Viewing 21 posts - 41 through 61 (of 61 total)
  • Office Canteens – Are they all vile?
  • stgeorge
    Full Member
    BigButSlimmerBloke
    Free Member

    I freelanced at dewar’s whiskey bottling plant in perth. brilliant canteen, and amongst the best bacon rolls ever. also great monday morning vibe because the pipes moving the whisky from the giant blending vats (around 14000 gallons iirc) to the bottliong lines ran above the offices. production stopped over the weekend and the whisky sat in the pipes all weekend, oozing it’s vile aroma. on monday morning the place smelt like a hangover, but by 10 most people were pretty happy about things in general.
    also worked for ga, now norwich union. i’d pay to go and eat there, not only fine food, but a staggering view up the tay toward the highland.

    _tom_
    Free Member

    Ours doesn’t even have cooked food. It’s just a fridge, tea/coffee stuff (though we do have a selection of twinings teas!) and 2 vending machines with ready made sandwiches and microwave meals. I usually just go down to tescos or subway if I can’t be bothered to make my own.

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    TooTall
    Free Member

    Hewlett Packard in Bristol have a fantastic canteen. I’d eat there more often if I could break into their site on a more regular basis!

    Pigface
    Free Member

    The Beeb in Pebble Mill used to be good, White city was amazing.

    I was involved in the tender process for catering in the IPO, our preferred bidder was given a month trial, they were great two chefs happy punters etc etc. Contract given and lo and behold the chefs vanished and things went downhill fast. Cue a very robust meeting with the supplier who really thought we wouldn’t kick them out. We settled on about 65% of the two chefs standard.

    Now I work in a place where we have a tuck shop.

    footflaps
    Full Member

    When I worked for Nortel, in the 90s, their Canadian offices had mini mall stores in them eg MacDonands, Pizza Hut, Dunkin Donuts, etc – quite novel and no wonder they were all over weight.

    TheBrick
    Free Member

    I think its uk thing. We in general have a very poor quality catering industry, from pub that mix in loads of salt and sugar into every sauce to canteen affairs that charge £4-5 for the most basic poorly made “curries” e.t.c. Its shameful.

    thomthumb
    Free Member

    work on a uni campus, we have ~6 different places to eat. all run by the same company!

    favourite is the fry up you can have on 3 floors of the same building. £3.50 7 item in basement, ££4.99 in the middle, in the bar with a view it’s £4.99 bacon, sausage, tom, mushrooms and a slice of toast 😯

    paninis are warm but not cooked.

    at lunchtime there is another bar which is not run by catering. 😀

    crazy-legs
    Full Member

    We were in temporary offices for about 18 months while a load of building work was done at our normal workplace and the difference in canteen food was incredible. Went from sloppy pasta served by a rude indifferent woman in a grey room with limited natural light to fantastic subsidised meals served by a really friendly helpful group of chefs in a light and airy restaurant. Proper coffee, the place was open at 7am for full breakfast, it was dead cheap and there was always a good choice of food. I miss that canteen.

    tomd
    Free Member

    The large site I’m at at the moment has a truly awful canteen. They do chips + something every day and that’s pretty much it. Last Friday was soggy chips with “rat burger” with a ladle of chilli corn carne dumped on the burger. Truly amazing.

    BoardinBob
    Full Member

    Ours isnt bad, but the menu choices are bizarre.

    Hottest day of the year? Lets put a madras curry on the lunch menu!

    trail_rat
    Free Member

    WhAt i will say is you lot neednt go work in ukraine or russia …..

    They made west africa look like michelin star to me !

