This review originally appeared on an old blog of mine from 2015. Some of the photos are now lost to time.
I eat a lot of fast food. I don’t really blog about it because it’s usually a pretty consistent experience and big brands don’t need the exposure (not that anyone reads my site anyway) but on the weekend I was returning from Box Hill to Narre Warren and stopped at a Red Rooster in Notting Hill because we needed food.
I haven’t been to a Red Rooster in a while, which was good because I had plenty of time to read the menu over a few times whilst I waited for the staff to stop talking and notice us. The girl that served us thought someone else had served us already for some reason.
I ordered their new Pulled Lamb and Slaw Roll. The Red Rooster website describes it as “Pulled lamb that has been slow-cooked in a rich tomato, oregano and rosemary sauce, served with a dry coleslaw on a crunchy roll” and looked amazing in the picture. I knew ordering a lamb dish at a chicken restaurant was a risky move, but boy did it look good.
I’m really having trouble articulating the disappointment I felt when I saw mine. I guess I just laughed and joked about how bad it looked. This made things worse when I actually ate it and it didn’t taste like anything. Just bread. The picture probably makes it look better than it was, the meat took up about 1/3 of the total inside space. It was thicker on the left in the picture, it was very shallow at the other end. I wasn’t planning to write about this, so I didn’t take any pictures.
Looking back, I’m not convinced this was cooked in the sauce at all. It tasted like plain lamb and the bun was very dry, not soaked in sauce. This pic has a dot of what could be sauce at the top.
Also, the roll looked and tasted like a hot dog roll from the supermarket. I was not expecting the roll to be great, but when I compare it to the one in their promotional material, it does not look like a “crunchy roll” and it wasn’t crunchy either.
I have seen other people complain about the internet about their food not looking like the picture and I realise that people have unrealistic expectations for fast-food workers. But to my knowledge, there was no one else being served. The staff were all standing around and did not appear to have any drive-thru customers and there was no line of customers behind us.
I have never sent food back before because I find it awkward. I did consider it, but the staff were all singing really loudly and it felt rude to interrupt them. They were singing nearly the whole time we were eating. I’ve never seen staff do that outside of a Disney theme park or at Hofbrauhaus Melbourne.
