December 30th, 2009
We decided to visit Frankie & Benny’s restaurant on Clifton Moor yesterday before taking in a movie at the Vue cinema which is situated next door to this popular ‘themed’ chain restaurant. Whenever we have visited in the past, it has always been very busy, predominantly with parents and their young families. It is usual for a meal at this restaurant to be broken up by several renditions of Cliff Richard’s “Congratulations….”, played every time someone orders up a celebratory cake and has it delivered by smiling staff to their respective tables.
We arrived at 3.30pm and were given a table where we could both sit the same side, to do a bit of people watching while we had our meal. I ordered up the “Amazing Skins” at around £4 to be followed by the “Full Rack of Ribs” at around £11. Paul went for the “Chicken Wings” at around £4, followed by “Salmon” at around £10.
With our drinks served, we settled back for a bit of people watching until our starters arrived. The restaurant was unusually quiet and as people arrived, they were shown to empty tables, decorated with nice cheap red paper napkins and flimsy cutlery. On this occasion, we never saw or heard one song by Cliff Richard, only Christmas tunes, played on a looping CD.
The starters arrived and were quickly consumed. This restaurant is, what it is, and you certainly wouldn’t go here for the quality of the meals served up. The ingredients used are clearly very cheap and mass produced, flavouring only provided with the over the top use of a variety of sticky sauces.
The mains were no better, with skinny mass produced fries forming the bulk of the ingredients on your plate. My ribs did fall apart, which was pleasing, but again where I did not use the sauce provided, the meat had little by way of taste.
Finishing up our ‘meal’ we ordered a couple of coffees, which were actually quite nice and had clearly been made with reasonably fresh ground coffee beans.
The bill came to around £40 for the two of us, which is probably OK, until you remind yourself that the real cost of ingredients used, could be no more than around £5, leaving £35 covering the cost of the themed restaurant, staffing and ‘service’, which to be fair was efficient and ‘Disney’ like friendly.
Score: 1 Star.
Posted in Food and Drink