After great hype and exposure from Gordon Ramsey’s TV Nightmares and comments from colleagues, what else could we do but go and check it out? Particularly given that as the official partner restaurant of the Sheffield Theatres Spring Season, it has a (very) tenuous theatre link.

To summarise the tv programme, it’s an awesome chef (who’s language is even more colourful that Gordon’s), a slightly camp owner, who wishes he was running a club and isn’t too hot at running the front of house, and his long suffering girlfriend.

I was therefore unsurprised when it took around an hour and a half to get our starters - but the ambiance and company were good, so it wasn’t a problem.

It was a little disappointing that the waitress (the girlfriend) painstakingly wrote down the details of our order in longhand - particularly after Gordon had painstakingly explained how you can shorten each dish to just a letter or two.

Strangely none of us ordered the “special” - a vegetable pieat £12. This was leftovers from pie night, four days ago, and when fresh it had only cost £8.50. 

It was also a little disappointing that we had to ask for the wine menu back after we’d ordered our food - how else are you supposed to find a wine that complements your meal?

But my choices - garlic prawns and tomatoes, followed by steak - sounded good. Ask! do a really wonderful prawn and tomato starter. Lots of yummy prawns in tomato sauce, with a nice rocket and parmesan salad and garlic bread to dip in the sauce. Silversmiths have large prawns, but no bread or salad, and the dish is overpowered by the very strong salty garlic butter. The rest of the party had barley soup - which looked like a thin vegetable soup, and again didn’t come with any bread.

The steak was inedible in parts due to gristle, but the chips it came with were nice. Again the dish was completely overpowered by the salt content of the garlic butter.   

My final gripe would be that the cheeseboard listing in the menu explaine d in great detail the sourcing of the chutney, but despite three people in our party choosing the cheese, no-one thought it might be interesting for us to know what the cheeses actually were.

I’d give Silversmiths another go - as I’m sure alternatives on the menu must have a lower salt content. But I wasn’t overly impressed by the first visit.

If you like the sound of this: try drinking salt water

1 Comment »

1. 

   Having been there on a girl’s night out we are so disappointed and upset. We found the food ok but overrated and overpriced and didn’t like the service, my girlfriends felt pressured to order more drinks and the staff kept coming back asking us if we wanted more drinks so it was uncomfortable. We won’t be going back. Emailed them about this and no response to both my emails, so that is why I am posting.

   Comment by Rachel Walker — April 13, 2009 @ 2:31 pm

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