Piccadilly Lounge

When is a parsnip soup not a parsnip soup? When it’s a tomato soup, that’s when.
I met my lovely companion for lunch at the City Inn where she was staying, and as most of the nearby restaurants were booked up for Labour conferences and Captain America brew-​ha-​ha, we hopped quickly into the bar area of her hotel for a swift bite. Note these words. Quick. Swift. Well, what we got was quite the opposite. We seated ourselves on some comfy chairs and after perusing the menu and deciding on our snacks, we realised that nobody was around. Staff-​wise, this place was a ghost town. As we got a little antsy I seized the opportunity to run up and order at the bar, where a bartender was… I have no idea what he was doing. He did seem to be making a lot of mysterious phonecalls. Perhaps about the elusive parsnip (more later)…
Anyway, food ordered, we settled ourselves down with our tap water and relaxed. Then our fingers started drumming. Half an hour was fast approaching and no food had appeared. What did appear, however, was the waitress who brought our tap water in the first place, asking if we were ready to order food. We had already ordered a parsnip soup and small Caesar salad, and a regular Greek salad. Off she went. Now we were getting close to the dreaded forty-​five minute benchmark and it was suggested that they might be growing the lettuce for the salad. Heck, they could have been growing the parsnips, roasting them, mashing them…
No! Lo and behold, they spent all that time genetically engineering a brand new breed of parsnip. This parsnip is not white, it is red! And while your average, ordinary, boring, run-​of-​the-​mill parsnip is carrot shaped, this one’s round! Spherical! Soft! Just when you’ve had enough time to get your head round that, there’s more. New colour, new shape… new flavour! Rather than that roasted, honeyed taste we’ve come to know and cherish, this one is juicy, fruity, tangy, sweet and… hey, you know something? These parsnips look, feel and taste rather like… tomatoes.
When we enquired as to this phenomenon, we were told, straight up, that it was parsnip soup. Curiouser and curiouser as Alice would say… Our waitress told us she’d go and ask about the elusive parsnip. She never returned. We don’t know what happened to her. Maybe this parsnip thing is a top secret government experiment. Maybe it’s like Fight Club. «The first rule of creating a new breed of parsnip is you DON’T. TALK. About. That new breed of parsnip.»
That said, the genetically engineered parsnip soup, or the parsnip soup cleverly masquerading as tomato soup so it won’t be caught and made to face whatever heinous crime it committed, was nice, I was assured. And my salad was the ultimate saving grace. The green peppers were a little hard, the dressing somewhat bland, but this was made up for in the epitome of salad cheeses. Feta, with a CRISPY COATING. Oh yes, nothing makes up for a multitude of weirdness like a deep fried salty cheese on a rainy day.
Piccadilly Lounge, you’re conveniently located, you’re handy, and you’re actually A-​OK. You’ve got me incredibly curious, and I like that. I might be back to see just what other strange new vegetables you’re creating behind those sleek walls.