newcastlecentric

The Lounge, opposite Central Station, is a jack of many trades.

It’s a bar for the after-work crowd in the evenings, a cafe bar by day and moonlights as a tacky meat market at weekends, where downstairs in the basement you may find topless dancers on a match day, or the grab-a-granny crowd on Friday and Saturday night, bopping away to horrendously cheesy music.

Tackiness aside, during the day the lounge is a perfectly civilised place to go for a bite to eat. Each table has a mini TV at it, so you can catch the latest on Sky Sports (if you’re so inclined), and the music helps to lift your mood if you’re taking a well deserved lunch break from work – as long as you’re open to the offerings of the Now albums and can appreciate small doses of pop chart.

We chose The Lounge because of their new menu promotion called Mix & Mash. It offers a choice of good ol’ British fodder, from doorstep sandwiches, fish pie and steak and ale pie to fish and chips or any two of numerous flavoured sausages; all served with your choice from four types of mashed potatoes and a selection of gravies.

Newcastlecentric popped along with a friend and we both chose the steak and ale pie, for fear of food envy. We were given the option of either mustard mash, cheesy mash, plain mash or mint mash, alongside the choice of onion gravy, mint gravy or good ol’ plain gravy. We went with mustard mash and no gravy with our pie, whilst our friend chose the cheesy mash, so we could compare.

On arrival, the steak and ale pie had the appearance of a giant pork pie. The pastry was thick, short crust pastry, browned to perfection. On slicing it open to see if we’d be disappointed by the lack of filling inside, we were both delighted to find our pies were filled to the brim.

The steak melted in your mouth, the ale gravy inside was rich and tasty and there was a slight twist as the chef had used whole silverskin onions and mushrooms, adding texture and flavour.

Both the cheesy and mustard mash didn’t disappoint either - although they were served with an unnecessarily giant sprig (more like a bush) of rosemary poking out, as though trying to posh up a dish that was supposed to say home cooked like your Gran used to make. We don’t remember our Gran decorating her home cooking with a herbaceous border.

We were left comfortably stuffed - if you need some good old comfort food, The Lounge’s Mix & Mash menu will sort you out for around £6.

Photo by StrudelMonkey on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

We’re not anti-London, not in the slightest, but the arrogant attitude of folk in our nation’s capital is sometimes unpalatable.

The perfect example awaits you at Monument Metro station this very day. It’s a poster for Primula cheese. Nothing wrong with that, unless you’re lactose intolerant.

It’s a terrible ad for so many reasons, but then most ads are. Why would you want to buy this particular brand? Because it tastes good? No. Because you can climb up a mountain without having to hold it? Yes. Excellent.

The image portrayed is of a woman dangling from a sheer rock face, with a tube of her favourite Primula flavoured cheese (it comes in three fragrances, olfactory fans) attached to her harness.

The message is seemingly that tubal delivery is vastly superior to your traditional solid cheese state, because it’s more convenient to have about your person when a cheese-related disaster strikes.

Why does the climber need it, exactly? She doesn’t appear to have taken a sandwich with her, which seems entirely logical given that anyone whose life hangs by a collection of threads is more likely to need a toilet than a light lunch.

And if she did have a sandwich with her, why not simply add the cheese during preparation, before climbing the mountain?

It doesn’t make any sense, yet our real gripe with this high concept, low IQ advertisement is the strapline:

TAKE THE TUBE - ANYWHERE

Do you see? “Unlike the tube train I’m about to catch,” you think to yourself as you walk by, “the tube containing my favourite cheese can go anywhere! Mmm, this convoluted juxtaposition has left me ravenous for synthetic diary-based delights.”

Except this isn’t London and Monument isn’t a tube station.

It’s barely worth getting upset about. Of course most folk using a Metro are aware of the London Underground. But as advertising goes, it’s lazy. Sloppy. Vaguely insulting.

From our collective experience in advertising (which is, rather worryingly, quite extensive), we’re quite sure the sum thought put into this by the client’s media buyer will have been: “They have underground public transport. That’s just like the Tube! Next!”

If you work in advertising, as a creative or a media buyer, make sure that as challenging as it is to dazzle consumers with the mundane, you don’t alienate them through apathy or ignorance. One size doesn’t fit all.

We’re sticking to Diarylea. We’ll eat it till the cows come home. Now there’s an advert.