Bompas and Parr - Complete History of Food AND C***V*ISIER - July 2010

Where: The Complete History of Food, Knightsbridge

How much?: £25 a head... not much for an evening's entertainment, but we both felt like we were paying to be at a PR event..

Bompas and Parr have rapidly gained a reputation for audatious food and drink related extraviganzas. They are certainly good at generating their own PR, and sadly from the evidence of tonight, other peoples too... 

The event bills as The Complete History of Food, "an exciting walk-through dining experience and multi-course meal charting key revolutionary periods in food history" brought to you by the pair behind such wonders as the walk-through Gin and Tonic and the bowl of punch so big you can row across it. They specialise in extravaganza (albeit booze advertising extravaganza), but my first personal experience sadly felt a little cheap and tawdry.. 

I used to work in the theatre industry and would often see 2 or 3 shows a week. After all of this time I still remember the feeling I had when walking into the wonderful and magical Punchdrunk producution of The Masque of the Red Death, the groundbreaking 2007 performance that occupied the Battersea Arts Centre. They transformed the entire venue. Every room, corridor, each everything and everyone you could see, hear, touch, interact with or read throughout the venue had been meticulously prepared to provide a truly immersive theatrical experience. I'm not going to re-review a show from three years ago, but if you want more info, then Charlie Spencer's review in the Telegraph sums it up well. Obviously somewhere during the run, someone had mistakenly sold a ticket to a random advertising exec who had walked through and vowed to borrow the idea and use it to sell product.

Before you say it, this wasn't on the same scale as Masque of the Red Death, it wasn't theatre but a pop up restaurant / bar experience (unashamedly sponsored) and shouldn't be judged in the same way. I know... I get it..  but while there was a lot of promise in the food and booze, it still felt like a borrowed trick used to advertise hard at me. And I'd paid to be there.  

You know what, I'm not going to review the food... it's done and gone now, popped off as it were. The show has been reviewed by countless other bloggers and reviewers, google 'review bompass and parr ' and you'll find a few or check down the right of this page and have a look at a few of the blogs I like, most of them were there too. The best one has to be Meemalee's Haiku review. it's inspired (and has some lovely pics of the food).

So leaving the slightly slim food pickings out of it, what were we left with? A walk through advert with C***V*ISIER emblazoned across cardboard sets wedged between a selection of slightly prosaic service corridors taking us through the building. Sometimes we'd see the kitchens, at other times the doors opened on store rooms stacked with crate upon crate of C***V*ISIER. We walked out slightly tiddled (and vowing not to touch brandy for a while) but in dire need of a burger. PLEASE BUY C***V*ISIER