Food review: House of Grain, Shrewsbury

At first, it was funny. We were shown to the first floor of Shrewsbury’s House of Grain – the town’s latest, on-message burger joint – and told we could sit wherever we liked. So we did. A small table near the window was free and we settled in.

Two minutes later, the waitress appeared. “You can’t sit there,” she said. “Would you mind moving.” The restaurant was, quite literally, empty. It was 6pm. “We have a reservation for that table at 7.30pm.”

My inner monologue kicked in: ‘So why tell us to sit wherever we like? Don’t worry, we’ll be gone long before 7.30pm (as, indeed, we were)’ and so on. . .

No matter. We laughed as we parked ourselves at metal tables elsewhere. We’d heard good reports about House of Grain. And, on the surface, it has much going for it. It’s excellently located, it’s tailored to the town’s hip, young groovers and its sourcing policy is excellent: burgers come from the best farm in town and brioche buns from Shrewsbury’s best baker.

And yet. And yet. And yet.

The menus arrived. I choose pig cheeks in cider batter to start – from the starter menu (and there’s a reason for writing the ‘starter’ bit) while she choose spicy Thai fish bites.

“Would you like those as starters?” asked the waiter.

A sense of ‘they don’t know what they’re doing’ settled like a grey cloud on a summer’s day. “Uh, yes please,” I answered. “As starters please.”

Ten minutes later, a different waitress returned with spicy Thai fish bites and beef hash.

“I think you’ve brought someone else’s order,” I told her.

“No, these are the pig cheeks,” she answered. I bit into one. Beef. Unless the chef had shredded the pork, left it in beef stock for a day or so and then mashed it with a bit of potato, it was definitely beef.

A minute later, she returned. “We’ve given you the wrong dish,” she said. I wanted to give her a prize. Perhaps a free dinner at a restaurant with staff who put the ‘pro’ into professional. She cleared our plates, much to my friend’s dismay. She’d eaten the first of her Thai fish bites and was just getting started.

We sat, foodless, for five or 10 minutes while waiting for the chef to cook the right dish. And once he’d done that, they brought the pig cheeks – along with the five remaining Thai fish bites that my friend had last seen a few minutes earlier. Returning her starter, rather than cooking a new one, was lazy, ill-mannered and just plain cheap. It lacked class and the rubbery bites had lost much of their lustre.

“Would you like a side plate?” the waitress asked.

“Yes please.”

She brought one to the table. It was stone cold. Attention to detail is really important in restaurants. Do all of the small things right and guests have a great night. Forget about the little things and evenings soon unravel.

I ordered a drink. “Please could I get a large bottle of sparkling water?” The barman took the order. After two seconds and five paces, he called at the waitress: “Fill that carafe with water, will you,” before disappearing behind a curtain. The waitress appeared to fill the carafe with tap water.

“I asked for a large bottle of sparkling water, to share, if that’s okay?”

Sparkling

She left the carafe and returned with a single small bottle of sparkling water. It had gotten past the point of being funny.

“Could we both have a drink, please?”

“Yes,” she said, getting another bottle. No apology. No ‘oops’. Awful.

House of Grain has a good menu – when the front of house and kitchen communicate sufficiently well to deliver what customers order – and our food was reasonable. But the service was awful. It’s the worst I’ve experienced since a particularly unpleasant evening in Shrewsbury about four years ago when a waitress dropped a scallop on a floor mat en route from the kitchen, picked it up and asked me if I wanted to eat it, telling me it would be free. Three people visited our tables. Three people made basic mistakes – wrong food, wrong drink, wrong order, reheated food et al.

Other aspects were equally curious. House of Grain is down wiv the kidz and promises food, drink and disco. And, in truth, the soundtrack is probably the best thing about it. The décor is a mish-mash. There are plastic chairs with big holes in the back – the sort that some of us used to sit on at school. I imagine they’re supposed to be ironic and cool, but they’re not. They’re something else: uncomfortable.

We moved onto our mains. She had a noodle salad, which featured all the right ingredients – zesty, sweet, acid orange, spicy Asian dressing, noodles, fresh herbs and the like. It was fine, though we were both a little mystified as to why they’d serve a cold noodle dish rather than a hot one.

I opted for the burger. A fantastic beef patty from Great Berwick Organics and super brioche bun from the Bakehouse were joined by a whole, XXL pickled gherkin, which was out of proportion and kinda killed the rest of the burger. The fries, however, were brilliant. Golden, crisp and as skinny as a size zero model, they were the best part of the night.

We waited a small age for our plates to be cleared. Then we realised they wouldn’t be any time soon.

We skipped dessert and made our way downstairs to pay. A check for £33.30 for the wrong starter, a so-good-they’ve-brought-it-to-the-table-twice starter, a burger dominated by a gherkin the size of a small cucumber, a cold plate of noodles and service that was at best indifferent. Nice. I asked the barman for a VAT receipt.

“Erm, VAT receipt,” he repeated, printing off another copy of the non-VAT receipt and presenting it to me. It summed up the evening.

On the terraces of football stadia around the country, fans break into a chant that’s three lines long and is repeated until people get bored. The lyrics are these: “You don’t know what you’re doing.” And that’s how I felt after our visit to House of Grain. Shrewsbury has plenty of good burger joints offering food that’s as good and service that’s immeasurably better.

And so to the marks. This is the thing. I’d thought House of Grain would be heading for a solid four star review. It looks cool, the ingredients are great and it’s bang on message. And from there, we work our way down.

We’ll gloss over the telling-us-to-sit-where-we-like-then-telling-us-not-to thing. But a star is deducted for bringing the wrong starter, then reheating my partner’s starter and returning it to her (inexcusable, fellas – that’s what gets a place a bad rep). And another is deducted for Watergate/not clearing tables/not bringing bills and so on, which leaves us at a that-still-seems-quite-generous two stars.

The owner, who’s undoubtedly sunk a small fortune into a new business, needs to take a closer guard. For there are only two consonants between House of Grain and House of Pain. And, for us, the evening was the latter.