I forgot to add the Conscripts " Restaurant " at Jever, I use the word Restaurant in a sparing sense, love pickled cabbage and meatballs 24/7 and you had it made, otherwise avoid like the plague.




..

At the aircrew hotel USAF Rein-Main - their incomparable Hoagy (sp?) rolls. Hot roast beef in a long slightly crusty bun. ;)

Best - The Officers' Mess lunches at Cazaux in France, followed by a cup of coffee walking on the beach by the lake.:cool:
Worst - the canteen underneath the French MOD in Paris - mostly inedible slop, suprisingly.:yuk:

A good catering story was related to me by a work colleague who had been a captain in the army. Stationed, in the '60's, near Ipoh, Malaysia he was in charge of messing for the small unit
During the annual inspection by 'the brass' from Singapore he was asked how he sourced the fresh vegetables. ''Simple'', he replied, ''I give Wong, the Chinese cook 20 dollars, he goes off to market and buys them there.''
''What!'' Cried a staff officer, ''you give army funds to a native?''. ''In future your sergeant is carry out this purchase.''
Next morning the sergeant is duly dispatched to market with 20 dollars and returns with about one third of the quantity of veg Wong would had bought.
Next morning Wong is given 20 dollars....

After 6 weeks of 6 days a week Albert operations in GW1, the most beautiful breakfast above the planet, an ACC out of Akrotiri, homeward bound. After weeks of beef bacon etc getting back to a real meal was a bonus. Was an ACC available on all aircraft out of Akrotiri , Lyneham, Brize ?

Smudge

Trenchard Hall Officers' Mess was no better when I went through a few years later. It was run by Living Out Instructors (mainly Stackers) for their own benefit (certainly not for the benefit of the Living In Students)! It was, by far, the worst Mess I ever stayed in bar none.

Apparently it is now the Sgts' Mess at Cranwell.

ISTR that the Mess Manager was done for theft - basically pocketing catering funds and buying in food barely fit for human consumption.

I'll never forget a certain Ulsterman, G******y M*****h (who later went Helos) who used to get wound up over the 'Minute Steaks' (which were so bad you could have soled DMS boots with them). He had repeatedly complained about them in the Messing Suggestions Book and was repeatedly assured by the Messing Member that there was 'No Evidence' as to the in-edibility of said steaks.

One evening we came down to Dinner, the choice was Plaice Meuniere or Steak. I had fish, G ordered the steak. When it arrived he bit into it and almost immediately went bright red, with steam seemingly coming from his ears.

"Right!", he announced in his broad Ulster accent. He then stood up and marched out of the Dining Room with his plate.

We later found out he had stapled the offending steak into the Messing Suggestions Book with the immortal words: "Here's your bloody evidence!"


He ended up with a weeks Orderly Officer but it was worth it if only for the comedy value!


Best Mess for me was undoubtedly Lyneham - Thursdays they did Crepe Suzette flambeed at table.

Absolutley brilliant - I would like to buy that man a drink:D:D:D:D

Ah, Trenchard Hall OM! Bane of baby pilots arriving back at Cranwell.

Returning there after attending Happy Hour in York House Mess to be met by the PMC who wished to know why, as THOM was our mess, why we didn't go to Happy Hour there on a Friday instead. "Can we wear our flying suits?", "Er, no..". "well when we can, we'll come to Happy Hour".

Never did go, unsurprisingly.

Sorry, bit of thread drift there. Food was crap too.

When I became an Instructor at Cranditz (living in York House Mess), for a laugh a couple of us wandered down to T.H.O.M on a Friday for Happy Hour.

It was just as ****e in the late '90s as it had been in the '80s.

Bloody place should have been bulldozed!

Some good ones:

Crayfish Thermidor with Caesar salad, at Salalah in 1974. Only thing was you had to catch the crayfish yourself. We used to take a short wheelbase out to Raysut, snorkel and flippers and sharpened curtain rails until we had enough of the beasts to make it worthwhile.

Engineers' chips, Friday lunchtime, 1981/3, at Church Fenton. Proper chips they were.

Episkopi 1983/86 lived in MQ but ate in the mess from time to time, good food but not spectacular. The best was the Souvlakia and salad in pitta, from the stall in Dodge City.

Dining in night (1989) in the wooden Dad's Army mess at Blandford, fantastic grub. For the first and only time in my career I found that I had to ask the PMC to excuse me for a moment. When I returned to the table my chair had been replaced with a milk crate. Spent the rest of the meal with my chin about 1/2 inch above my plate,

Full English breakfast at Bentley Priory was a great experience when I stayed there in 1997.

Breakfast in the RAF Club is also way up there.

