Unspoiled Brats

After the club last night, we wandered down Elgin Street to a birthday party at Ontourage, which may be a spelling mistake, or may be an intentional piece of wordplay, or possibly both. Within the bar were several of our friends, including the lady who has agreed to act the part of the femme fatale in my rabbit epic. I couldn't face the idea of tacking straight into a gale of booze, so I detoured to the adjacent establishment, Brat.

Brat is an upmarket hot-dog joint. This does seem like a ridiculous idea and one doomed to failure, but I was completely charmed by it. Unlike the horrendous over priced hot dog joint in London's Soho (where that seemed to be the whole concept - flog over priced, horrendous hot dogs to people) Brat is more like a distillation of all that's good about Holland and Germany. Well, it's high-class sausages and beer, there's no BMWs or thumpin' techno involved.

Year of Eating Differently (110): The Gourmet Hotdog Company, Berwick Street

Possibly we are now approaching the End of Days. Strange prophets and harbingers of doom will walk our streets, or set up incredibly overpriced joints selling nothing but hotdogs. Not only that, but hotdog establishments with ludicrous amounts of packaging (separate cardboard containers for salad that you can take to the till and have passed down to the cooking staff to add to your hotdog), three 28" flat screen televisions above the cooking area, complete with animations to display the menu options, and at least 6 members of staff, half of which seem to be doing nothing apart from stand there behind the racks of gently revolving sausages, and two blokes (possibly the owners) standing beside them, wondering whether they really should have spunked their life savings on this enterprise.

I give it two months; if it's still going after that it will be less capable of trading on the novelty value, and they'll probably have had the televisions repossessed. The trouble is, whilst there's clearly a market for upmarket burgers that you can treat as a full meal, a hotdog on its own is not a convincing proposition unless it's three in the morning and you're ripped on lager, in which case you're probably still likely to blanche at paying about a fiver for a tube of reconstituted meat.

After all that, my hotdog wasn't bad; not too bland, but nothing to write home about either. Very bright colours. Five minutes after I'd eaten it I couldn't remember a thing about it, so all that marketing and packaging is possibly for naught. Oh, and the money spent on fitting the place out didn't extend to a good design for the mustard dispensers. How bad is that?