Minority Report on the New Zalyqa, Howard Place, Stoke. Friday 8^th May 2004.

A squarry squad of 6 made this outing: Yup, Tone, Pedro, D Ceen, Beardie and Rich.

Zollett ran 4 of us up to the Victoria, a mini break from revision. The Victoria in Victoria Place? below Unity House, turned out to be a smoothie’s contemporary bar with Skol and smoothflow type beverages. It used to be a good warming up venue but sadly now has nothing on offer to attract a true squarrite. Swiftly moving on, we descended on the Wheatsheaf Hotel in a back street. Pedigree or pedigree was available so we plumbed for pedigree all round for the first, second and third rounds. Top man Beardie and ballroom blitz Rich arrived before moving on to the Norfolk Inn where there were nor folk in except us. Luckily, they had Pedigree on tap so we had another Pedigree. Luckily we coped. Pedro remarked once or twice that the evening had been very well organised as usual. Just wait till his trip to the Beartown Brewery in the Autumn and the Gresley Arms Beer Fest on Nov 5^th , which no doubt will take a lot of organising on his behalf!

I popped my head into the ‘New Zalyqa’, next door, to make sure that they had us on their list and we wouldn’t miss our pre-booked table. As luck had it, they’d reserved their biggest table for us and the other 3 customers were left in envy of our take over. We gloated over the fact that we’d got the biggest table until 10 minutes later when these other 3 left. We were on our own. What was going on? Never before had we seen this balti house so empty. The food was reasonable though. The peshwari nan was slightly soft and doughy in parts, the baltis were average but the rices were good. The chilli tikka massalla balti contained sufficient chillies to keep me going, but too many for Beardie who would be going for even longer. An additional pint of …yes, pedigree was ferried in by Tone and Rich, with kind permission of the Norfolk; and a bottle of wine appeared, like magic, from a Beardie bag. A tenner covered the meal and closing time beckoned. Mid week T and Pedro returned home for their beauty sleeps and the rest of us sped into Castle for a last call at the Full Moon.