Rocky the Giant Lobster

Agent Triple P, on the whole, does not like seafood but he is very partial to lobster.  He was intrigued by the story, therefore of the giant lobster caught in a fisherman's net off the coast of Maine.  Rocky, either named after the Rockland area where he was caught or because of his large claws (or both - no one seems sure), measured a whopping four feet long and weighed 27lbs.

 Rocky next to a normal lobster

Rocky was released back into the sea as large lobsters like this lay disproportionate numbers of eggs and help keep the stocks up, although whether Rocky was actually a Rockette is also not clear.  Lobster is expensive in Britain and most of ours come from Canada.  We once went to a lobster feast in Prince Edward Island where one of the inhabitants told us that when they were small they had to wrap up the remains of lobster they had had for dinner in newspaper before they put it in the rubbish as only poor people ate lobster and it would have been embarassing to have been caught doing so!

The kindly people at the Maine State Aquarium provided a snack for Rocky before releasing him

The best lobster we ever ate was in the Shanghai Court restaurant in the Grand Hyatt, Taipei. It was perfectly tender with none of that chewiness you can get from some lobster (which is why, incidentally, Rocky would not have made very good eating).  Rubbery! Or, rather, it wasn't.

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Big Breakfast of the Week 12: Eegon's of Cowes

Triple P's breakfast of choice at Eegons: the All Day Breakfast for £5.50

Very much a feature of Cowes Week for many is a pre-race breakfast at Eegon's Cafe in Cowes High Street.  This is a classic English cafe (pronounced "caff" in this instance) and you are just as likely to be sharing it with the hard working chaps from the Isle of Wight street cleansing department (they start work at 2.00am quite often during Cowes Week) or lifeboatmen (especially as the new RNLI station will be virtually next door) as yachties.

Triple P usually takes the £5.50 All Day Breakfast which consists of two eggs, two rashers of bacon, two sausages, fried bread, baked beans or tomatoes and toast.  There is also (for girls, presumably) a half breakfast for £4.50 which only has one sausage, one rasher of bacon and one egg.

The new Regatta Platta

The range of cooked breakfasts is simply marvellous although woe betide you if you try to ask for any changes to the menu.  Asking for scrambled, rather than fried eggs, for example will be met with a polite refusal.  A new offering this year is the Regatta Platta: a sausage, a rasher of excellent bacon, fried bread, toast, mushrooms, baked beans (or tomatoes) and saute potatoes plus a drink all for £5.

Proprietor Rod Ainge is a Cowes fixture, heavily involved with the commercial life of the town so you are just as likely to eavesdrop on unofficial meetings between council officials and representatives of the local retailers as discussions about sailing.

Breakfast Bonanza

The biggest challenge used to be the enormous Breakfast Bonanza, a plateful so vast you actually got a certificate if you finished it (Triple P has one, of course).  Two eggs, two sausages, two rashers of bacon, mushrooms beans or tomatoes, hash browns, black pudding, fried bread and toast for £7.50.  This year the new Steakfast looks even more of a challenge!  We haven't tried the latter yet.

This year thay have also introduced a loyalty card where, if you amass ten stanps you get a £5 voucher.  this, of course, encourages you to visit even more than you should.

Breakfast at Eeegons is not perfect, the sausages (compared with the bacon and eggs, say) are low quality and the sauces are generic catering sachets rather than HP or Heinz but even so for the sheer choice and value it gets 9/10

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Big Breakfast of the Week 11: Brasserie Roux at the Sofitel St James

The Sofitel St James is a convenient location for Triple P: close to the Canadian and South African High Commissions, the Institute of Directors, Quebec Government House, the Commonwealth Secretariat and other places where Agent Triple P can be regularly found.  So it is quite often that Triple P finds himself there for breakfast.  Now breakfast at a boutique five star hotel like this should be a pleasurable experience but, we have to say, that we have been regularly disappointed at the Sofitel.

The interior designed by Pierre Yves-Rochon

Breakfast is either a buffet or, as Triple P prefers, a la carte.  The problem is the indifferent service from grumpy Eastern European waiters.  Eastern European women have been a great boost to the restaurant trade in the UK: friendly, nice looking and efficient.  Their male equivalents. however, seem to resent the fact that they aren't making a packet as plumbers or carpenters.  The staff in the Brasserie Roux consistently let down what could otherwise be a good restaurant.

 

The red grapefruit juice which Triple P requested was nice and cold, although perhaps a little on the small side.  This didn't matter as they offered us a refill (although whether we would have had to pay for that wasn't clear).  The teas, served in one of those trendy iron teapots, was curious as, on opening the lid, Triple P found neither a tea bag nor leaves.   This meant that there was no way of adjusting the strength of the brew.  As for the breakfast itself at least this time they got TripleP's order correct.  In the past they have omitted items because, like increasing numbers of waiters and waitresses in London, they don't write orders down.

