Review 10: Slaters

1 atmosphere                                    **

2 the food & drink                            ***

3 price                                                ***

4 hospitality                                      *

5 reading potential                          **

6 clientele                                          **

7 location                                           ***

8 busy-ness                                       ****

9 professionalism                             *½

Now, as I touched on earlier in the reviews, there exists peculiarly to the world of cafés the entity known as ‘the siren’.  Below is a picture of a typical siren. 

There are two obvious qualities to a siren which make them so successful at what they do: 1) they are stern, moody, cold, etc; 2) they are very attractive, aesthetically pleasing, pretty, etc.  Now, if you remove the 2^nd characteristic you remove all justification for the 1^st, and are left with … well, ahem.  This, then, is the scenario that revealed itself to the illustrious Tea-drinker 1 & his guest reviewer, Rogue Leader, on their visit to Slaters.  Of course, I by no means expect my waiter /tress to offer me cigars & ginger beer on my arrival, but neither do I want them to periodically lean across the table, slap me in the face, and shout ‘Mau!  Mau!’.  Our waitress was just plain unfriendly, and by the time she got around to taking our order Rogue Leader had almost exhausted his material in lecturing me on cholinergic and adrenergic receptors, which believe me is no mean feat.  Here he is, by the way:

Slaters, whose slating is going to be as subtle as that pun, is on the same street as the likes of Ascaris & the Moka Bar.  Unfortunately, unlike these two, it’s a dump.  It certainly doesn’t look it from outside – the great, deep blue sign board looks new & fresh, there are tables on the pavement, and the shop front sports large windows.  But, as with a charming, mossy cave which is in fact home to a ravenous, psychotic grizzly bear, the fun stops once you cross the threshold.  Actually, said cave would probably be more hygienic – our table was covered in salt (I narrowly avoided a speech on hypertension from R.L.), and the floor was liberally sprinkled with onion.  An unidentifiable smell persisted throughout our visit, and smoking is permitted.  The radio (as, in fairness, I have encountered in every café) was awful: fuzzy soft rock, interspersed with loud 80s clubbing music.  And, eerily, I think someone next door was planning some kind of prison break – for the entire half hour or so that we could stomach the bear sounds coming from the kitchen, we could hear an intermittent tapping which sounded bizarrely like Morse code being rapped on the pipes in the walls. 

Slaters is trying to be American, and is about as successful in doing so as Liberia – while their flags look almost identical and you’ve a good chance of being shot in either, that’s where the similarities end.  So while there is a bar thingy with racked beers, on the converse the furniture is Ikean, the floor is fake plastic wood, and semi-bakelite statuettes seem to be the order of the day.  Admittedly the rugged cream walls & their red brick half pillars are pleasing, and the flowers on the tables are real (very rare), but that’s not enough to placate the Almighty & Wrathful Tea-drinker 1. 

I’d love to be able to say something nice about this place, but I am a man of action – lies do not become me.  It has nothing going for it.  Rogue Leader spent an age chewing his food not because it was phenomenally good, but because ‘some chap somewhere – maybe in Australia – pointed out that one’s endorphin release when eating food was much greater when you think about what you’re eating, instead of just going into the customary automatic pilot of eating.  Take banana sandwiches, …’, at which point my eyes glazed over & I don’t remember much.  So, with an overall **, the review is over.