The other week me and the wife decided to take a trip to the Swindon Outlet centre.\u00a0 I’m no big fan of shopping but at least with the outlet centre it’s good quality stuff at reduced prices.\u00a0 That and I desperately needed some new shorts for our trip to Malaysia (this weekend), being pantless out there wouldn’t have gone down well with the locals.<\/p>\n
Anyway, we had planned to go there early but we were delayed until nearer lunchtime.\u00a0 Me being me, I wanted food as soon as we got there.\u00a0 Sadly the outlet centre only has a food court and while I don’t mind eating there I wanted to make a day of it.\u00a0\u00a0Me and the wife hardly get to spend much time together, as she generally works\u00a0weekends.\u00a0 So after a brief trip to the information desk we were pointed in the direction of Bottelinos nearby.<\/p>\n
It’s a nice looking, modern restaurant built out of an old railway building – like most of the surrounding buildings. It mixes old and modern quite well, although inside it does feel a little bit like an office building.\u00a0 It was a quiet afternoon so there wasn’t much of an atmosphere.<\/p>\n
A quick scan of the menu told me two things:<\/p>\n
It wasn’t looking like a great start but I came to try the food and to sit and relax before\u00a0inevitably\u00a0being dragged around the shops.\u00a0 My wife ended up picking Lingunie\u00a0alla\u00a0Marinara\u00a0and I went for Rigatoni\u00a0con Formaggio. Given it was \u00a310 for a pasta dish or \u00a313-14 for a meat dish and that the restaurant had been recommended to us, I was expecting something fairly nice.<\/p>\n
What I got didn’t quite match up to my expectations.\u00a0 Perhaps my mistake was in not asking for it\u00a0al dente?\u00a0 Maybe I looked at the staff wrong?\u00a0 Maybe I forgot to say please?\u00a0 Whatever my crime was, the pasta was far\u00a0too\u00a0soft.\u00a0 It was mushy.\u00a0\u00a0That I can almost\u00a0forgive, but\u00a0the sauce… I can only describe it as liquified processed cheese.\u00a0 Despite the claim that the sauce was made of mascarpone, gorgonzola and parmesan I couldn’t taste much of it, all I could taste was melted craft cheese slices. There was also spinach in there… somewhere. The wife’s dish wasn’t much better, I’m fairly sure it was\u00a0canned tuna along with the worlds smallest clams.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If this was some \u00a35 for two lunch then I could understand the low quality, but \u00a330 for lunch?\u00a0 I had expected something a little better.\u00a0 On the other hand, the disappointment of the dish inspired me to make it better myself.\u00a0 I was convinced that somewhere in there, was a tasty meal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The other week me and the wife decided to take a trip to the Swindon Outlet centre.\u00a0 I’m no big fan of shopping but at least with the outlet centre it’s good quality stuff at reduced prices.\u00a0 That and I desperately needed some new shorts for our trip to Malaysia (this weekend), being pantless out there wouldn’t have gone down well with the locals. Anyway, we had planned to go there early but we were[…]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1PTCG-u","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ginnyang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ginnyang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ginnyang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ginnyang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ginnyang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/ginnyang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36,"href":"https:\/\/ginnyang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions\/36"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ginnyang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ginnyang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ginnyang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}