Table talk

A new meaning to full bed and board

Hawk-eyed readers were quick to spot an alluring offer in last week's recruitment ads.

The Hotel Maes-y-Neuadd in north Wales was looking for a general assistant for its three-AA-rosette restaurant. On offer was on-the-job training and live-in accommodation. More puzzlingly, the ad continued: "Chamber maid also available."

I've heard of staff incentives, but isn't that taking things a little too far?

So it's a load of total Cobleighs

The restaurant critic on Sheffield's evening newspaper, The Star, was intrigued to receive through the post a press cutting of a restaurant review of a revamped Tom Cobleigh pub-restaurant in the city, with an invitation to reproduce the article if he wished.

Puzzled as to which newspaper had published such a glowing account, the critic rang Tom Cobleigh to enquire about the author. "We wrote it as a PR stunt," came the numbing reply.

I suppose that's one way to ensure ringing praise.

Announcing a new mobile eaterie

LAWRENCE Clifford, chef-proprietor of the Galley restaurant in Ipswich, was persuaded to concoct a dish that combined the traits of Oscar Wilde's foxhunter and quarry - being both unspeakable and uneatable - when a customer asked him to deep-fry the hard-working cellular phone of his dining companion.

It emerged this was an act of revenge, as the companion had accidentally smashed the first man's mobile at the same restaurant a month before.

Fortunately, Clifford's novelty dish of battered phone with chips, salad and lemon wedge was greeted with uncontrollable hilarity by both men - which seems to support fears that mobile phones can fry their users' brains (or was it the four bottles of Sancerre?).

Perhaps wearying of the customer quips that have followed the incident, Clifford says his next fried appliance will be nothing less than a laptop computer.

Or maybe it was the curly drink straw…

A welsh restaurant's link with top-level mathematics was recalled last week on the anniversary of the formulation of the unlikely sounding Theory of Knots.

The theory, which explains mathematically how knots work, was written on a napkin during a dinner at Annie's Restaurant in Swansea 10 years ago last week.

But in case you think it was the (doubtless excellent) food that fuelled the breakthrough, I have to say that Ed Witten, the American who cracked the problem, scribbled his jottings before the first course arrived.

I suppose it could have been the pre-dinner drinks.

Is that just one free lunch, or one each?

There are those that charge the earth for it and those that are cheap. But the Mongolian Barbeque just can't give it away.

To celebrate its 10th anniversary, the company has been proudly proclaiming that its Covent Garden branch will offer a free lunch on 8 June. But so far the reaction has been somewhat muted.

Bemused operations director John Dodds said: "People don't actually believe us and keep asking what the catch is."

‘Much drinking, little thinking' - Swift

The award for stating the bleedin' obvious this week goes to the National Union of Students.

In a news release about its imminent announcement on its fiercely contested exclusive five-year wines and spirits contract, it notes: "Students are among the biggest consumers of alcoholic beverages" - with most male students having had a drink in the past seven days.

Get away.