On the other hand, in 1970, we were off to stay at the USAF Academy, Colorado Springs, flying from Waddington in a Britannia, we eventually reached New York (Dulles), via Goose Bay, where we were issued with USAF in flight meals to keep us going to Colorado Springs. Words fail me, it wasn't just bad but I didn't have a tin opener with me!

Rgds SOS

I'm with Gericault. Spent a week at Cazaux doing some stuff. We arrived too late for dinner the first night so headed off to town. Well I just did not believe how many small legs some chickens had. A cross between a chicken and centipede. The rest of the week we ate like Lords in the mess. They put on a special bash for us the last lunch time which went on all afternoon.

The worst has got to have been some kind of Pie in the mess at Wyton. never did find out what was in it.

Lyenham was good. I lived in at Brize for a year. Cold Beef and chips with HP source did me at lunchtime back in 90s. I tried same a few year back it was bloody awful. Mac the knife had sliced the beef at some supermarket. The source was some terrible sachet.

Ahh, Baby's Heads...

Best from the 'larger' can as found in the 4 or 10 man rat packs (you got a much smaller one in the 24hr rat pack).

Place can (sealed) on it's end in a mess tin of boiling water, heat until the end 'pops' out. Then remove from the water, point in a safe direction (normally towards some poor unsuspecting victim) and pierce with a tool of choice... the marlin spike on a jacknife RE was pretty good...

Allow pressure to vent and then remove both ends of the tin. Now push the mess in the tin halfway out and using the end of the tin as a guide neatly slice in half and place it on the plate, open end up, push the remaining half out and place on plate in a similar manner. Dress it appropriately with ketchup.

It looks just like a sliced open baby's head, even better with ketchup dripping down the side ;) hence the name.


Also good was the stewed steak, I used to make a brill cottage pie with it when out sailing, served up piping hot at midnight, kept the cold out and the duty watch awake.

Ahh Sapper,

Obviously a chef of High caliber. I wish I'd been in service with you !!!!

Smudge:ok:

Tops - Bacon (with hint of fish 'cos that is what the pigs were fed on!) and Halloumi cheese roll in Lady Ell's, Akrotiri. Great for the hangover. The lunchtime salad buffet in the OM there was also a treat (while it was under RAF catering supervision that is). Plus of course any food from the Inflight supplies after hours of chucking buoys into launchers while the nav attempted to empty them just as fast!

GW1, Saudi Arabia:

Christmas Day, 1990, after planning solidly for 3 weeks, decide we will have a 'run ashore' for a Christmas Lunch. Drove 40 miles to the nearest town, Dammam, to find it closed! Eventually find the only cafe open in town, a taxi-driver's greasy spoon. With very low expectations, we went in.

My Army colleague, in his best Arabic, ordered 4 cokes and 4 kebabs. While waiting, we noted the less-than-clean taxi drivers wolfing down their food, throwing chicken bones over their shoulders. Expectations lowered further.

The meal arrived over the next hour. A starter of soup (some sort of delicious broth), main course of a large roast chicken with lashing of vegetables each, unlimited glasses of coke, finished off with home-made biscuits and sweet tea. All superb. The bill came to the equivalent of £6.

A most unusual, but surprisingly good, Christmas Lunch, and a welcome change from the appalling MREs we normally had.

Hi guys and gals. I've just had a brain burp about stuff I must have forgotten years ago but now comes to mind (that's what PPrune does to you).

Leuchars - 1976. I worked in the mechanical engineering and supply centre (MESC) along with my supply oppos and the rigger Flight Sgt and the Rolls Royce rep (Br*** E****) .

I wonder what they call the MESC now (the building is still there on Google Earth).

OC SCAF had an office just down the corridor, he had a place in Guardbridge and invited me and my fiancée for dinner.

It was the best Italian meal cooked by an Englishman that I can remember. Very simple; tomatoes, onion, garlic (and more garlic), oregano, veal meat balls, fresh pasta (fusilli IIRC, from a deli in St Andrews) and then Tiramisu (I Know Tiramisu is old hat these days but in 1976 in Scotland it was cutting edge and it was delicious).

But later, in late spring the boys and girls from the Survival Equipment Section organized a barbecue. There was a clearing by the Tentsmuir sands and we had to transport ourselves and all the gear (including disco kit) through the Tentsmuir forest to the clearing by the beach.

Set everything up and got on with the party. 37 years later, I still remember that evening - the food was fantastic the camaraderie was intense and mucking about on the beach was so much fun.

Rgds SOS

Red Flag - Nellis 'Killer' Burrito for breakfast between brief and 'step'...You can figure whether it was the best or worst feed!...it is all a function of what time you retired on the night prior and whether there was food involved in the preceding 12 hours!

On exercise when we had no milk. Catering made their own by diluting a can of evap with water. :uhoh:

I also recall at Leuchars in the mid 70s, a huge menu made up of sausage. Grilled sausage, fried, braised, toad in the hole etc. You couldn't complain that we weren't given a choice.

