After a tiring day at the RHS Spring Flower Festival at Malvern, we were more in search of a pleasant unchallenging meal, than anything more “haute cuisine”. The sort of meal we’d sometimes describe as “having your tea”, rather than “going out for dinner”.
Ego is a small chain of about 25 places. They aren’t pub restaurants but rather restaurants in buildings that used to be pubs. We’ve been to one before so knew the menu is best described as pan-Mediterranean. So, expect pizzas, alongside Moroccan spiced lamb and classic Greek salads. It generally works
Gambas pil-pil is a well known Spanish tapas dish and it’s accurately cooked here. King prawns were served in the oil they’d been cooked in with lots of garlic and chilli pepper. There’s sundried tomato toast for dunking.
The other starter of baked goats cheese may not have been the best ever choice. It was nicely prepared, oozingly soft but, as often the case in restaurants, they use a really mild cheese. That’s “mild” as in not having much flavour of anything. It sits on toast, which may once have been crisp but had quickly gone soggy. Perhaps the nicest thing on the plate was the beetroot chutney which did work in perking things up a bit.
For mains, pork fillet had been wrapped in Serrano ham and skilfully cooked so that it was still moist and succulent, the ham giving it a slightly crisp, salty “edge”. Dauphinoise potato was decent enough, as was just wilted spinach. There’s an apricot and sherry sauce which moistened things up, without actually tasting of either of the two main ingredients. Pizza with peppers, artichoke and black olives was fine. Perhaps more like an upmarket supermarket pizza than an example of the pizza chef’s craft. But it did the job.
Neither of us fancied dessert but coffee was good. Expectations of dinner had been met.
