Welcome back!

I’m going to level with you, Rotherham is hardly a foodie hotspot but today’s review is a lovely, family friendly Anglo-Italian place, plus the news and some other stuff as usual.

I’m just going to put it out there at the top. This isn’t going to be an especially long review.

It’s very hard to pick fault with the type of restaurant W¹ is.

The inside is sleek and well decorated, it’s a place you could quite easily take a new date and feel like you were somewhere cool and happening, drinking wine or cocktails² at the bar while you wait for your table before sharing some olives and antipasti and then ordering something impressive like a sea food linguine overflowing with fresh shellfish.

But it’s also got the type of homely, familiar, Anglo-Italian menu that makes it perfect for something like a family birthday.

The type of place you could take everyone you know and someone would find something they like. Pizza, pasta, steak, fish, chicken in a creamy sauce. These are the types of crowd pleasing dishes even your mildly xenophobic grandparents won’t turn their nose up at.

They’re not reinventing the wheel, they’re not even really perfecting the wheel, it’s just good, classic, Italian dishes done well, in a nice setting.

I ordered a calzone, the dough was soft and pillowy and it came packed with toppings and served with a generous dipping pot of Bolognese.

My mum ordered the seafood ravioli and got a lovely looking plate of pasta and scallops and mussels.

My wife ordered Pollo Montanara, a succulent chicken breast flattened and cooked perfectly in a creamy pancetta and mushroom sauce.

The fries were salty and delicious.

The garlic bread was a good fresh dough topped with a puncy garlic butter and gooey mozarella

For dessert the tiramisu was a real standout. As you’d expect from this kind of place. But nobody had complaints about any of the desserts, profiteroles absolutely caked in chocolate, an Affogata made with silky vanilla gelato. It’s good stuff.

And that’s it really. It’s good. Real good. And the locals know it because if you want to come here you better book in advance.

Just a side on the plan really or lack thereof. I’ve decided to park all the social media and logo and any further advancements in everything outside the writing until I’m confident I can competently produce one of these week in and week out.

It turns out when you work full time and have commitments and stuff it’s not always easy to find food worth writing about. I’d love to drive an hour to North Yorkshire to try some little fancy gastro pub every weekend but life often gets in the way.

But I keep plugging on anyway. Today’s Main maybe wasn’t the most interesting thing I’ve ever written about but it was worth writing about all the same. Good food is good food.

If you want to support my endeavours, how about a new 65” TV?

We watched Woman of the Hour, the new Anna Kendrick film on Netflix last night. I’d recommend it.

Kendrick, who also directs, feels like she’s trying to say something about Hollywood by contrasting the central plot - an out of work actress goes on reality show The Dating Game where she meets a real life serial killer - with interspersions of the violent murders the man has committed previously. It’s based on a true story, and a scary one.

It won’t change your life but it’s a solid film I’m glad I watched. And it’s a cool 90 minutes. More films need to be 90 minutes long.

Short and sweet this week. I’ll be back next time. Stay safe.

Chris