But a mess curry, always something to be enjoyed.

Saintsman ... At Stanley in 83, the ATCOs established a relationship with the officers on the floating fridge (the Blue Star refrigerated supply ship) and were able to acquire slabs of long-life milk which were technically time-expired and thus untouchable by the caterers. Accordingly, ATC had perfectly serviceable milk, whilst others used Compo.

Quite stimulating climbing the Jacobs Ladder down the side of a bloody great ship with a 24-pint slab tucked under your arm, before getting into an RM fast-thing back to the jetty!!

When I joined the green lot us youngsters had a full cream milk allowance.

And one camp we got to talking in the pub with a local farmer about it and the fact that we never got it, next day he turned up with 200ltrs of chilled unpasteurised milk. Which tasted lovely.

As he did every day for 4 weeks. We were drinking a pint of it with every meal youngster or not.

We thought this was particularly nice of the bloke until one of the farming lads just laughed and said its spring he will be saving himself a fortune in over quota fines.

To be honest anything they fed us that camp was the best food ever. Its amazing how many fussy eaters (myself included) changed what they would and wouldn't eat getting up at 5am every day and not stopping moving until 6pm you could have told me we were eating horse meat and brussel sprout stew and I would have turned up with my mess tin lined with bread and eaten the lot and kept my eye out for seconds.

Never mind the quality, feel the width.
 

When the 16th Entry of Boy Entrants were inducted, 22 May 1952, we handed in our Ration Books!

It took some time to accept the size of the meals that we received.

Then there was the matter that in the NAAFI we could buy sweets and chocolates without coupons!

Thing was, on 10/- a week, we couldn't afford any :bored:

I might have recalled this before, but its worth another iteration.

Met Office Leeming and also Topcliffe, 0500 hours, autumn routine, mid 1960s.

Observer, having sent off the 0500 ob. carts off over the airfield and returns with great bag of 1 minute old mushrooms. Perfunctory rinse.

Meanwhile LB has frying pan on, and coffee brewing.
Fried egg, bacon, tomato, mushrooms , buttered toast and coffee for two in SMetO's office at 0515. No tablecloth and candles but ................. !

Brief weathership/ duty pilot c. 0600, him probably subsisting on tea and toast or indeed fresh air.

I got the impression my audience was somewhat distracted.

The aircrew feeders at Scampton and Waddington were brilliant.
The pilots kitchen at Jever provided exactly what we needed.
The small Q shed kitchen at Wattisham was particularly good on the mornings when the firecrews kindly left us freshly gathered field mushrooms.

Nothing matters very much, most things don't matter at all.

Danny42C may recall directing the Fire Crew by radio at Strubby in the 60s to collect mushrooms the size of dinner plates. We did, a few years later. :)

Its a bit of a toss up for me amd I cant decide

Cranwell Sgts Breakfasts
Coningsby Airmans Steaks
Waddington Sgts Steak and Kidney Pie
Halton Main Airmans Chow Mein

Still better than GW an old long lost friend, who clambered down the said ladder and then stepped off the Atlantic Conveyor into the sea to go for a paddle, made even more incredulous by the fact he couldn't swim a stroke.



..

A few years ago, I used to go twice a year on exercise at St Mawgan.
Worst food - any meal in the Mess there.
Best food - the food in the mobile kitchen in the HAS site just up the road that had been set up for the troops.

We used to try any opportunity or excuse to eat in the HAS but were firmly told 'you're living in the Mess, you're eating in the Mess!'.

I remember doing a trip with some "bits" that needed servicing at Alamagordo, and we night stopped Albuquerque. Breakfast in the early morning at the Mall accross the car park from the hotel (at Co pilots recommendation) was two of the biggest Chilli dogs I have ever sat in front of, with what seemed a bucket of Coke. Hot, damn hot, and a change from the usual fare of a Brit. ISTR that about two hours outbound I committed the GEs greatest sin. I used the elsan, "el ringus stingus" was painfully in evidence. Never had the urge for such a breakfast since then.

Smudge :ok:

Leuchars, mid 90's

Main mess, did a good line in trays of exceedingly nice hand made cakes that never got involved in any form of 'work order' upgrade negotiations that might have taken place when a routine work order may have become a priority or even a gold plated urgent work order thingy when head slop may have mentioned blackfriars... :E

Same place, same time... The feeder out on the 111 Has Site, the chef used to raid the main mess for spices and other cheffy type goodies and really knew how to use them. Did a nice line in things chicken, amazing in fact just what he could do with a chicken... :E

Same place, same time... The feeder on the 43 Has Site, somehow chicken just wasnt the same in there.... :suspect:



On scheme, picture... It's wet... your cold... the snow has changed from snowstorm to f*k me it's a blizzard proportions and to cap it all everyones very tired having been up 3 days solid doing bridge gallops and chucking in the odd tactical minefield for good measure...

