Review of J. Sheeky From May in Clerkenwell

I was perusing the fish section london-eating.co.uk, a site which features customer reviews of London restaurants, when I stumbled upon a review that really caught my eye.

It was a review of the posh pub J. Sheeky, in Covent Garden. May of Clerkenwell wrote,

I don't quite agree with previous critics who have said that the service was good as I found this patchy - they were quite fussy about not letting me have an extra chair to put an expensive bag which I didn't want to leave on the floor and the table was clearly too small for it to be left on the table. Other tables had TWO empty chairs but they would not let me have one!

Small tables and no place to put an expensive bag? I wonder what sort of bag it was; perhaps it was a baggie full of cocaine, which certainly fits the bill for an expensive bag (pun intended). To think that other tables had TWO vacant chairs! It must have been terribly difficult to look at the unoccupied chairs, any one of which could have accommodated an expensive bag. How dare the servers refuse an extra chair? Were they human beings? Did they have any compassion in them at all? The answer comes in the next part of May's review.

One waiter could not speak English well and referred to us as "lady" (what am I, a mafia gangster?) rather than "madam" or "miss"! Another seemed to be overworked and plonked plates down as though dishing out canteen food.

Aha! The servers were so brusque and unfriendly because they were foreigners. It's all falling into place, now. Why on Earth would anyone ever call a woman "lady"? Unless, of course, she was a mafia gangster. Other sorts of gangsters, who are not affiliated with the ethnically-Italian "mafia", do not refer to a woman as "lady". They often substitute "dame" or "broad": hence May's specification of "mafia" gangster. The servers were apparently unclear what sort of restaurant they were in, plonking plates all over the place. Damn their overworked hides!

I'd say the atmosphere was of a canteen or department store cafe rather than a destination restaurant like The Ivy or Le Caprice. Perhaps things have gone downhill since Corbin and King no longer own it. Their famed fish pie and iced berries were so-so, with the pie being too salty and berries being very hard just out of the freezer.

Ah yes: the famous sale of J. Sheeky by Wes Corbin and Burger King, to none other than the notorious pornographer Dicky Fester. No wonder the restaurant is so rude...there's a new sheriff in town! Despite Fester's vulgar ownership, though, it's strange that a dish called "iced berries" would be frozen.

May's ratings for J. Sheeky broke down as follows (on a scale of 1-10, 10 being best): Food - 6; Service - 5; Atmosphere - 8; Value for money - 5. Atmosphere was an 8? The place had the air of a canteen! Once again, the reviewer was too generous.

On the basis of this review, I recommend J. Sheeky, though not as a dining experience so much as to satisfy anthropological curiosities such as: (1) What are foreigners like? (2) How does J. Sheeky differ from The Ivy and Le Caprice? and (3) Are chairs better off with asses in them, bags, or nothing at all?