FURZTON LAKE HOTEL, Furzton, Milton Keynes

A few years ago I was kicked in the nuts by a dwarf. It was not an experience I wish to replicate - however lying on the floor of the pub in a small pool of burning testicular agony I realised that I had learnt a very valuable life lesson. Like anyone who has paid the price for assuming that because something is small that means it’s not sociopathically dangerous, I learnt that first impressions can be deceiving.

It seems I didn’t learn this lesson well enough and so it was that last week I got kicked in the nuts by another dwarf. Except in this case the dwarf was the food at the Furzton Lake Hotel and the first impression was that far from being small, they were big, retarded and guaranteed to fuck up my order, my food, my life and pretty much anything else I cared to involve them with. (Can I stretch a metaphor or what?)

As soon as I walked into this place I knew it was going to fuck up. For a start it was huge, vast. It could easily seat a couple of hundred people, It was also busy and the paucity of staff didn’t bode well for any sort of expediency of service. Secondly it was staggeringly cheap. £5 for an 80z steak is a bargain but they were also running a 2 for 1 deal in most dishes - so my steak and my girlfriend’s steak was going to come in at £2.50 a head. I briefly considered that maybe this was a mistake… maybe they were quoting the cost of a drawing of the aforementioned steak… or maybe a brief description in blank verse? It certainly seemed unlikely that they would be selling anything resembling meat for this price. If they were then I wasn’t sure I wanted to eat it.

Regardless of these obvious signals that I was about to indulge in an eating experience on par with medieval dental surgery, I bit the bullet and went up to the bar to order. It was here that my suspicions of the upcoming culinary apocalypse were confirmed. After standing there for about ten minutes one of the gibbering Neanderthals behind the bar finally stopped picking fleas off its fellow chimps back and flopped its drooping eyes over in my direction. For one moment, staring into those deep liquid pools I thought I detected a hint of intelligence, a spark of humanity… but then it was gone. The creature languidly shuffled towards me, knuckles dragging on the floor, and uttered a single guttural question

“Ug?”

Taking this as a prompt for my order I decided to forgo language and instead just pointed to the items and made eating gestures. In response it dumbly thumped a few buttons on the cash register and when this failed to elicit a response, started smashing it up with the leg-bone of a zebra one of its colleagues had been gnawing at. After a few moments, the commotion alerted the Alpha Male, a huge Silverback with hunched shoulders and a head the size of a basketball. After lambasting the younger female he finished smashing the register to bits before waving me away.

By this point I knew that was the last I would hear about my money, order or anything resembling food again.

And then the dwarf kicked me in the nuts.

Against all odds, against all hope, against all rational thought and logic the Furzton Lake Hotel came through. Didn’t just come through but actually exceeded not only my expectations (which were damn low by this point) but forced me to re-evaluate my expectations of pub food from then on.

Seriously, they knocked it out of the park. I order my steak blue. I do this mainly so I can complain about it being over-cooked. My girlfriend ordered hers blue too, usually because she can guarantee it will be medium rare, how she likes it.

My girlfriend couldn’t eat the steak at the Furzton Lake Hotel because it was a genuine blue steak. I mean an actual honest-to-goodness cut-off-a-cow-waved-at-a-radiator-and-shoved-on-the-plate blue steak. Given the experience so far I would be liable to believe this might actually be due to the cook not knowing what a steak was, let alone how to cook it but then they made the same mistake with mine so I can only assume it was deliberate.

Not only that but it was actually a good blue steak. You can’t serve a shit steak blue - the meat is too tough, the taste all wrong - you need a good cut of meat to eat it like this. Usually the blue steaks I have managed to order have been tough and/or tasted of silage. In comparison, this was a pretty fucking amazing steak. Melt in your mouth tender, dark, rich, deep meaty flavour, accompanied by hot crispy golden chips that were freshly cooked in something that may even have been actual sunflower oil.

I was amazed.

Look, here’s the thing. I simply cannot recommend the Furzton Lake Hotel, because I simply cannot believe that this wasn’t a fluke. Everything about the place screams fuck-up. I have absolutely no idea how they did it, and I cannot believe they will ever replicate the situation again. I can only assume that maybe another restaurant took pity on me and sent their food over. There is no way in a billion years my girlfriend and I ate two great steaks for £2.50 a head, served fresh, fast and perfectly cooked by a huge unmanageably large chain hotel run by inbred semi-sentient retards. It didn’t happen. I dreamt it. Feel free to dream it too, but don’t blame me if it turns out to be a nightmare.

One Line Review:
Excellent and incredibly cheap pub grub produced by God-only-knows-what God-only-knows-how.