The breakfast itself was not as hot as it should have been although the sausage was truly excellent.  It did come with some very good wholewheat toast.  The all inclusive price was £23.50 which is on the high side for London but did include drinks and toast so that makes it rather better value than it first appears.  An automatic 12.5% service charge was included which given the service was offhand (perhaps they are just trying to be Parisian) was a bit much.

So it loses marks for the poor quality tea, the lukewarm eggs, the rather unattractive dining room and the service.

All in all a disappointing 5/10.

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Lunch Out: the Rex Whistler Restaurant at the Tate Gallery

The Tate Gallery Millbank.  Triple P's meeting was, handily, in the building in the background

Agent Triple P had a meeting on Millbank the other day and ran into an old friend, the luscious M, in all of her Mediterranean glory, coming out of the same building afterwards.  Having just both finished somewhat tedious all-morning meetings, and given it was a nice sunny day (it's been our hottest April since records began with 26 degrees Centigrade or 79 Fahrenheit), we decided to repair to the nearby Tate Gallery restaurant for lunch.  Now, the Tate (or Tate Britain, as it is now annoyingly called; to distinguish it from the Tate Modern) was one of Triple P's favourite galleries and used to be Triple P's favourite in London, but more on that later.

First let us go into the Rex Whistler restaurant.  The restaurant is named after the artist Rex Whistler (1905-1944), who painted the murals adorning the walls.  Having been thrown out of the Royal Acadamy, Whistler went on to study at the Slade Art School.  Whistler became famous for his murals and trompe l'oeil works and painted the mural in the Tate Gallery restaurant in 1927 when he was only 22.

The original bright young things:  left to right: Zita Jungman, William Walton, Cecil Beaton, Stephen Tennant, Georgia Sitwell, Teresa Jungman, and Rex Whistler. Photographed by Cecil Beaton

Whistler was one of the original "bright young things" and is believed to have been the model for Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited; required reading for a certain type of young lady when Triple P was at Oxford.  The great love of his life was Lady Caroline Paget, daughter of the 6th Earl of Angelsey. It seems that his love was unrequited but he did numerous drawings and paintings of her including one nude, whether from life or imagination is not known but she did have something of a racy reputation.

Lady Caroline Paget by Rex Whistler

It was at her family home, Plas Newydd, in Angelsea that Whistler painted his greatest work, a 58' by 12' painting which is the largest canvas painting in Britain.  Like the Tate mural the picture is of an Arcadian fantasy landscape. 

Whistler's immense canvas at Plas Newydd

Whistler was paid £5 a day for the eighteen months it took him to complete the Tate mural.  The subject of the mural was devised with the novelist Edith Olivier (1872–1948), a friend of his.  It was at Edith Oliver's house that Whistler first met lady Caroline Paget.  The story of the mural relates an expedition by seven people who leave the Duchy of Epicurania in search of exotic meat, to relieve the diet of their own people who subsist solely on dry biscuits. 

The Tate Gallery in January 1928.  Sandbags attempt to keep the flood waters at bay

The mural survived the Thames flood on January 7th 1928, when the Thames, swollen by melted snow, burst its banks at Hammersmith.  Despite being under two feet of water, Whistler's mural was robust enough to be largely undamaged.

Self-portrait of Rex Whistler (1940) in his Welsh Guards uniform,  This picture is now in the National Army Museum in Chelsea, just a couple of miles from the Tate

 

Whistler joined the Welsh Guards at the outbreak of World War 2.  Commanding a Cromwell tank he became the Guards Armoured Division's first casualty in Operation Overlord when his tank's track became entangled with wire.  As the crew tried to free the track they came under heavy machine gun fire. 

 

 

 

 

Whistler sprinted 60 yards to another tank to call in supporting fire but was killed by the concussion from a mortar, after completing his task.  There was not a mark on his body but his neck had been broken.  He was buried in Normandy and his brother, the famous glass engraver Laurence, designed a wonderful memorial prism to him which is in Salisbury Cathedral.

The Whistler memorial prism in Salisbury Cathedral

Anyway, on to lunch.  Triple P hasn't eaten in the Tate Gallery restaurant (the appellation "Rex Whistler"is comparatively recent) for some time.  In fact it could be over twenty-five years!  It was really famous, not so much for it's food but for its wine list.  It was, as it still is, unusual in that it maintains its own cellar rather than buying wine in as its needed, like most restaurants.  This meant that it was able to buy fine clarets en primeur and cellar them; meaning that they could sell them in the restaurant at a good profit but keep the prices far below other restaurants who would have to pay market price. 

