The Pie Shop

Dinner at “The Lux” tonight. Lux, of course, stands for Luxembourg not luxurious.

The menu posted on the wall offered steak, chicken in garlic and herb and moussaka as the main courses on the steamline. I wanted to have the steak. Not because it would be any good, rather that it would likely be tough as nails and provide great blog fodder as I try to cut it with my plastic knife. I was intrigued, however, by a new offering at the “short order” bar: “Pie Shop”. I figured one of my compatriots would get the steak and I could blog about his broken knife so off I wandered to the short order bar with visions of delicious freezer to oven meatpies in my head.

Do you actually have any pie? Not much of a pie shop is it?

The “Pie Shop” had two large metal casseroles. One was chicken and mushrooms covered with what appeared to be a puff pastry; the other featured beef and onion with the same pastry- not really much of a pie, either one. I took a little of both along with fries and gravy. I rounded out the meal with some veg from the salad bar. My co-worker, J, who is familiar with my eating habits, saw me taking a picture of the meal and, noting the salad, accused me of “sexing it up” for the blog. Shut up, J.

The chicken in the pie was very dry but this was more than compensated for by the watery sauce. Overall, it was adequate. The beef and onion pie was inoffensive in that it tasted like ground beef. The onions were undetectable. When coupled with a generous helping of HP sauce, however, it was delicious. Probably only because I find HP sauce delicious.  The gravy was excellent as it usually is at the Lux and it brought back fond memories of gravy soaked meals at a decent greasy spoon back home . The gravy at Cambridge also often makes me wax nostalgic, evoking memories of eating glue in 1st grade.

M1's Chicken - Taken from the grill 15 minutes late.

The menu selections of the four of us were pretty varied. M1 and J had the chicken with garlic and herb. M1 commented that it was dry while J suggested that it had been perfectly cooked…15 minutes before they took it off the grill. J also had the moussaka and seemed to enjoy it despite his inability to remember what it was. M2 went to the pasta bar. He was very impressed that the pasta had “formed a perfect lump” and thought the sauce was ok. Alas, no one was naive enough to order the steak.

Both M1 and M2 had what they described as “sweet scrambled eggs” for dessert. Upon tasting it, M2 immediately put his aside, calmly and maturely asserting that he “can’t eat that”. M1 took the less dignified route of exclaiming “Holy fuck, that is awful”. Which begs the question: “Why would you select something that looks like scrambled eggs and has a sign calling it Egg Pudding as your dessert”? I doubt they have an answer…

A note on KAF milk

M1 is quite a milk drinker. In KAF, fresh milk is an extremely rare commodity and we’ve only seen it a few times. Usually, the milk in the dispensers is the UHT stuff.  For clarity, we call this stuff Milch as it seems to all come from German suppliers and is so labeled. When even Milch isn’t available, the milk dispensers contain some sort of noxious white substance for which we do not even have a name. Some say it is powdered milk. I believe it is the excretion of Satan’s breasts. Tonight M1 unwittingly took a sip of this evil nectar. I suspect he’ll have horns by morning.