Christmas Dinners

It must nearly be Christmas and the office festive dinners are in full swing. As ever there always seems to be a clash with everything happening at the same time. Yesterday was no exception and I had an admin team Christmas lunch at the university and a Psychology Department Christmas dinner in the evening.

I wasn’t going to go to the lunch event having already booked the dinner for the evening, however the idea of a secret Santa convinced me and I went along, promising myself I’d only have a starter and save the big eating for the evening. Needless to say, all the best plans don’t always work out that way and by lunchtime I was really hungry and the sight of the starters, Christmas carvery and puddings was too much and I ended up having the full 3 course meal. It was all really tasty and I really couldn’t have asked for anything better. And there was plenty of it. The room was full and had a really nice atmosphere and the serving staff were nice and cheerful. And at £12.50 per head you really couldn’t ask for much more. The secret Santa also went well and hopefully everyone got something they liked. It can be a gamble with a £5 limit but there were some really lovely gifts. I got a musical Christmas tree box of biscuits which I really like.

We have been organising the department christmas dinner for several weeks and it is always difficult to find somewhere that everyone is happy to go to and somewhere that has availability and space for a large group. After a bit of debate on date and location we settled for the Glengower on the seafront in Aberystwyth. It does have good reviews and most people say the food is pretty good  They were a little tricky to sort the booking out with and needed a £10 per head deposit to confirm the booking but said we could add people to the booking if we needed to. However when we did go to do this they lost our original booking and didn’t seem too pleased we were changing things. As ever at this time of year several people have been struck down by illness, other commitments etc which did result in a few phone calls backwards and forwards on the day of the booking. The Glengower insisted that any bookings cancelled on the day were to be paid for in full so this also meant a bit of ringing around to try and fill places and in the end we just had one drop out from the 18 people booked. At £25 per head this was a good booking for them but they still insisted that the meal for the person not attending would need to be paid for in full. We did get them to bring the food out though so some people managed to share a bit extra of everything.

Glengower dinner

The food was OK – but certainly not as nice as the lunch roast dinner we’d had and the portion sizes were very small but we did talk them into bringing out more vegetables for all of us. The seating arrangements were a little weird as well. They split our group up on opposites sides of the room so we ended up as 2 separate groups and the general feel just wasn’t as welcoming as I would expect for this type of thing.

Never mind, I’d certainly had a good feed over the whole day. I just have to go and do it all again next week when Alan has his departmental meal in the same place.

Tags: Christmasdining out