Rex Whistler Restaurant

Triple P thinks he has been thee times before, back in the eighties.  Firstly with HMS and Agent DVD, secondly with his former work colleague and on-off girlfriend SA and finally with Stinky C, the paratroopers daughter.  Stinky C worked as a graduate trainee at one of Triple P's previous organisations.  She was very posh and had gamine short, brown hair which reminded Triple P of Leslie Caron (who Triple P once saw shopping in Guildford, whilst she was performing in a play at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre).  Several of her fellow trainees complained that she stank and Triple P was nominated to break this news to her.  Deciding that it was best done over dinner we were not prepared for the fact, that evening, that she had changed out of her smelly work clothes and presented herself in a tiny, very low cut little black dress which displayed her quite awesome bust to distracting effect.  Taking her to the Archduke winebar she promptly hammered her way through several bottles of claret and half a bottle of port, displaying, along with her cleavage, a thorough knowledge of Bordeaux wines.  Much impressed, Triple P and C embarked upon a quite inappropriate relationship for someone who was supposed to be mentoring her and her fellow graduates (we have a horrible feeling that it actually started that very night).  Anyway, a Saturday lunch followed where we sampled the Tate's extensive wine list during a very happy afternoon (it tends to be one of those restaurants that you linger in).

Anyway, back to the other day, rather uninterestingly, we both had the same lunch.  The restaurant does a good value set lunch or you can go a la carte.  With the set lunch each possible choice is accompanied by an optional  recommended wine.  Two courses is £16.50 and three is £20.50.  Wine is £3.75 for one glass, £7.25 for two or £10.50 for three.  We started with a potato and watercress soup.  This was excellent and not as heavy as we might have imagined.  It was a substantial bowlfull, however, and given that on the set lunch you can pay for two or three courses  you could easily have had just this with some cheese for a light lunch.  A good excuse to access the wine list!  With the soup the recommended wine was Quinta de la Rosa Branco 2009 from the Douro.  Made  from the same grapes that go into white port (60% viosinho) it balanced the thickness of the soup well and had an unusual English-style, grapefruit finish with the viosinho giving it a floral smell.

To be fair we had already eaten one of the slices of beef before we remebered to photograph it.  Still...


The main course was rare roast beef with devill sauce, fat chips and carrots.  This was, we have to say, not a full-sized course but after the soup that was less critical. If you had opted for a main course and a dessert you might feel a bit short changed, however.  The beef, however, was meltingly good and the sauce was only mildly hot and quite subtle.

To accompany this, we decided against the recommended wine, Château Bernadotte 2007, and went for the rather more splendid Château Prieuré-Lichine 1995, at a very reasonable £52 a bottle (given that we were charged £40 for a bottle of Cloudy Bay sauvignon blanc in a wine bar last week).  A this sells over the counter in the UK (if you can get it) for around £40 a bottle we didn't think that this was an unreasonable mark-up. 

Even though the days of Chateau Lafite for £11.00 a bottle are long gone at the Tate (at least now they take credit cards, for a long time it was cash only) there are still some bargains to be had in the fifty page wine list and we need to arrange some further visits.  The selection of Bordeaux is still impressive with an average of four to six châteaux per Bordeaux region (the list is very French heavy).   For example they have six wines from Margaux, from Château Labégorce, a cru bourgeois at £21.50 for a half bottle, up to a Château Margaux itself for £370 for a 1989 vintage.  The key thing about the restaurant's cellaring policy is it means that you get access to older wine than you usually can find in restaurants. The list also contains a very wide selection of wines by the half bottle.

The restaurant decants wine properly which, with one like the Prieuré-Lichine really is necessary.  In fact, it probably could have benefited from another hour in the decanter.  Although a nice deep garnet colour still it is probably at the end of its life and wouldn't be worth keeping much longer.  However, it was still a very nicely balanced claret which was still very fruity and even slightly herbal. 

We finished the wine with a rather paltry, but delicious, serving of mature cheddar cheese.  We ordered a another serving to split between us.

All that's left of the permanent collection on display

All in all it was an excellent lunch in a very pleasant restaurant and, in fact, the only slight negative about the afternoon was the gallery itself.  This used, as we said earlier, to be our favourite gallery in London but now, other than the Turner wing, most of the permanent collection has been removed to be replaced by trendy one off exhibitions of inferior art or schools' areas, leaving the glories of the Tate largely confined to one room.  Save us from trendy curators!
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Trader Vic's Vancouver

In one of the pictures we posted of Pamela Anne Gordon last week you could just see, behind her hand, part of the roof of Trader Vic's in Vancouver.  Sadly, this is the only real tiki restaurant we have ever been to; we visited there in early 1995 not long before it closed.

