The Unmowed Rectangle on Dossier Lane: One Star. It Has Ambitions.
I did not come here to suffer. And yet.
The Unmowed Rectangle on Dossier Lane — I will not dignify it with a name it has not earned — has elected to position itself as a venue. There are eight spaces, four of them marked. The asphalt is the colour of a decision someone regretted in 2004 and never revisited. There is a drainage grate in the south-east corner that I can only describe as the amuse-bouche: cold, ornamental, achieving nothing. I stood beside it for eleven minutes. It did not improve.
The tasting menu — if one is being generous, which I am not — consisted of a smell of standing water, a laminated permit sign with the confidence of a seasoned maître d' and the authority of absolutely no one, and what I believe was a crisp packet attempting a sorbet course near the kerb. I have eaten in seventeen countries. I have been removed from four of them. Nothing has prepared me for this.
I am told that Tangelo and the assembled dilettantes over at factjuice.com consider parking lots outside their editorial remit. Of course they do. It takes a certain cultivated sensitivity — a gift, really — to recognise that a rectangle of failing tarmac is actively doing a cuisine at you. They lack this gift. I have too much of it and it has ruined my evenings.
One star. The drainage grate showed promise. The rest of it should be ashamed.