A surprisingly disappointing dinner

We went out to dinner at the Attic last night. It was my 3rd visit there, and the previous 2 times the food has been absolutely phenomenal. My expectations were obviously high last night - and I was actually quite disappointed.

Their new winter menu was launched only last week, so I was quite curious to see what they came up with. Some old favourites are still there - the chilli salt squid starter, the crab & fettucine main meal and so on. But we each had only choices that we haven't tried before.

My starter was a slow poached duck egg served over tenderstem broccoli with a herb aioli. Lovely stuff, but the egg was poached firm, instead of soft as I expected, and there were only three tiny pieces of broccoli on the plate. It was supposed to be served with toasted brioche, but instead there were a few crumbs on the plate, the biggest roughly the size of my pinkie nail. My husband chose the winter mushroom salad with gorgonzola, red onion and pine nuts, but there was no sign of any gorgonzola or red onion in the salad. The mushrooms were well cooked but when you order a meal with gorgonzola, you expect to receive it!

My main was the pork belly, which was mostly lovely if a little less tender than I expected. But it was served on a little square potato cake that tasted like the potatoes had been frozen - you know that almost floury texture that potato gets when it is thawed? It tasted like that. Plus the sauce that was served with the pork was entirely savoury, and usually pork is served with at least a touch of sweetness. So that was unusual. My husband had the duck 2 ways, and that was really well cooked, so no complaints.

Then we waited about 20 minutes to be able to attract our waitress' attention, and once she finally took our order for dessert it was almost 40 minutes before we received it. We queried it with our waitress after about 30 minutes and she had to ask again what we had ordered, and then said that it's "definitely coming". I had the salted caramel pot, very nice but the flakes of salt were huge so the taste alternated between too-salty and not-salty-at-all, a little disappointing. It was also supposed to be served with a sea salt tuille, but instead again I received a 1cm by 1 cm little square of baked dough, flavourless and adding absolutely nothing to the dessert. My husband's dessert on the other hand was HUGE, a piece of pear and almond tart big enough to serve 3 people, and the tart base was really hard and overbaked.

Then once again it took forever for our waitress to visit our table so we could request the bill. We told her that we were in a hurry to get home and relieve our baby sitter - the long delay on the dessert meant that this was about 30 minutes later than we expected. And despite us commenting on this urgency, she was still standing around doing nothing for about 10 minutes (I could see her from my seat).

When the bill finally came we were charged corkage on 2 bottles of wine even though we only had one, which caused more delays.

So yeah - all in all a really disappointing evening. Given all the other great restaurants in the area I honestly don't know if we'll be back.