Review: The Rattle Owl, York

Hey, front of house folks. If you have a table of braying, cackling, bellowing morons dining in your restaurant then I totally understand that there’s not much you can do about it. The other tables seated nearby trying to enjoy a friendly Sunday lunch really do just have to put up with the raucous, ear-shattering, bonhomie of the sextet of swine gurgling their way through several bottles of wine in close proximity. But it’s really, really hard to enjoy the deliciously cooked food at all. So what you could do is just maybe quietly show some sympathy. An apologetic wince, or maybe just a quiet “sorry about that” when you bring our bill. It would be a nice gesture.

We found an app on the iPhone that measures volume. Apparently that table generated the average volume of “alarm clock” rising at times to “power tool”. Given that, maybe it would have been worth a member of staff, perhaps a manager, telling them to SHUT THE BLOODY F*CK UP AND LET OUR OTHER GUESTS DINE IN PEACE, YOU PACK OF BRAYING ASSHOLES!

Then again, they were ordering an awful lot of wine. And we know how the markup on that goes. : )

So let me try and push the noise to one side and review the rest of the experience. The Rattle Owl is a nice looking restaurant with a long, thin dining room and an art deco vibe. Our waiter at Le Cochon Aveugle recommended their Sunday lunch, and that was recommendation enough for us.

I tried a white onion soup to start, with goat curd and char-grilled silverskin onion. This was nice but the soup was rather over-salted. Maureen’s smoked salmon was good. But of course roast beef was the main event. Beautiful bit of beef, very well treated, meltingly good. The Yorkie was huge and puffy but burnt a little too brown. Fine veggies, including a well braised leek and excellent roasties. Gravy was decadent, but oddly distributed: Maureen’s beef was bathing in it, mine only sprinkled on. Wines by the glass were reasonably priced and good.

Sunday lunch was £21 for 2 courses and I’d say that’s about square value. You’d be very lucky to stumble on a roast as good as this by chance, though I can’t say it was epic. And of course it’s also hard to disentangle the effect of six raucous tossers on my enjoyment of the food. C’est la vie.