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This review relates to the previous restaurant at this location, What's Cooking. Little has changed since then (though if anyone cares to offer a more recent review we'd be most grateful.
From where I sat I could see four posters fixed to the wall. They were vintage posters, put in place to give the room the ambience of a bygone time. This is what they were: The Godfather, The Clash (London Calling), Star Wars and Blondie. Google the release of each of these, average them out, and the date you get will be 22 March 1977. I know, because I have done it.
This places us bang in the middle of the American nostalgia boom that fired the public appetite through most of the seventies. Which is near enough exactly when the first restaurant in the long running What's Cooking chain opened in Heswall. In fact its vintage is such that that this is actually the second What's Cooking to have set up shop in Chester. And where others (Fatty Arbuckle's, Great American Disaster) have come and gone and faded from our memories, What's Cooking has kept its position as a local favourite.
The current incarnation is a smallish establishment situated on the Watergate Street Rows. There are rooms on two levels - an upstairs bar accomodates some tables - but the total capacity is little more than thirty places. The menu is a walk through pretty much every American genre from sea to shining sea: ribs, burgers, pizza, burritos, fajitas, steaks, sundaes. There is a strong pitch for the kids' party market and it is just the kind of place that kids love.
Portions tend to the generous. I was expecting maybe four ribs for my starter, but a bone count as I wiped my fingers at the end of the first course produced a tally of no less than ten. The menu promised the meat would fall off the bone and this is quite literally what it did. I had little difficulty polishing these off, though it would have been even less difficult if the remarkable barbecue sauce that covered them had been applied either prior to cooking or, indeed, not at all.
The signature Fried Chicken dish was also a belt-stretcher. Loads of fries, a proper salad of lettuce and tomato (with none of that oily dressing you get in more tony restaurants) and a little rock pile of deep fried poultry bits. I can tell you that I couldn't have eaten any more if they paid me.
I drank a bottle of Dos Equis by way of an aperitif. Billed as a Speciality Beer (ask for details), this dark beer with its peculiar tang exemplified the problems inherent in trying to source a native, yet typical, American brew (other, named, beers came from Mexico, Italy and India). There is a very short wine list and it is advisable to shun the red in favour of the whites, whose temperature is low enough to mask any shortfall in quality.
Business is brisk, all day long. The service is delightful and the clientele is mostly of an age to appreciate the nostalgia ride. At fifty quid for two including wine it wouldn't be right to call this cheap, but special deals for kids can make a family visit reasonably pocket-friendly.
Thirty years is a long time to run with a theme. But when it works as well as this, why change it? False memories delude our sentimental heads. Who now would swap these vibrant times for the shabby unchic of the nineteen seventies? Few: and after all it's impossible. But What's Cooking lets us pretend.
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