Comments on: Banished to where there are fat people but very little food

By: I’m not embarrassed to say I like the veggies at Carlton’s Embrasse. And more… | kuchnia.wpblog.pl

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 07:49:48 +0000

[...] upstairs as Three, One, Two. A fortnight between courses, a starvation diet and a coach party from weight watchers. The complimentary coffee didn’t really sort it [...]

By: I’m not embarrassed to say I like the veggies at Carlton’s Embrasse. And more… | Tomato

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 05:44:54 +0000

[...] upstairs as Three, One, Two. A fortnight between courses, a starvation diet and a coach party from weight watchers. The complimentary coffee didn’t really sort it [...]

By: Tomato - » Is this the most expensive curry in Melbourne?

Tomato - » Is this the most expensive curry in Melbourne? — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 23:13:13 +0000

[...] After 90 minutes we’ve been eating at $2.13 a minute – the bill comes to $192 – which ain’t bad as we’ve thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. It is nothing like the torturous $2.875 a minute in a long drawn out but tiny meal at Three, One, Two. [...]

By: Ed

Ed — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 01:24:59 +0000

Pam,
It wasn’t that the food was bad – I thought it was delicious. It was just so small and took so long to arrive. A good restaurant manager shouldn’t charge in that circumstance where you didn’t even eat the food but a lot of Australians don’t get the whole idea of quite how far service should extend.

By: Pam

Pam — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 00:57:36 +0000

I dined at Three, One, Two last week and had an equally bad experience. In fact all four of us did! Service aside (which was good), the food was substandard, with my main equal to that of what would have been served down at the local bingo hall – no joke! I didn’t eat the meal, complained but was still charged $40 for it! I can’t believe we walked
out of there $170 a head later!

By: Ed

Ed — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 23:35:33 +0000

Jamie, i know what you mean about those review trifectas he does. I’ve recently painted my toenails blue and grown a beard as a disguise but don’t know if I can keep it up much longer – not that anyone knows me anyway.

By: Jamie

Jamie — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 13:20:41 +0000

Ed, I feel your pain. We read Lethlean’s rave reviews (all 3 of them) about The Argo, went there on Valentine’s night (a bad idea, I know, I know…) and it was so crap that I felt compelled to start “The Dinner Blog” to vent my anger…
http://thedinnerblog.blogspot.com/
Did you notice how Epicure call’s John Lethlean a “reviewer” rather than a “critic”?

By: Tomato - » The $55 dégustation

Tomato - » The $55 dégustation — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 05:01:48 +0000

[...] I visited twice in two weeks, once on a Tuesday lunchtime and once on a Monday evening. Each time the place had a respectable crowd. What amazed me, a few days after my Three, One, Two visit was the value offered by the dégustation. Each portion was the perfect size. And, knowing what the proliteriat really wants from a Chinese restaurant, my old friend Crispy Duck satisfied me twice. Tagged:Albert Park Chinese Restaurant reviews [...]

By: Ed

Ed — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 02:52:33 +0000

Hi Jackie
I should declare that I do know Jane who used to manage both Gingerboy and Ezard and the night I was there I was acknowledged by Zoe (because Jane must have spotted my name on thebookings list) but still the service was too fast and the food as stated. I didn’t hold back on the review. When Jane asked me in the food had more heat and of course the service was top notch, and it would have been difficult for me to blog that because of the conflict. I’ve long had a bee in my bonnet about reviewers being known in restaurants back from when I moved to Sydney (from the UK) in 1996. The problem is that the market is so small here and that there are only two or three reviewers in each City writing mainstream reviews that they can’t avoid being noticed. The same thing happens though to a leser degree in London where there are a dozen or sopeople doing this. And I guess I do try and regard part of my review as being entertainment as well as information. There are no rules to blogging and this is very much an experiment – a notebook –and I am trying to see what I can do outside what are the established formats in Australia an serve up variety with some form of innovation and perhaps stimulate some people to diagree or agree with me. Some people may like what I write others not. I was just out with Jane funnily enough and was telling her that I am going to try and blog more of the places I visit, which I will do. The sad fact is thogh I make 100% of my money from writing and sometimes I get busy which stops me from writing everything – I just need a break from it.
Anyway, like I said I hope to do better this year although I was also thinking about making the cost/minute part of an alternative scoring. system.

By: Jack

Jack — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 00:55:53 +0000

Ed
It seems a shame to mostly blog the badly performing, high profile restaurants, a bit of a tall poppy restaurant syndrome…
I’m surprized at your comments in the 312 review about restaurants treating well known reviews differently (I assume you do not classify yourself in this category, but as the general public), and then you say that Gingerboy had improved but you where with the manager… Double standards seems to be at play here, and unfortunately for John Lethlean I can guarentee you that no restaurant worth their Maldon salt would not know what John or Necia look like.
Zoe and Teague of course know John, (and yourself? or was this after the fact of your review. Where you ‘invited’ back?)yet did not ‘fix’ the issues that John had with Gingerboy, I guess because they did not realise they existed. The funniest think about all this is the thing that bugged me the most about Gingerboy was the lax service, (I can deal with bland unadventerous food, unfortunately it sells!), and Zoe’s hosting of mine and a couple of other tables as they arrived was the thing that was the most annoying, blatantly rude.
Jackie