Dining

I went out to dinner to celebrate a friend's birthday on Friday night. It was held at the Last Drop Brewery Restaurant, a faux-Tudor monstrosity that appeared, apparently overnight, just off Nicholson Road in Canning Vale. It was as if some modern-day Aladdin had said to his genie, "Bugger building me a luxurious palace in one night. Just build me a big-arse beer barn with olde worlde plastic light fixtures and laminex tables, then dump it next to an arterial road in the middle of an industrial zone."

As a fan of fine dining, I would offer the Last Drop a few pieces of advice on how to tweak their establishment so that it raises the bar for the whole Canning Vale Industrial Zone dining scene.

1. Few really classy restaurants serenade their patrons with a middle-aged couple doing Captain and Tenille impressions on an electric keyboard.

2. Few middle-aged couples doing Captain and Tenille impressions on an electric keyboard are so hopelessly out of touch with the post-Simpsons world that they would call their combo The Be Sharps.

3. 'Chardonnay' is not supposed to have an 'e' in it... unless you're at a rave, I guess.

4. Nor does 'blonde' have two 'l's, 'vinaigrette' two 'a's, or 'chef's' a complete lack of apostrophes.

5. Really well-prepared calamari shouldn't bounce.

6. I know the rest of your patrons tell you otherwise, but quantity isn't a substitute for quality. But at least you don't have an all-you-can-eat buffet. For that I thank you.

7. When determining your prices, try to avoid matching one of the best restaurants in the city unless you're prepared to match their exquisitely talented chefs as well.

8. A selection of promotional swatches from a gelati manufacturer clipped together does not constitute a dessert menu.

And as for the beer... actually the beer was rather good. I had the wheat and the light, and they were both pretty damn tasty. If they just ditched the food, the decor, the music and the Menu that the Spellcheck Forgot, and squatted in the dirt of a vacant lot pouring beers, it'd be a step in the right direction.

The final nail in the Coffin of Judgement was an application of the Blandwagon Carpark Class Indicator Test. Take the total number of cars in the carpark, divide by the total number of European cars, and the closer the result is to 1, the classier the establishment. In this case I took the total number of cars (fifty), divided it by the total number of European cars (one - my Golf) and got a BCCI of... fifty. Not good.

Few things in this world are as depressing as walking through a carpark and realising that more than one person has had $70,000 to spend on a car, and chosen to buy a beige Toyota.