The distinctive pitched roof of Trader Vic's is just visible above Pamela's right hand

Agent Triple P has been to two other Trader Vic's: the one at the London Hilton, which is still very much operating and the one at the Beverly Hilton which is hanging in there although we're not sure of its future given the extensive refurbishment planned for that hotel.  Anyway, neither of them have the authentic South Seas splendour of the Vancouver restaurant.

Trader Vic's was the brainchild of Victor Jules Bergeron Jr (1902-1984) from San Francisco.  He opened his first restaurant, Hinky Dink's, in 1937 opposite his parents grocery store in Oakland, California.  Gradually the decor of the restaurant became increasingly tropical and he changed the name to Trader Vic's opening a second restaurant in Seattle in 1940. 

The huge surge of interest in anything Polynesian, following the Pacific theatre in World War 2 and in advance of Hawaii becoming the 50th state (in 1959), helped him build a chain of restaurants which set the model for many themed restaurant chains that came afterwards.

Trader Vic's menu cover

During the sixties and seventies there were around 25 Trader Vic's around the world but these started to disappear in the eighties and nineties as tiki fell out of favour.   Now tiki is trendy again and there are, once again, 25 branches of Trader Vic's globally.

The Bayshore Inn in the mid sixties with Trader Vic's on the right

The one in Vancouver was opened in 1961 as part of the new Bayshore Inn at 1601 Bayshore Drive.  It was built by Western Hotels which was founded in 1930 in Yakima, Washington State.  In 1954 they acquired their first hotel in Canada and then changed their name to Western International Hotels.  The 332 room Bayshore Inn was the first hotel they had constructed themselves, as opposed to having bought.

Unlike most hotel-located Trader Vic's, which are within the normal space of the interior of a  hotel, the Vancouver branch soared into the sky in a pastiche of a Polynesian lodge. This gave its dining room an anazing sense of space; especially as it looked out onto the harbour and Grouse Mountain across the water.  It also meant that you could arrive at the restaurant by boat; another unique feature.

There was a problem with the opening of the restaurant, however, in that an hour before opening the Liquor Control Board of British Columbia refused to grant the restaurant a liquor licence because of the prominent penises on some of the tiki statues inside. A quick session with a hacksaw removed the offending members and the restaurant was ready to go!

The Bayshore Inn with Trader Vic's in the background right

In 1972 a shambling man in a dressing gown and slippers sidled into the Bayshore Inn, declared it to be "pretty nice" and took over the top two floors of the hotel for the next five months and twenty-eight days.  Howard Hughes had returned to Vancouver for the first time since 1945 when he piloted local actress Yvonne De Carlo for a flight over the city.

Triple P was taken to Trader Vic's at the Bayshore Inn by his particular friend S in 1995.  They had only met a few days before and, at that point she had not moved to Vancouver.  We had drinks and dinner there although Triple P found the somewhat rococo cocktails not to his taste and indeed the food was not particularly memorable either.  The restaurant decor was, however, unlike anything else we had ever experienced!

Vancouver in 1965.  The Bayshore Inn is about a third of the way in from the left, on the inlet.  On the right is the pier where the Pan Pacific (built in 1986) and Canada Place are now

Vancouver 2007. Tower blocks obscure the Bayshore Inn

When Triple P visited, as indeed when it opened, the Bayshore Inn was in a rather run down industrial part of the city.  Work was just starting on clearing old railway lines which would eventually make way for the large number of apartment blocks that infest the area (including S's!) today.  S and Triple P walked back to the Pan Pacific from Trader Vic's along the waterfront (as far as we were able) as there was no nice path and gardens like there are today.

In 1970 a large tower was added to the Bayshore Inn and in 1980, on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the company, Western International Hotels changed its name to Westin so the Bayshore Inn is now the Westin Bayshore.  The area it is located in is now very much more salubrious than it was before.

Trader Vic's closed the year after Triple P visited, in 1996, and a normal end to this story would be that it was demolished to make way for something trendier.  In fact the space where it was located hasn't been built on and remains an open space but the Trader Vic's building still exists.

A couple bought the building and had it moved to Vancouver Island.  The building was put on a barge and taken across the water where it was then taken by road to its new site.

It was placed in a waterside setting at Rachelle's Vineyard in Brentwood Bay to be used as holiday accomodation for guests at the vineyard.

Trader Vic's in its new location overlooking Brentwood Bay on Vancouver Island

It was a major engineering feat to move a building 44 metres long, 12 metres wide and weighing 140 tons in one piece from the mainland to the island.

The building a couple of years ago

Sadly, although it still retains many of its original interior features it seems to be in rather a bad way these days.  Let's hope someone is able to restore it to its former tiki glory.

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