Review Duke Street Sandwich Bar and Deli Truro

Its forty past midday, you're in Zone One, you're hungry. But at One O'Clock you have that meeting about the orphanage fundraiser. Options. You need options:

• You could go to the Co-op and get a sandwich, but if you did that you would be being mean to yourself.
  
• You could go to The Truro Coffee house and get some of their yummy food, but can you risk the wait? If you miss that meeting... orphans will die.
• Or you could go to one of the sandwich shops.....
  

So put your Snickers and pack of Discos back on the shelf, walk out of the Co-op and into the heart of the city's trendiest quarter. Lo! There, 'pon a trice of thoroughfares 'midst the shadows of spires be the Duke Street Sandwhich Bar and Deli. Rejoice, for ye hath found thine luncheon salvation.

Unlike the Co-op, you don't get much for a quid fifty in the Duke Street Deli, maybe a can of drink and a Tide Table. But if you can up the ante, if you can show momma who's really greasing the skillet, say, to between two pounds fifty and four pounds fifty, then my dear reader, you have found what you are looking for.

Anyways, rather than waffle on... I'll stop showing off in front of my friends and lay down the low down on why the this one wins the show-down:


The Food

The ingredients... yea, yea, whatever... they are all locally sourced and organic and fair trade and all that green razzmatazzZ that we expect nowadays. I'm not dissing that, but as well as being green ingredients, they are great ingredients. Stuff you haven't heard of. Stuff you haven't thought of. Stuff you haven't considered with other stuff. Stuff you have heard of but thought it was something else - I always thought alfalfa was a metaphor for agrarian poverty.

Goats cheese and cow cheese and this and that and crab or salmon and that and.... alfalfa . You can have bread with bits and relishes to relish. Its all good and seems so good for you. Fresh and rich like......

IP Issues

My Only Concern with this place is that they casually imply you can combine their ingredients within a "make your own" framework. That's fine. But these guys have a lot of ingredients in their arsenal, raising the question:

What happens if you stumble upon a groundbreaking sandwich combination? Who owns the rights to that combination? You or the deli?

I would love to have the chance to come up with the next brie and cranberry, but not until the establishment that I use as my "lab" adheres to this creative commons license. When it comes to free-form sandwich experimentation, if you're going to play at the perimiter, you had better play fair.

Enough on The Food, How's the Mood?


You know how when you see alcoholics queueing for free beer? Well that's what this place can get like at lunch time. Storming the Baguette Bastille. As good as their food is, I never go in there then.

"Do you want butter on that?"

And then there are the quiet times. When you can sit in the big frosted window, drink coffee and just chill as Truro Z1 drifts by outside. Read a free paper on the chunky oak stool-counter and listen to the melodious hum of the chiller cabinet, intercepted only occasionally by the star-chime ping of a grill timer.




Conclusion

I have been taking notes in my head for this review for nigh on three months, as well as eating lunch in or from other places, and I can say, categorically, that the Duke Street Sandwhich Shop is the best sandwhich shop in Truro. In the pecking order, its the Alfalfa Meal (ED - Thats a really crap gag. delete?)

Am I biased? Probably, but I'm only biased because I'm right: If you can find a better deli/sandwich bar/shop-what-have-you, in Truro in 2007, then I'll wear an alfalfa and Cornish bacon ball-gown to the high-school prom. Chase me!

Duke Street Sandwich Bar and Deli
10 Duke Street
City of Truro
TR1 2QE
Tel: 01872 320025

Mid Cornwall Stores Sell World's Nicest Lolly

Many stores in Mid Cornwall (ADSA, Tesco, Sainsbury's, Iceland...) are now selling the world's best lolly, the amazingly tasty Del Monte Iced Smoothie. Imagine making love to a beautiful woman all weekend, only to find out she is an android who you can "date" almost any time. And when you don't need her you can keep her in the freezer, no problem. That's the Del Monte Fruit Smoothie.




