The Inconvenient Mule

A new café has recently opened on Ricky High Street, adding another option to lunching options. We already have Cinnamon Square and Brown Sugar established as firm lunch time favourites on the High Street, with Neros for coffee and snacks and Cafe in the Park at the Aquadrome. So how does this latest contender fare against the existing choices?

The Fat Aubergine makes much of its shakes and smoothies. There’s a bewildering variety, although Brown Sugar already offers a strong selection. As with Brown Sugar there are several menus around which makes it trickier to make a choice than perhaps it should. We both intended to have dairy free options and went for fruit smoothies and shakes, however missing the small print from each menu ended up with yoghurt and a milk shake respectively! They were tasty enough, but you don’t necessarily want to have to spend a good deal of time reading to make a simple choice.

We were more disappointed by the food, which is already prepared and not made to order as in Cinnamon Square or Brown Sugar. This meant that some of the choices were already sold out, and we felt there were relatively few fresh options available; something the competition does well.

On the whole, although it’s nice to see new businesses on the High Street, we didn’t feel Fat Aubergine offered anything that wasn’t already available from other cafés. It’s not the easiest of markets either, as Cinnamon Square uses its award winning homemade breads and is better than ever in its recently expanded form, while Brown Sugar’s deli format offers a superior selection of fresh food. For the moment at least we’re likely to stay with our current regular favourites for weekend lunches.

As it’s our first Christmas in Rickmansworth we decided to make the most of the local seasonal events. This involves the customary Christmas lights switch on which is combined with a Victorian Evening. This is a nice community event with stalls from local organisations, businesses and rides for the kids. Here’s a selection of snaps from the evening:

Mulled wine available in exchange for a donation to charity

Entertainment and crowds

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Over the few weeks we’ve lived in Rickmansworth I’ve been in search of a decent Sunday Lunch. So far I’ve tried two of the swankier, but nevertheless reasonably priced pubs in the area in my search.

The Feathers, Church Street, Rickmansworth

Open just four months in its current incarnation, the Feathers is probably my favourite hostelry in central Ricky. The pub is a part of oldest Rickmansworth and has the fine stone and wooden beam clad interior you’d hope for. The Feathers has been given a modern refurbishment, giving a comfortable mix of dining, drinking and outdoor areas in very pleasing surrounds. The service is good, with the staff clearly having been training to ensure guests enjoy the new venture. The Feathers, price-wise and in terms of appearance, places itself at the classier end of the pub food spectrum while not straying into Gastropub territory.

The Sunday Roast is £9, which to my mind is mid-to-high for a non-Gastropub. Unfortunately the Sunday Roast I had last weekend was distinctly mediocre. The beef was not at all generous in quality and was clearly of the ‘been sitting there for sometime and overdone’ variety. The trimmings were fine but of a similar unremarkable quality and quantity. It’s the quality you might expect at Wetherspoons but which you’d only expect to pay similarly £5 for.

This is, I feel, where The Feathers may have trouble in terms of retaining food custom, as I love my Sunday Roasts but I certainly wouldn’t rush back for this one. When you have a new venture and you’re pricing and presenting yourselves as being reasonably well presented and classy, the whole product needs to delivery to estabish a customer base and here it simply didn’t. Others around us were also unhappy with their food; a table who ordered burgers and had requested how well it was cooked along with expecting the cheddar topping and potato wedges promised in the menu instead received standard well-done burger with a processed cheese slice and what can only be called a stingey number of standard chips. Again, if you’re promising quality in the menu the product has to deliver.

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The blog has been unusually quiet in recent weeks, however with good reason, as the Mule has been on the move. While remaining in the heart of Metro-land, we’ve ventured further up the Metropolitan line, beyond the bounds of Greater London and into the Hertfordshire countryside. In a search of that elusive combination of rural idyll and urban convenience at a price that’s affordable we’ve ended up in Rickmansworth. A smallish town of some 14,000 or so, it’s nevertheless home to the district council, has a decent selection of shops and eateries, good connections to London while being just 3 miles from the megastore shopping of Watford. Being beyond the London sprawl the countryside is on the doorstep, in the form of lakes, rivers and the Grand Union canal.

We’re hoping it will suit us nicely. It’s true that while Rickmansworth lacks something of the charm and fancy restaurants of Pinner, there’s a strong population of young professionals and we’ll not object to decent, reasonably priced meals out plus a couple of fine old pubs given a modern twist.

