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.