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The drama of dinner

Why are pre-theatre menus so disappointing? Natasha Tripney thinks restaurants should smarten up their acts

Dinner before or after the show? OK, it's not quite up there with 'to be or not to be', but if you attend the theatre on even a semi-regular basis, it's still a question of considerable importance. Paines Plough have come up with a possible solution during their current season at Shunt Vaults, with the self-explanatorily titled A Play, A Pie and A Pint, where your £10 ticket includes a drink and some pastry-cased sustenance. But this is a novelty rather than the norm.

I definitely made the wrong call recently, in going for the after-the-show eating option at a performance of Michael Bhim's play, Pure Gold, at Soho Theatre. The set included a working hob and toaster and, at one point, one of the characters uses these to make egg on toast. As the cooking aromas floated over the audience, I found my mind rather drifting away from the onstage action, conjuring images of hot butter melting into bread, and of said bread being dipped into hot, yielding yolk.

It was my own fault; I should have attended to my stomach before the play began, but that's not always the easiest thing to do. While gigs and film screenings tend to have more scattered start times, most plays start at a stubborn 7.30pm sharp, leaving you with only a short window of time in which to eat. And, if you live outside of London, and are reliant on public transport to get home, post show dining is just not possible.

Some venues, like the National Theatre, take the audience's need to feed into account and have a good array of pre-show nibbles on offer, while London's Menier Chocolate Factory has a lovely adjoining restaurant that serves themed pre-theatre dinners in keeping with their current production. Others, you feel, haven't really given the issue much thought. The restaurant at the newly refurbished (and Stirling Prize nominated) Young Vic, for example, seems more geared to passing foot traffic than to people there to see a show.

Outside of London, the cafe at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre is known for its varied menu (haggis baguettes!) and quick service, standards it maintains even during the Festival. Leeds West Yorkshire Playhouse also has a large canteen-style dining area where playgoers can eat before the show.

However, if you're heading to London's West End, it's usually either a snatched sandwich or a pre-theatre menu. Sometimes these fixed price affairs can afford you the opportunity to sample a limited but expressive sample of what the kitchen is capable of. But more often than not these seem rather cobbled together and, even at the reduced prices, you can leave feeling rather ripped-off. The pre-theatre menu should be an ideal way to advertise what a restaurant is capable of, to coax customers back for the full lingering three course experience, but this is rarely the case. A lot of the time there is the sense that restaurants offering these deals are trying to get as many people in and out as quickly as they can, so they can concentrate their energies on their 'proper' customers.

Personally I'd rather have one well-executed course, perhaps bolstered with olives and bread and a sizeable glass of wine, than attempt to cram two courses into a short space of time. But this may be because I've had one too many disappointing pre-theatre meals. So please, if there are places that offer quality pre-theatre deals, whether in London or elsewhere, I'd like to know about them.

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