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Everything on a Stick, and where they can stick it

Please note that since writing this blog post, Everything on a Stick has closed down

When we arrived at Everything on a Stick, we had a sneaking suspicion it used to be the ill-fated Minibar: a drinking venue whose concept involved serving yourself drinks out of a fridge, but then paying bar prices for the privilege. I never got why anyone would want to do it: I mean, I can sit on my own sofa with my own music playing and my own friends round for the evening, and everyone can help themselves to drinks from the fridge for a fraction of the price – or am I missing something?

So what, we wondered, is it with this venue and ill-conceived concepts? Everything on a Stick serves (as you might expect) all its food on a stick. Except the fried rice, which doesn’t come on a stick obviously, because that would just be stupid. But then again, why serve it at all?

Anyway, it’s also an all-you-can-eat restaurant, although there are various conditions attached to this claim: you only have two hours in which to stuff your face; you can only order in rounds of three dishes at the time; and one of those dishes has to be a ‘side dish’, meaning carbs or veggies, presumably to keep the costs down.

In no particular order, we ate chicken, beef, lamb and duck kebabs, scallops wrapped in bacon, marinated salmon and tuna, garlic prawns, grilled stuffed squid, griddled courgettes, roasted sweet potatoes, and corn on the cob. True to its word, everything did indeed come on a stick (except the aforementioned fried rice) and if that were all that’s required of a plate of food, we’d have been happy. But cooking things on sticks requires more than just, well, a lot of stick. It requires seasoning (there wasn’t much going on), time for meat to marinade (most of it seemed to have been dunked in sauce, post-heat element), and a reasonable attention to cooking times. The meat and fish were uniformly overcooked, while the sweet potatoes were almost crunchy. It doesn’t take a Masterchef finalist to figure out that just because something is cut into small pieces and put on a stick, doesn’t mean it takes the same amount of time to cook.

While we were mid-meal, a photographer from Het Parool came in to take photos for next week’s review that Johannes van Dam is writing. I’m curious to hear what he thought of it, but at €26 a pop, I’d rather do dinner at home and get my sticks elsewhere…

all the info

Everything on a Stick (International)
€€

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