Hart failure

When I saw in Sydney’s food guide that Harts Pub in Sydney’s historical Rocks precinct was serving Ploughman’s Lunch, I thought 'Bewdy... '

I went with a mate, who will probably never trust me to pick a pub for lunch again. The Ploughman's was a disappointment

It’s pricey

When I opened their menu, the hairs on the back of my neck fell limp; this place is $8-10 a plate more expensive than their competitors nearby.

On this visit, Harts Pub was out of kilter with other pubs in the district, both in cost and value.

Their Ploughman’s Lunch was listed under the heading “Mates Plates”.

Mates plates – I imagined these were plates you can share generously with a friend. At $24 for Mates Plate Ploughman’s, the price suggested we would have a real tuck-in for two. Nearby ‘The Australian’ Hotel sells a shared plate for $14, and there’s more on that plate than two grown men can eat comfortably.

Instead, for their portion control at Harts Pub, the mates they have in mind would be a sparrow and a church mouse.

The service was as shy as the lunch.

When we ordered our Ploughman’s Lunch at Harts Pub only two other tables were already occupied in the bar. I can't explain the dealy. By the time our plate was slapped down, we had finished the first drink and were starting to eat their paper menu.

I could barely believe my eyes. There was so little food on the plate. These guys may have never been ploughing, but that’s no excuse not to guess the size of a ploughman’s hunger for real food. This was a concept of a Ploughman's lunch, not the full quid.

What we were served as a Mates Plate PloughMan’s Lunch would have caused a walkoff in any farmer’s field. A small piece of a single type of cheese. A couple of pickled onions. A finger bowl of gherkins. A few lettuce leaves. A feint taste of prosciuto. Six small slices of salami, about the size of a 20 cent piece, cut thin enough to see through. A single small roll that would leave a fashion model hungry. How can two mates be satisfied with that?

This is a tourist area, so we can expect to be squeezed, but not to this extent. This was all bottled and bought food,. The only work the chef had to do was slice the salami and warm the bread crumbs. There's no visible reason why it took so long to deliver, and cost so much

A simple search on Google should have alerted them to the genuine makings of a client-pleasing pub’s Ploughman’s Lunch.

After we two mates had fought to get a share of this small meal, I went, like Oliver, to the bar to ask ‘Please sir, can we have more bread’. This request took a long phone call to management to get approval. Another luncher standing in the queue behind me told me he also had had to ask for more.

I ordered a wine. I know this is a beer pub, but in Sydney there’s no excuse for any pub in the city to be ignorant of good wine service. After the bar staff had sniffed the neck of the bottle of already opened house wine, twice, to see if it had turned, she had to re-poor the liquid into other glasses, twice, before we found a glass that was clean.

When our lunch was served, the plate was slammed onto the table as the waiter ran past. It was so light, it bounced. I had to call the waiter back for side plates and cutlery.

It hadn't take long for us to scoff the mate’s plate. And the wait for extra bread meant we were getting desperate for food. Just as we were about to leave, another small roll was dumped on the table without a word.

The slogan on their web site is “So original it’s criminal”. Our lunch was almost ‘original’ in that sense.

After this paltry lunch at Harts Pub we went a block down the road to a better known packed pub, to satisfy the hunger pangs with another shared plate, , , for $10 less.