A return to Guest Night at New

New College
Oxford



Having raved about our steak at a guest night in a previous post, we took the leap and signed up for the end of term dinner - promising to be a fancy affair.

New was going 'Japanese' with the above menu promising... well... probably too much.



Condiment platters arrive: sweet chili sauce, gari (pickled ginger), and little fish filled with soy sauce.



First up, H's vegetarian platter. Vegetable tempura in the far distance (pumpkin, we think), vege maki roll, rice topped with half a quail's egg, cucumber and gari.



Non-vegetarians were served the above: prawn tempura, prawn sushi, smoked salmon, cucumber roll and what we think is a tuna maki rolled in shredded nori.

The rice was hard and bland, while the fish was... oddly flavourless. The attempt at tempura was admirable, but was probably closer to fish & chips batter.



An unplanned middle course arrived: vegetarian soup. Surprising, as college are known to cut costs where ever possible, so unannounced courses tend not to occur. It turns out that they probably had dishwater that they needed to dispose, and we were the recipients. A medley of random vegetables combined with shiitaki mushroom stems (tougher than jerky, and much less tasty) came in a thin vegetal broth that was most likely made from boiling carrot together with cabbage. Totally inedible.



The main course of tonkatsu, yakituri [sic] and rice. What can I say? the rice is of the Uncle Ben variety - bland and hard, and as no sauce-based food was served, impossible to swallow. The 'yakitori' was just grilled chicken with no sauce, and no seasoning. Chewy, bland, hard. The tonkatsu was more similar to a poorly executed schnitzel - no real complaints, but again dry and bland, although it was about all that we could eat.



The vegetarian option - an udon casserole (heaven help the man who thought of that idea) was declared a mess. Gloopy noodles sat in essentially the same mix that had previously been served as soup, topped with an egg. As H doesn't like egg, this was pretty much declared inedible as well.



The side servings of boiled pumpkin and spinach added some texture, and (thank goodness) a tiny amount of moisture to the meal.



Dessert turned out to be a surprisingly edible 'cheesecake', which was in fact more like a baked cottage cheese mix topped with a lychee.



Served with mango sauce (read: canned mango pulp), it was surprisingly good.

All in all, this was worse than the first effort documented here. For £17 per head, this is not good eats.