Regular visitors to the blog will know that the Mule is fond of snickets; those often little know alleys and paths linking streets. Metro-land is prime territory for snickets, perhaps owing to the preponderance of inter-war housing. Rickmansworth is no exception and we quickly discovered a handy snicket for accessing Waitrose:

Rickmansworth snicket to Waitrose

We’re still very much in the early stages of exploring the area, however, and we’d much appreciate any local recommendations of eateries, hostelries, shops, services, walks, entertainment etc.

More from Dara Towers and Rickmansworth to follow!

Well, it’s moving day tomorrow and we’re off to Dara Towers in Rickmansworth. At 8am tomorrow the Aussie Man with a Van team will be round to pack everything up and cart it up two or three flights of stairs at the other end. Full packing is the best thing since sliced cheese.

We’ve had a tough week painting the new flat ready for occupation. I had a crazy fool idea to paint three of the walls in the living room with stripes in the manner of the decor at Delisserie in Hatch End (one finds inspiration in the strangest of places). While Dan and his parents attended to the rest of the flat (three shades of coffee in the bedroom, green hall and bathroom), masking tape and careful edges were my territory for three days. Provided you use decent masking tape (the blue stuff from Homebase is good) and have a reasonably steady hand for the touching-up, it’s not too difficult.

It’s a bit sad to be leaving Pinner with its snickets and strange assortment of people, but semi-rural Ricky awaits with the promise of lakes and a lovely Waitrose!

This weekend sees the Rickmansworth Canal Festival; two days of music, activities, stalls, rides and dozens of canal boats. We went along on the Saturday to see what was going on. It’s an impressive event for a town of some 14,000 and the festival was suitably heaving with people. It was fine to see many local groups present and greater range and variety of stalls than normal present as these type of events. Although there was a period stand with an archery demonstration we would have fancied the chance to have a go ourselves, or other traditional fare such as a coconut shy. Still, those with a destructive streak could have had a go on the crockery smashing stall, pictured below. The festival certainly provided a good day’s entertainment for us and had we chosen we could have stayed late into the evening with a number of music stages and beer tent to provide entertainment.

Here are some highlights of our day at the festival, mostly from around the canal area, which offers a feast of sights, scenes and shapes for the camera lens (click thumbnail to view full-size photo):

Other bloggers have also been talking about the festival:

• Lazy Days canal boat blog
• Gig photographer (seems there was a power issue with the evening’s entertainment)

Making the most of the fine, summer-like weather yesterday we headed over the border to Hertfordshire for a walk along a stretch of the Chess Valley. We began at Chorleywood station, walking north through Chorleywood House Park to the river and then roughly following the river past the M25 to Rickmansworth, where we picked up the tube home.

Chorleywood houses

Chorleywood is a compact place; one of the relatively small settlements on the farther flung reaches of the Metropolitan line which, through the vision on the railway’s founders has nevertheless a station to its name, and so became a popular, yet rural, commuting location. We began by exploring Chorleywood, heading south of the station to the high street. It was functional and featured some nice delis, cafes and shops.

Chorleywood Common

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We’ve finally taken the plunge and bought a new pad of loveliness. Yes, bought. Despite these times of financial horror, we’ve taken advantage of the lowest interest rates since 1694 and shall be moving to Rickmansworth (known locally and affectionately as ‘Ricky’) as soon as we get everything sorted.

The search for our new flat took up three days last week, which is probably as speedy as you’re likely to get. We saw eight properties – four flats, three houses and a maisonette – so we had a pretty good idea of what we could get for our money. Some of these places were, er, interesting, to say the least. Let it never be said that we shunned the prospect of viewing the maisonette with the astroturf garden or the flat that could’ve been a set for Life on Mars. One of the flats – the only one with a balcony, albeit north-facing – was pretty lovely, but was sold the day after we viewed it. One of the others had huge ceilings and loads of space, but was a 25-minute walk from the station. The latter was a total lads’ pad. Copies of ‘Nuts’ and smelly ski gear all over the place! The biggest house had nice wooden floors, fireplaces, a decent kitchen and a garden – but the front room opened straight out onto the road and there was a pub carpark next door (nice pub, though).

Tiresome.

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