from Meng (86%) on July 8th, 2008 (1 month ago)

Italian Home Bakery, 7 Baker's Place (Kerr Street), EH3 6SY, Edinburgh

My 3-word review: Italian $h!t Bakery.

This place USED to be the dog's bollocks around 4 years ago. Authentic Italian pastries, hot-steaming pizza slices, creamy chicken pesto sarnies. Now with a change of ownership, it's the dog's doo-doo.

Been coming here on occassion to pick up lunch just to tentatively try out what they have on offer, and it's pretty pretty dire. Here's why:

Linguine a la chorizo picante? Just dried re-microwaved pasta not even fit for a garbage bin to eat, with what tastes like food-processed scraps from leftover pizza paste. Yes, you are meant to microwave it, and yes, it doesn't improve the flavour.

Baked goods are terrible (most of them seem pre-bought/pre-baked from elsewhere). That, and the presentation alone should give you fair warning that all is not what it seems. The standout awful pastry, the 'Strawberry' Slice, tastes as if someone chewed up Strawberry-flavoured bubble gum, spat it out, wrapped it up in dried-up offcuts of a Gregg's pasty, baked it, and charged you a pound for the pleasure of eating a pink-coloured bath sponge. So yummy it makes Gregg's freshly-baked goods taste like Masterchef-inspired masterpieces.

Creme de la creme is the bacon, cheese and tomato ciabatta. Within a month or two of coming here, the cutbacks are beginning to show. What was once a nice slice of emmental procured from the J.Mellis cheesemonger from next door is now industrial-grade bucket shredded cheese (the type cheapo takeaways put on pizzas and chips to serve to drunken punters too sozzled to realise they'd never eat such food sober) spread over squashed and tasteless tomato.

The worst offender? Uncooked bacon in the ciabbata. After receiving this substandard sarnie (now that I think about it, calling it substandard is far too high a compliment) 'toasted' on far too low a setting, it was only after eating it 2/3rds of the way with the tomatoes and cheese squished out did I realise I had been eating raw lukewarm bacon. It gave me a stomache for the rest of the day. Buyer beware.

I should have poked a finger down my throat, puked it up on a plate, brought it back to the shop, and asked for my money back. But I won't because they'd likely scrape it all off and baked it into a lasagna to serve back to unsuspecting punters, so I refuse to give them that satisfaction of being a food-processor that pays them to masticate their garbage. Never again. Italian Home Bakery? Italian Prone Fakery more like!

The score? 0.5 Stars - Gran Dizgraziato. And you can quote me on that.

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