    I have a photo of what i was served off shore in ukraine somewhere ill go dig it out

    samuri
    Free Member

    Ours is great. 2000 people on campus, they do great food in the big canteen, really nice breakfasts, some great currys and it’s really good value. Upstairs there’s a smaller sandwich shop which is very nice and another shop selling packed food. There are also costa coffee shops around the campus. I really can’t complain. 😉

    I’ve worked on various IBM sites around the world. The one in Munich was geared up to German tastes (unsurprisingly) and I simply couldn’t eat there. Yes they served beer but the food was just not to my liking. Heavily spiced sausage, horrible slimy vegetables, weird sauces. The Germans guys loved it though although they insisted on being told what the name for everything was in English, I drew a blank on about 50% of the stuff.

    bravohotel8er
    Free Member

    I used to temp for Lloyds TSB in the holidays way back when I was in my late teens, their canteen was good.

    JPMorgan Chase had a whole array of brilliant, but fairly expensive canteens. However, the best one that I ever encountered was the one at the RNLI HQ in Poole. I imagine prices have risen somewhat since, but back in 2004 it was possible to get a MASSIVE roast dinner any day of the week for £3. Then you’d eat it alongside a bunch of highly charismatic salty sea dogs, it doesn’t get much better than that.

    paulosoxo
    Free Member

    Whenever I go into the office I cause mayhem as I loose my payment card, don’t put a little jacket on my coffee cup and generally don’t understand tge bizarre methods of selling food they have.

    Last time I tried the old get as much salad in a bowl game, then they went and weighed the bloody thing. Nothing has a price on it, and the menu seemingly changes throughout the day.

    I hate my quarterly trip to the office.

    andytherocketeer
    Full Member

    WhAt i will say is you lot neednt go work in ukraine or russia

    Jeez don’t remind me.

    Will never forget those “dumplings” for breakfast. And no idea what the fruit juice was, but it wan’t very pleasant.
    And I think we offended the lady on the till, by not taking the piece of bread that you’re supposed to take. Could have built a house with them, they were so hard.

    Still, it did only cost something like 16p for a meal.

    But the roast chicken with dill, served in lay-bys by the locals was brilliant.

    jfletch
    Free Member

    My “favourite” lunch they do here is the breakfast muffin. Who are they trying to kid? Left over breakfast, in a stale muffin. The icing on the cake is that they charge more for it that if you had bough all of the components separately at breakfast, when they were fresh!

    trail_rat
    Free Member

    Andy do you mean the brown apple juice looking stuff they all drink with every meal?

    Its fermented bread “beer” – when the breads beyond hard they stick it in water and put it in the sun 2 days later drain off the liquid and thats what they drink.
    ( in my office in aberdeen i have 2 russians and a ukrainian national )

    Did you experiance the dried out cottage cheese breakfast ?

    I liked borsch though and buckwheat. thank goodness or id have starved. Offshore was worse than that – i watched the food come on on the billy pugh and a bag burst – it rained potatoes onto the deck from only 2 or 3 foot They were splatting like liquid filled balloons ! Soo sooo rotten – so glad i didnt eat much of anything on there and stuck to my back up noodles and hot java lava

    Bugger photos on works phone and its at work. Basically evening meal was 1 egg cut in half with brown yolk and some mayo over the top accompanied by brown puree which my translator tells me was egg plant. It actually looked and smelt like poop

    andytherocketeer
    Full Member

    Well it kind of looked like apple juice, maybe a bit darker, and had brown things floating in it.

    Borsch (sp?) was not bad. I’d have that again.

    Was only there for 2 weeks, and the only meal I would say that was “really good”, was the one in Star City. Well that and the BBQ and party that Samara Uni invited us too.

    konabunny
    Free Member

    Most of the places I worked at in Ukraine and Russia had in-office cooks. Lovely home-made meals served at your desk or in the break room, nice little omelettes made for you in the morning if you asked nicely. The uni canteen was pretty good too. Kompot was healthyish.

    Its fermented bread “beer” – when the breads beyond hard they stick it in water and put it in the sun 2 days later drain off the liquid and thats what they drink.

    Kvas. It’s great. You can buy it in the Latvian shops in London.

    andytherocketeer
    Full Member

    Ah think the stuff in our canteen was more like Kompot than Kvas.

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