But not only do these babies taste so great, they are also mainly fruit, nigh on no fat and only 96 calories - for reference an atypical Magnum has close to 4000 calories. It's the lolly version of having your cake and eating it, but the cake makes you live longer, have a better complexion, ward off cancer and prevents liver disease. In terms of sex toys, they may not last long but they have just the right amount of stickiness to Blu-tack the Polaroid to the back of the shed door.
.

Only Available In Mid Cornwall

Review, Cuckoo Truro, Saturday Night

It wasn't long ago that Betty reviewed the lunches at Cuckoo and gave it a mild but apparently justified criticism.


Went last night to see Holly Golightly - who is the 38th most famous person ever to grace Truro (Not counting Brian May's infamous 2003 "Drive Through" on the way to Flambards). The plan was to spend some time in Cuckoo and afterwards to nash on down to Pippa's. Well. No need. The night was great. Packed out with atmosphere, fun, friendly people and just a little smidgen of self-referential irony from the band. All in all, a great combo.

I might have ruined a fair few friends' evening by being a dropthepop.org bore but hey, its only the single most important issue to face us as a planet.

Anyways, Cuckoo, when it passes the required population threshold, is an ace venue for this ace city's all night/late night funkentastic melange of memorable moments.


In terms of its design ergonomics and the underlying architechonic principles its also much better than one would expect as a music venue. Bonus.




I have one regret about going to Cuckoo. Just the one. Regrets are something you should try not to have even though, like a vile cancer that eats away at your perception of the things you have done, they are often unavoidable. Kebabs, the shame of Saturdays.

Midcornwall.com Statement on Jamie Oliver Terrorism Threats

Midcornwall.com is totally impartial in all matters about everything.

Irrespective of the Terrorist threats made by the CNLA , I do think that Jamie "Oli" Oliver should be made to pay for his "Flavor Shaker", which is crap. I have two, one I bought in Trago for £11.99 and one I got for an Xmass pressie. It came out about about 25 squid! Its just a crap idea.

• Its hard to clean.
• It will make about as much "stuff" as to feed post Burger King anorexic on speed. Rubbish.
• The E2E (effort to effect) ratio is on the same level a Remington Fuzz Away.

The BRIT Awards: Vote for The Best Resturant In Truro Every Month On Midcornwall.com

Midcornwall.com Reviews are fantastic, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning winning explorations into the unknown areas of the area's restaurants and bars.

But we feel that the City needs a way to determine which are the Best Restaurants In Truro, and so, dear readers, we provide.

Every Month we will be listing the Best Resturants in Truro, and, logically, the worst.


To vote for a restaurant or restaurants just send a list of the restaurant name with marks out of ten on the same line to thebritawards@midcornwall.com.

Like this:

La Menza D'Pradre 4/10
Barry's Bistro 9/10

Send as few or as many as you want and we will do all the collating, normalizing and indexing to calculate a list from objectively best to objectively worst restaurant.

Please note that the techniques, algorithms and technologies that we will use for this computation will be on a par, both conceptually, computationally and scientifically with Google, SETI,CERN, MIT and County Hall.... combined.

What this will guarantee is 100% certainty in the fact that this list will be as close to objective as is logically possible when dealing with the subjective.

To vote in any months The BRIT Awards just send all votes to thebritawards@midcornwall.com.
by midnight on the last day of the month.

We will then have our guest presenter, Live on youtube from LA or maybe Probus.

Mid Cornwall Images: Roach Rock

Thanks to Chris Leather for this fantastic photo
of what is one of the most interesting places.
Cornwall Guide.

Mid Cornwall Pic: Truro Cathedral

Fee free to send my any pics for putting on the blog.

Cornwall has the Cleanest Beaches In Europe!

We should all be celebrating. Hoorah! Cornwall has the cleanest beaches in Europe.

Now we just need to wait for global warming to ramp the sea temp, and for the opening some beach cafes that sell damp baguettes for eight quid, and we really will be able to compete with the Med'.

Make mine a '99!

