Day 4 in the house of chocolate. Been too busy to blog, catching up on working, busy trying to hold fat people's heads and oxygenate them. I am ashamed to admit, as I am only used to mannequins until now, I never realised how difficult it is to stabilise someone's head in place with one hand, whilst holding an oxygen mask and trying to bag them at the same time.

So first things first, since I last blogged, a bag of maltesers, a minty aero, can of full fat coke and sticky toffee pudding with brandy cream (I'll justify this later). So all in all not a bad 3 days for me when we consider my normal sugar intake, but it didn't stop me tasting my morning mid-stream urine to see if it tasted sugary, hence if I had developed diabetes yet.

This is getting ridiculous, and slightly disgusting so I am joining a gym later on today. The time spent going to the gym/showering/gymming will leave me with less time to contemplate which Hummingbird cake I'm going to go for next.

However what also needs to stop is my love of fine food. This may not be too difficult though after an outing to Gordon Ramsay's gastropub "The Narrow" http://www.gordonramsay.com/thenarrow/ last night. Very disappointed. With the food. Had an offer on the lovely toptable, 3 courses for £22. The venue was nice, on the Limehouse end of the Thames, view was lovely, if a little too quiet for my liking as it always is downstream from the Southbank end. We (the boy, a girlfriend and myself) got there for 7.45 on a Thursday evening and it was empty-ish and got a lovely reception from the door staff as we were taken to our seats.

The waiter although nice, was not fully understanding our requests and couldn't recommend a decent beer for the boy, lumping for a Peroni recommendation when there was actually quite a large beer selection (though I didn't get to see what was actually on tap at the bar). I made a trip to the toilet, having consumed a litre bottle of water to try and scare a constipated stool out of my body before leaving (sorry too much detail but my bowels are the bane of my life, so just deal with it, its my blog I'll cry if I want to).

The toilets were clean, though I have to confess a pet hate for restaurants/bars whatever that don't have paper towels to dry your hands as this was - I hate using hand driers, especially unhygenic ones that aren't automatically activated - defeating the purpose of washing your hands.

So after taking a wizz returned to find gladly the crowd had picked up slightly which added to the ambience. So we settled down to choose from our set menus because of the offer, of 4 starters/4 mains. The boy and girlfriend plumped for rabbit terrine with quince jelly, whilst I opted for garlic mushrooms on toast. All in all for me a pleasing bite, the mushrooms were the bouncy and the right side of juicy but the terrine was in my opinion quite flavourless and looked sad, the quince jelly was definitely needed in addition. other offers for starters were pumpkin soup and salmon fishcakes.

To mains we go, where I had Hake, mussels and clams in Suffolk cider with chive mash and the other two had game pie and mash which didn't all come at the same time, boy was waiting for a while before his came. I'm seeing some kind of conspiracy here, but glad to say it worked it in my favour as my dish once again trumped theirs. They liked the consistency of the pastry, flaky without being too oily but weren't sold on the flavour. I on the other hand decided to demonstrate my delight for my fishy brothy which arrived in the cutest little crock pot by doing what my friend does and sing to my food. It began as tastefully tangy, but about four spoons in the cidery-vinegar-lemon taste became a bit too much and there was nothing to take of the edge, even with a huge dollop of what felt like instant mash with a few dried herbs thrown in for good measure. I personally like mash with skin on but I guess I can't expect that at restaurants.

We had a delightful time contemplating whether we could be as demanding as the customers that had been on a recent show of F word where they had local restaurants competing about food, but decided we didn't have the cojones to do this. However our collective cojones were forced to grow when after our desserts (me and the boy sticky toffee pud, nice with a bitter bite and friend having Treacle tart with blood orange syrup and vanilla ice cream - she was disappointed, the tart was too dry and the syrup ice cream mixture was not sufficient to hydrate the dessert) we waited 25 mins for a green tea and americano. We had to ask two separate waiters twice for the items but to their credit, the manager didn't charge us for these and also took off the service charge and apologised, explaining that they were short staffed and didn't expect so much custom.

It was Thursday night and we were left a little disappointed. The portions were a good size and the service though at times slow was made up for by the lovely manager. Flavoursome it was not but cos its Gordon, I want to give it another try perhaps not with the top table offer and see if there's any difference.

Will post again, perhaps something medical related, until then adios...