Hoosegow Charcoal Restaurant
Hoosegow: (n) a prison.
I wasn't sure why a restaurant would be named "hoosegow", or whether there was some other meaning of "hoosegow".
I have discovered that this restaurant is, indeed, prison-themed. I'm sitting next to a large ornamental metal grille.
The room has a grey floor, dingy lighting, and a black-brown-red colour scheme. Anyone not in the 1% of the population who know what a "hoosegow" is would not see any "prison" here. They'd be more likely to see a photographic dark room, a lunchroom at a concrete plant, or a level from the computer game "Doom".
This babaganoush is a bit unusual. There's extra lemon or mint in it, and it's spicy.
The filo pastry stick doesn't use up much of the babaganoush.
Odd.
Rustic barbeque (sic) sauce, fat chips.
Everything on the menu contains chilli, as you'd expect in a prison, or is vegetarian. Unless you're an explicitly spicy restaurant, having no non-spicy meat dishes is a bit poor.
The meat here is juicy and nicely cooked, but it's matched with what the French might call "barbecue sauce with vinegar added". This very inelegant taste makes this a pretty average dish.
The "fat chips" unsurprisingly, turn out to be entirely regular chips, but with increased dimensions. I might as well dip them in the barbecue sauce.
Strawberry coulis, Persian fairy floss, double cream.
The tart is very crispy, and its innards have a mild lemon tang.
The problem here is the other components of the dish. They just don't add anything. The very mild strawberry coulis is like strawberry water, and the double cream just disappears into the lemon tart filling.
The Persian fairy floss had such a mild flavour that I couldn't taste it before it dissolved in my mouth. :(
Time to go and pay the bill, then I'm gonna shank someone, and dig through the wall with my dessert spoon!