Watch this and Chill

Rambing Pig by Rapsa opened only last year. It’s an offshoot of the main restaurant which is based in Hoxton, the part of London where everyone wears new balance shoes and has a wedge haircut, or they did when I went there.

Well, now they’ve opened a restaurant in Ewell, Surrey, which is great, especially if you find standing around waiting at no reservations places and then being deafened by noisy groups shouting, drunk on aperol spritz.

When it was announced in March that the restaurant had won the Estrella Best gastropub award (98th), I felt that I had to go. Never mind that most of these awards are not really worth much, I mean, I don’t think anyone even bothered to check who won it this year or last year. Now I’ve been, I can only say the restaurant is unlikely to win any awards again and was lucky to win this one.

The first problem is the restaurant is hardly ever open, then when you get there, they look surprised if you turn up with out a reservation. well, i did that last Tuesday, and they weren’t exactly pleased to see me. By the time i’d got out of my coat, I was thinking it wasn’t such a good idea. I mean, where was the friendly welcome, more to the point, where was the gastropub I’d been promised? There was nowhere to sit around the bar, so anyone ordering a drink would have to stand around awkwardly.

A quick look at the menu suggests you’d need to order three or four dishes to share, but not much fucking good if you’re on your own like I was. Worse, there’s nothing here for less than eight pounds. We’re talking 9 for a bit of crispy chicken, 15 for a few slices of ‘lechon’, and the travesty of £4.50 for some boiled rice.

If a place charges that kind of money , it better be for some seriously good food. But it wasn’t. Filipino food can be oily and heavy, which was certainly the case for the kare kare croquettes I ordered. Just looking at the picture of them is enough to make me feel queasy, and reminds me that Marco Pierre White once said it won’t taste good if it doesn’t look good.

Next the service, I fail to see how you can call yourself a Filipino restaurant with no Filipino staff anywhere to be seen. There may have been someone in the kitchen, but I saved the embarrassment of confronting them about my food.

Then the bill came, and I was really shocked to find I had to pay a 12.5% service charge , to bring the total up to nearly thirty pounds. It looks like they’re charging Hoxton prices in Ewell, that’s actually criminal.

On the way home, I thought about all the places I’d been , and all the places I had read about, I realised that Rapsa was neither a place I’d enjoyed, or was somewhere I’d really read about until I saw the award. And if the food is really really really bad, there’s a different reason why no-one’s made Instagram reels about it. And that’s because the presentation is more crapsa than rapsa.

the verdict.

The food is barely adequate; you are given a very small portion too. A delicious bowl of noodles of the same quality is no more than £10 at Box Park Croydon. And you can get some delicious chicken at Jolibee for £3.

Service

I felt very uncomfortable as a single diner. I definitely might have ordered more food if I had been treated better, given a better table. they don’t really explain the menu either.

atmosphere, there really isn’t much, if any atmosphere, they don’t play music or have much in the way of decoration.

Overall

It pains me to say just how much I disliked the experience here, I was hoping to find something that would remind me of the Phillipines, but it wasn’t the case at all.

2/5