newcastlecentric

In the hunt for a lunchtime special that would ensure we didn’t have to eat again that day, while at the same time pacifying the tight-fisted amongst us, we landed at a restaurant familiar to most.

Marco Polo has been around forever and every time we return, the labyrinth of floors and rooms seems to creep further through the buildings of Dean Street. In its current incarnation, purple walls frame exposed brickwork, varnished wood cosys up to cream leather booths. It’s all very pleasant and empowering.

The no-nonsense sounding Business Lunch was a very reasonable £5.95, which buys you garlic bread or soup, and a choice of selected pizza or pasta from the regular menu.

The round, pizza-style garlic bread was perhaps the greenest object we’d seen that day. It’s a struggle to describe it any other way, other than to say it didn’t taste very green, or indeed of anything else. It was a dull mouth of dough and… well, nothing much. It was the first time any of us had added salt to garlic bread.

The main course saved the day, although clearly it was a triumph of quality over quantity; a nine inch pizza feels a little inadequate, no matter how well it’s put together. It was pleasing to see a pepperoni pizza actually smothered in the stuff; all too often restaurants prefer minimalist patterns of meat that leave you feeling cheated and empty.

So a poor starter, a small but perfectly formed main course - you can’t complain for £5.95, can you? Well, strictly speaking, no.

Unless you ordered a pint of Peroni.

Now we appreciate it’s a premium pint and not domestic cooking lager. But £3.90? Seriously? We weren’t quite prepared for that; this herald of the £4 pint caught us entirely off-guard.

Save those prices for the bars you frequent once a year for a birthday or leaving do; they’ve no real place at the table of a dinnertime special, whether it’s a business lunch or not.

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