Having lived in Birmingham, my friend and I have enjoyed our fair share of delicious curries. We’ve also had a couple that resemble cat sick. The Gourmet Gannet provides the novel experience of a curry that not only looks like vomit, it smells like it, too. At least, we presumed the lukewarm plate of watery yet gloopy slop – a true scientific marvel! – was the curry my friend had requested. The waiter had previously tried to force a steak on her, insisting that my vegetarian companion had ordered it. ‘You must have got confused,’ he kindly suggested, scarpering away leaving the steak on the table. No, good sir, you’re the one confused if you think we’re accepting a charred lump of burnt shoe instead of the food we asked for. Poor chap, the whole debacle shook him up so badly that when he brought the alleged curry, he fumbled his grip and tipped the accompanying plate of undercooked rice into my friend’s lap. Which, no, was not cleaned up or replaced. Not that she wanted it to be, given that the scattered grains carried a distinctive whiff of rancid fish.

But on to my food, arriving a mere seventeen minutes after the curry. I was tempted to ask if we could have the steak back. How difficult is it to create an inedible burger? Well, the Gourmet Gannet certainly rose to the challenge. Again, this left me questioning everything I knew about the science of matter, being both rubbery, gristly and mushy all at the same time. At fifteen quid, I wasn’t expecting Michelin star food. I was, however, hoping for something no worse than Ritzy’s Saturday night burger van. You won’t be surprised to hear that the chips were burnt on the outside, raw in the middle, and devoid of seasoning, or that the burger bun was both stale and soggy. I can’t review the accompanying ‘garden salad’, because I didn’t want to deprive the slug of his single lettuce leaf and shrivelled slice of cucumber. He seemed to be enjoying them far more than I would have.

When I asked for tomato ketchup in an attempt to render the burger at least slightly edible, I was told, ‘We’re not that sort of establishment.’ That makes sense, considering flavour of any sort seemed to be not their sort of thing. either. I won’t bore you with the dirty cutlery or the sticky, dog-eared menus. Neither will I expound on the hairs stuck to the table, or the dead flies in the ladies’ loo. I won’t blather on about the diners next to us, whose beef and onion pie looked as though it had been dropped on the floor and scooped back up again, nor how when they complained the waiter told them that it ‘won’t make no difference to the taste’. Because that’s their review to give, not mine.

But I will tell you that both my friend and I invented a game called ‘grubby waiter bingo’, including points for things like nose picking, crotch scratching and coughing on the food, and that both of us got a full house before the bill arrived. I tell you this, because it’s not a matter of opinion, as the manager helpfully explained was the reason we disliked the food, but of protecting the health and happiness of the good citizens of Windermere. Gourmet? I don’t think so. A Gannet running the kitchen? That might be an improvement.