• Added: 13th of April 2008
• Area: Manchester
• Category: Bars and Pubs

Manchester M34 5HD

manchesterguyuk said
You'll soon discover why you're the only one there
There's naught like tradition and nothing is more traditionally British than a Sunday roast with all the trimmings. Sadly, however, the roast AND the trimmings are something which escape the unwitting diners at The Boundary, Guide Bridge, Audenshaw. And so it was that I came to leave this establishment incredibly unfulfilled and £35 lighter.

A popular dish with old folk and single men alike, 'boil-in-the-bag' dinners are the order of the day at The Boundary. The 'roast beef' I ordered arrived after an hour of waiting (despite the fact that we were the only people in the entire restaurant) swimming in the water it had obviously been 'broiled' in and attahced to more fat than there was beef. Undeterred by roast meat unfit for your average school dinner, however, I pushed it aside to start on what else was sloshed haphazardly onto my plate.

To say the rest of the food was terrible would be a huge understatement. Let's be honest, I'm not a gourmet, but at £8.95 a time I expect a little more than instant mashed potato with my boil in a bag beef. Add to this the meagre two roasted new potatos (and I use the word new loosely as they had obviously been warmed up), the under cooked carrots and the over cooked green beans and you have a recipe for one largely un-touched Sunday roast.

But what of the other things on the menu?

The Sunday menu is that small that during my hour at the pub the one person I did see left the restaurant after five minutes because none of the four dishes they had on offer tickled his fancy. The two people I was with ordered Tuna Steak (burnt to cinders and also buried beneath instant mashed potato and swimming in the water from the over cooked green beans) and roast minted lamb (exactly the same boiled school fare I experienced with the beef).

Combined with the fact that staff actually became confrontational when told that the food was more fat than meat and 'no, everything was not ok with our meals' and I found myself extremely eager to allow the place to return to it's previous state of having no customers whatsoever.

You could argue that entering the one pub in the area whose carpark did not contain a single car on a Sunday afternoon was warning enough but, having paid my £35 for a meal I did not eat and receiving a shrugged 'well, that's just what you think' from the bar staff, I left feeling I'd been had.

On the upside, if you don't drive it is incredibly close to Guide Bridge train station. Although so is The Queens Arms, which in my experience is one of the best carverys in the area.

In a word? Avoid.