soon Poon, there are far too many good places in town to eat to both­er with it.