The Garden House, May 11th 2008

The Garden House
1 Pembroke Road
Norwich
Norfolk
NR2 3HD
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English people like the summer, or at the very least they like the idea of it. They like the idea of heat, clear blue skies and refreshing Enid Blighton style-esque beverages in quaint, slightly overgrown gardens whilst simultaneously tending to an unusually responsive, yet equally rustic and well loved barbeque. The truth is we aren't really cut out for these extreme weather conditions. An inch of snow and the traffic comes to a standstill as we abandon our cars on the motorway and forge a path home on foot to avoid being snowed in or out of whereever we intended to be. An unforseen summer heatwave and we lethargically trapse along the streets like Moses leading the Hebrews, lathered in sun lotion and demanding that the government embrace the Spanish siesta as its own to combat the utterly intolerable temperature. It was a Sunday afternoon which fit the latter perfectly. Not a cloud in the sky, the temperature high enough to warrant the forecasters reading it in Fahrenheit to accentuate the difference, and a thirst which made the walk for a drink wortwhile. I'd heard a lot of things about the Garden House, and truth be told, it was a fairly mixed bag which had amounted to 'quite expensive but lovely garden'.

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It was a lovely garden, it was in fact so lovely that it made me wonder how it stayed in business during the other 51 weeks in the year that people didn't sit in it. The inside wasn't particularly special, as dark and empty as you might expect on a hot day when everyone else was sitting outside. Being a Sunday afternoon they were clearly pushing the roast which came with chicken, beef or pork. At £7 it wasn't a bargain, but I wouldn't describe it as overly expensive either. All the girls behind the bar looked like they should be selling bead bracelets at some kind of market stall for some reason. We placed our order and they handed us two wooden spoons. When we wandered outside to find a table it became evident that there were a lot of people with wooden spoons. Annoyingly our food didn't come at the same time, which is probably because of their rather rustic spoon ordering system that can't process two people from the same party ordering food seperately.

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When the roast eventually turned up it was pretty nice. The roast potatoes were really well done, crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside. It also came with two monstrous Yorkshire puddings, (honestly, they were massive) as well as proper gravy which hadn't started its life in granule form. The only let down was the chicken itself, which wasn't carved from a whole bird but was just a roasted breast. Still, this aside it was all excellent. The atmosphere was upbeat, probably a result of the weather, the only blemish a guy with a laugh that sounded the horn on my old Rover 214. It was the kind of laugh people use when they're part of the studio audience for a television sitcom to try and make it on to the soundtrack, honestly, it was the most excruciating sound I'd heard come from a human mouth since Davina McCall's 'all your grey mum' moment in that L'Oreal advert. Not that was really in any way the fault of the Garden House itself.
jj
Verdict: A really good spot, especially on a summer day, but its quality is probably in direct correlation to the weather - The inside isn't much to write home about. The food was great and there was quite a lot of it, and although it wasn't exactly value, you pay a premium for the surroundings you sit in while you're eating it. Based on that, it's well worth a visit.