Every weekend or so, my lovely father and I go for lunch at Perkins to catch up on the week’s events. It’s always nice to spend an hour or two with my dad, especially on a lovely day like today. Perkins isn’t known for being overly posh; it’s cheap, family-friendly comfort food – today’s visit, however, was probably our last.

I decided to get a “Farmer’s Market” salad – full of spinach, candied pecans, strawberries, feta cheese… it sounded delightful. Until I went to take my second bite, and half a strawberry covered in a slightly unwelcoming skin of grey-green mold sat on the end of my fork. Our waiter was mortified, and proceeded to get the manager, who instead of taking the opportunity to apologise, arrived red, flustered, and clearly panicked. She brought back another salad, this time a Caesar (I’d since lost my cravings for fruit)… which was full of half-brown lettuce, and a lovely hair on top. I decided my dad (the man who’d had Poulin’s in over the weekend for mice and told them that for $300, he “expected their heads on little spikes set up on the front lawn to scare off all their mates”) would be better than I would at dealing with the situation; he did, and we didn’t get charged, and left with a $25 gift voucher… although why we’d want to go back, I’m not entirely sure…

Makes you think, though, doesn’t it? With Gordon Ramsay on his fifth series of Kitchen Nightmares, a story in the local paper about several of the city’s restaurants being closed down for sub-standard food hygiene, along with the recent Sizzling Wok incident, it kind of makes you wonder what really goes on behind the scenes…