Yahoo News Boat House Bistro, Bewl Bridge, restaurant review
copy of copy of In brief | Parabola London
When it is full, my local reservoir contains a gallon of water for every man, woman and child on earth. A cool, if ultimately meaningless, factoid that I didn’t even cop off t’interwebs. (That one: you could stack six London buses on top of each other in the deepest part of Bewl and they would still be underwater; the ADHD way of saying it’s 30m deep.)
No, the Gallon Fact was printed on the back of a cubicle door in the ladies’ at Bewl’s newish Boathouse Bistro, which (having been created last year) reopened for 2017 a fortnight ago. Which is when I decided this was the perfect venue at which I could celebrate Mother’s Day a week early – on the grounds that no longer being with the father of my children can mean Mother’s Day gastropub lunches remain unbooked and the kids are not always cajoled to get down to Asda before 9pm on Saturday night in order to grab the last bunch of wilting daffs and a “beautiful” card in which they may scribble (sincerely) YOUR THE GRATEST MUMMY THAT EVER EVER LIVED EVER [heart emoji here].
So, I thought I’d better get some of that stuff covered ahead of schedule (I draw the line at buying my own daffs), in order that I might spend Mother’s Day mostly horizontally and accessorised by chocolate and Netflix while the kids binge on Xbox. This is the second flush of parenting; the pragmatic, yet occasionally nostalgic, double-figures years.
To this end, me, the 10-year-old and my partner drove through Kent to collect the 14-year-old from his Saturday-night sleepover, and (are you still with me? I hope so, there’s room in the back if you all shove up) headed for Bewl Water.
“Turn left, left, left and left again!” said the cheerful chap at the entrance kiosk, which I felt sure would bring us back to exactly where we already were though I was too tired to argue. “That is a LOT of water,” said one son or the other as we parked outside the Boathouse Bistro – and what’s not to like about a faux Mother’s Day lunch at a restaurant that would soon tell us exactly how much water that was?
From the outset, I could see that the Boathouse was made for slightly awkward fauxbrations such as Mother’s Day-a-week-early: it’s smart-casual in that “smart-casual” freshly “designed” provincial hotel restaurant style, painted many shades of grey and with acres (well, a metre) of space between the tables. Best of all, it has lovely views (even on a drab, overcast day in March) of elite #TEAMGB (probably) athletes rowing and/or windsurfing themselves senseless for our dining entertainment. Having only managed to book for 1.30pm, it was clear the 12.30s and 1pm’s had been granted the best positions by the windows. However, we were next to the table of 65th birthday celebrants (clue: silver balloon printed with “65”), so hardly in Siberia.
We were given tap water by a smiling male server (no female staff in sight) wearing a black branded polo shirt (very parochial smart-casual hotel-style dining-room-cum-plumber). I felt I could probably manage a beer and the kids had coke and my partner wasn’t fussed about a drink. And we all looked at the menu (two courses for £18, three for £23) and were told that it was the same menu for children, just with smaller portions (canny), so I wouldn’t recommend it for, say, shouty toddlers or the sort of elderlings who eat one roast potato and declare themselves “practically full to bursting!”; no, it is best suited to those of us in our middle years, with galumphing offspring.
The difference between a Sunday roast in a reservoir-side “bistro” (it’s not a “bistro”, it’s a restaurant) and the same in a posh pub is that in the latter your plate should be comfortably and slightly messily loaded, and soused with a thick gravy, while the former will almost certainly arrange your meat slices, with catering school politesse, neatly atop your potatoes to make a nice little teetering pile, and the gravy will be thinner, with the metallic tang of having been pre-prepped a bit fussily and then possibly either microwaved or sous-vide-d. And, of course, your crackling will arrive – ta-da! – on its own separate plate, along with the fussy mini-veg. But you won’t care about that because you have chosen your venue while not necessarily 100 per cent food-focused.
And the view really is marvellous and the service is good enough and the staff are terribly apologetic about the fact that they just opened for the season yesterday and the till has gone a bit bonkers, so the receipt will have to be handwritten (“if that’s OK?”). And there’s Wi-Fi, too, so the kids are able to discover yet more exciting facts about reservoirs… and then go off to the loo to gather even more about this one (“and there’s an awesome basin in the loo, mum…”).
All this came to pass for well under 100 quid and for more than that, frankly, on “Mother’s Day” (faux or otherwise) one cannot reasonably ask. In fact, by the time you’ve had your little slab of sticky toffee pud with its bisected banana even the picky eater has cleared his plate, while his brother (who will eat anything in about 60 seconds, tops) is has just done a bit of Googling and, apparently, oh-my-god the most haunted village in England is just 21.4 miles/38 min drive away. “Can we go? There’s between 12 and 16 ghosts!” “Only if there’s decent restaurant with a view of them.”
Boat House Bistro, Bewl Bridge Lane, Lamberhurst, Kent TN3 8JH; 01892 890000