Truro and the The Real Veal Meal

For the last decade Veal, the pale flesh of a young cow, has been shunned, and for good reason:

• Calves are taken from their mothers at one week old and grown in dark plastic cages for the first three months of their lives.
  
• Then they spend another month in "down time" where the veal farmers try to keep the cattle in an emotional state somewhere between "solemn" and "in malaise" for as long as possible. The more depression the calves experience the more tender the meat, it's that simple.
• The veal Calves are then sent from all over Europe, via a very crammed cattle wagons, on a drive-by tour of Nazi concentration camps and then on to the slaughter house for a very long, prolonged and upsetting death.

Hence it surprised me this morning as I took my normal Saturday sojourn through Truro's fair meandering alleyways and streets and, of course, its wonderful weekly farmer's market. For there, midst the vegetables and smoked cheese hawkers was a stall blatantly purveying this flesh blessed by Beelzebub himself.

The Mengele of Moo offered me a parchment and I began to read.....

A few moments later....


"Is that good for burgers?" I asked, at this point bathing in the realization that this veal wasn't the bad veal, this was the good veal. This was the veal that was essentially the cow version of lamb. This was the veal that was vealized using bull cows from a dairy herd that would have been killed anyways, at birth. BAM. Bolt Through The Head.

Ive had a bit of an issue with meat of late. I know I should be vegetarian. We all should be: eating meat is very bad for the planet in so many ways. But some meat is so good. And Truro is so good for meat that it's bad. The South African stall in the market that sells biltong far cheaper than eBay.... the smart-ass-yummie-delies with their perfect combinations of meat with healthy stuff like alfalfa.

And now this man who sells a veal that I have a moral imperative to eat because if I don't I am practically firing the bolt through the head of a five second old baby bull!!! I thought perhaps the credentials of the veal's moral status might actually turn my domestic assistant away from her near two decades of vegetarianism. But no, or at least, not yet.


Myself and the farmer-merchant conversed some more about his veal and I purchased 500 grams of veal mince for £1.75 because, frankly, I'm not paying eight quid, for something that might actually taste rank.

One Way Veal Burgers Take enough veal mince for your burger. Season with Maggi sauce and chilli. Cook only one side until the middle of the top is cooked to your satisfaction. This will result in an isotropic thermal gradient within the burger and thus a stratification between chargrilled and moist/tender. During cooking apply vertical pressure along the burger's Y axis with a soft utensil. This will squeeze out juice and fat which you must move away from the burger using the utensil a la tende. When cooked remove from heat and bisect the burger along the X axis, flipping one half fully along its z axis. Place rejoined burger on a glazed blueberry raft. Drizzle with Schadenfreude (If you cant get this try Teriaki marinade from Tesco) Finish with a bouffant of grated Parmesan

And this is the result:

Veal has the potential to turn a normal One Way Burger into a One Way Veal Burger, and you don't have to be Heston Blumenthal to know that its the only meat like this, in this regard.

I don't know if Bocaddon Farm will be selling their ethically wholesome veal in Truro again. I don't know if they did If I would buy some. I don't know if it tastes , in burger form at least, much much better than beef or if it really does taste like chicken. But I do know this: man, newt or bovine, everything that lives must one day die.

Police issue new warning about the "Truro Switch"

Truro police today issued a second warning to drinkers in Truro about the new underground practice amongst bar staff, the "Truro Switch". Chief Inspector Leslie Grantham warned that "though not a health risk per se, the Truro Switch is irresponsible and against the 1968 Trades Description Act."

The Truro Switch is based upon the "Cowboy Switch", popular in the GoGo bars of Bangkok and Manila during the Vietnam war. American vets on R&R would be surreptitiously given the switch in order to make them more amiable to the limitless immoral promiscuity that was on offer.

Truro may lack the hookers and the battle-mashed amputees but it seems it has its own version, and reports are that the craze is sweeping through the area's bar-staff fraternity. It is somewhere between an epidemic and a local pandemic.




If you have been on the bad end of a Truro Switich let us know, email blog at midcornwall dot com