You return from the days activities to find the 'chef' (Section 432 Driver in his day job) has done a full service on the pack and managed to make dinner from a 10 man rat pack all at the same time...

The rat pack got opened and tipped into a steel washing bowl (everything less the tea bags, coffee and sweets) enough water was then chucked in to make it sloppy and give a sort of stew effect and the whole sorry mess then boiled up for 1/2 an hour while being stirred with spanner/ladle/screwdriver (in fact, whatever comes to hand tbh)...

Amazingly, it tastes brill and was the way the RE's cooked as a section/troop when in the field

Nasi Goring.
 

cliver029,
Tis indeed a small world. There was a cook at Church Fenton in 1971 who had been posted back to the old country from Tengah (when 74 Packed up I think). His Nasi Goring was to die for. Many of we students ordered it fresh on a daily basis. Had to be the same guy. I have never tasted a better one.:ok:

My worst was in the "Greasy Spoon" at Valley a few years later.
It was called "steak". It was black and could not be cut with a steak knife.
I didn't actually taste it for fear of losing teeth.:uhoh:

The Heritage Centre at Waddington has recently laid hands upon the Messing Suggestions Book from 1960! The staff have not had much time to digest most of the information, but a quick glance through revealed that one of the complaints was about the standard and paucity of the breakfast cereals... the reply apologised and gave a long standing strike at the Kelloggs factory as an excuse.

Worst:

Anything at Linton on Ouse at the moment, though the lunchtime reheating of the unused breakfast bacon/sausage on a Pizza is pretty rank!

Best:

Now let me think . . . . .

Sapper you forgot to mention that the steel bowl was placed on an engine block or exhaust to cook it with the engine running.

Initially I thought I was having my leg pulled with the engine cooking storys.

Until I was I saw a foden chicken dinner being cooked during a 6 hour convoy to exercise. It was brilliant. And certainly proved the phrase anyone can be uncomfortable in the field. But with a bit of effort and skill it can be pleasant.

They even had different spots to cook different things on the foden.

Only time things got a bit out of hand was when one BDO got a bit of a strop on about cooking things on the steam generator contraption. But I reckon that was more to do with the fish starter than the rabbit. Either that or she was a vegie.

For me the best was a close call between the vegetable curry served on the Nimrod or the wonderful food served in the contractors mess at ASI where I used to eat as a part time contractor when off shift during the late 80's airbridge.
By far the worst was the (airmans) mess at ASI, true the chefs did the best they could with what was supplied by most meals still tasted $@*!.

That would be the metal ammo box's windlassed to the exhaust pipe then. Simply chuck the compo tins in (un-opened of course) just before leaving the harbour area and dig them out on arrival.... Sadly if the convoy got lost or delayed then not all the tins made it :eek:

The tin would go off with a bang followed by a couple of bodies popping out the mortar hatch collect the surving tins before they followed...

Back in the 70's, one of us Transporters feeling cheated because the V force got steaks and we didn't, wrote:

"Why don't we get steaks like the V force?" in the Luqa Officers' transit mess suggestions book.

The next day one of the said steaks was found stapled into the book with the words:

"If you can eat this one, you are welcome to it!"

The V force member was invited to purchase a new book without gravy stains.

the worst: any food at the IJC Kabul mess halls Dec 11 - May 12. Christmas Day fare was just simply binned by the brits.

the best: BBQ RC West Feb 12 with wine. BBQ RC East Mar 12 not with wine!!

And any meal down at Bastion when able..!

By far the worst I ever experienced was the 'soup of the day' at Machrihanish which changed colour and taste only very slightly each day, depending on what had not been eaten the night before, and unsurprisingly whose ingredients were never precisely specified.

With only 2 regular livers-in, the arrival of our mob for a month and the adjustment to the catering arrangements must have seemed like heaven to those poor souls.

CS

Wensleydale, what a shame you don't have the book from 1970 when the food strike occurred. The arrival of the late WO Paddy Shannon soon retrieved that situation. Waddo then became "the place" to dine for the JRs. The subsequent SIB investigation failed to uncover the ringleaders of the strike. Other notable chefs in my life, the late Neil Chinnery at Church Fenton, with his Field Catering Unit (before MCSU) who worked absolute miracles with a few quid and loadsa waffle. Finally M****n E*****h at Wegberg and Marham, due to his lack of height,known as "The Gastronome". A man who took the greatest of pride in his craft and ensured his customers were the absolute top of his priorities.

What as in everyone refused to eat in the mess? Lol cannot see what you could charge them with.