Restaurant Review: Waiter! Waiter!

The Waiter! Waiter! restaurant in Battersea has been open for six months, and is steadily earning itself a reputation for serving top class food at fairly decent prices. The main talking point of the establishment, however, is that it is owned and run by Jacques LeBeouf, the famous pastry chef and former Miss Paraguay.

The décor in the dining room is particularly stunning, with beautiful crystal chandeliers and very thought-provoking tables. These physics-defying furniture items somehow manage to hold up one’s plates and elbows despite their legs not actually reaching the floor. Extraordinary.

Once my wife and I had stopped admiring the chandeliers, tables and the cleanliness of our hands, we were forced to choose our dishes, which, given the extent of the menu and the quality of the meals on offer, was no easy feat. Luckily the waiting staff are equipped with cattle prods, meaning that the terminally indecisive have some added incentive to choose quickly. I opted for the soup of the day (although not, I was informed, that particular day), and my wife – after a bit of encouragement from Nigel, our waiter – chose the chicken Caesar salad.

Once it arrived, my wife was highly complimentary towards her entrée, though Nigel said that that was a side-effect of the high-voltage shock, and after a little while she stopped talking to it and started to eat. Waiter! Waiter! prides itself on its restaurant-joke-applicability, and as a result my soup came complete with fly in it. This is a very nice touch that my wife and I enjoyed greatly, though I must say I was a little disappointed that our waiter, when asked what the fly was doing in my soup said ‘The backstroke, sir’, when it was quite obviously doing a front crawl.

For my main course I had the ‘Gammon Surprise’, which was indeed a big surprise, as I had ordered the halibut. With a side compote of plum and damson, and topped with lemon margarine, it had a slightly awkward air of perspicacity to it, although my wife put that down to the gentleman on the next table whose cottage pie was repeating on him. My wife, on the other hand, thoroughly enjoyed her duck a l’orange, despite the fact that the kitchen had run out of oranges and so had to make it with banana.

I had the rhubarb crumble for dessert, and my wife had the chocolate fudge cookie. We didn’t like what we had so we swapped.

In summary, then:

Waiter! Waiter! Restaurant, Battersea:

Décor: Four bangers (out of five); Very nice, but a little disorienting
Food: Three bangers (out of four); I burped up a little bit of sick afterwards
Service: Eight bangers (out of eleven); Nigel gave me his number
Price: Ten bangers (out of ten); For some reason I wasn’t billed