Not being a restaurant, people's expectations are often surpassed. We often catch people of guard with the quality of what we do. Coming to the Greyhound, guests know they can have cheese and tuna toastie, a bacon and chilli burger or grilled sea bass and wild mushroom risotto.
One bone of contention I've had over the past year has been the chips. A few comments on a review site have alluded to "why don't you make hand cut chips?"
Again, we are a pub, with a tiny kitchen, selling 80kg of chips on some weekends! So I think you know why.... I ain't peeling 80kg of spuds just for chips, then blanching them, cooling and storing them before re frying them. No thanks.
We use Lord chips. They are a highly respected all potato chilled chip. This was not good enough for some people, who went on to put their views on them on to the Web.
The quest was on to find an alternative.
Due to import and export problems at various ports around the UK, we were at one point delivered a frozen chip from another company.
Customer and staff feedback alike was good. People were loving these.
This is where, as a chef with values, I had to make a choice.
No brainer you may think? Well no. These new chips were full of additives, flavourings and preservatives. Something I'm have tried to usher out over the past couple of years.
My ethos is natural, real food. I know some additives are required in some food. But do we need them in our chips. Am I wrong to want to do away with the artificial chip?
What would you do?