Making full use of a glorious bank holiday Monday, after touching down from my flight for Greece, I met up with Pat for dinner at The Summerhouse. The early evening was lovely – even at 6.30pm it felt like we were actually meeting for lunch!

The Summerhouse is the latest in the recent trend of pop-up restaurants/shops around London. Its parent restaurant, The Waterway, lies just up the road so presumably the reason for having a pop-up located nearby was to further take advantage of the canal that both lie next to. We were happily guided to a table along-side said canal for our meal. It was really a perfect evening … and normally the view would have been perfect too .. except …. then Mr Rat came along!

He was one of the largest rats I’ve seen in London and I’ve seen quite a few around. Of course it wasn’t really the restaurant’s fault (we were trying to think positively that Mr Rat died way up the canal nowhere near the kitchen …) but bless the manager – he tried to push Mr Rat quickly downstream with a broom … only for Mr Rat to come floating back not too long after!

After that bit of excitement we settled down to choosing our food. The main reason I wanted to try out the Summerhouse was that a review I’d read had mentioned popcorn shrimp. The Summerhouse menu describes it as ‘Best ever’ popcorn shrimp – though I’m not entirely sure why the ‘Best ever’ bit required quotation marks …

Popcorn shrimp is so named because of the bite-sized popcorn-like nuggets that the shrimp comes served and in its simplest terms is a breaded shrimp fried with a bite. Done well it is awesome. The rest of the Summerhouse menu had no real surprises on it (lots of seafood with some Mediterranean influences and a couple of meat dishes) though the biggest surprise was probably fish and chips being sold for £16. Really? It was only cheaper by £2 than the most expensive dishes (a filet of sea bass and a steak!)

Pat and I were pretty hungry … read in this instance greedy … so as usual we over-ordered. First having a chowder each, neither of us could resist, plus the popcorn shrimp before moving on to our mains with additional sides. Not being able to really finish our mains and sides we did, however, resist dessert.

Overall food was average. The chowder was watery yet salty, and lack the creaminess and depth of a decent chowder. The popcorn shrimp was disappointingly flavourless, so it was good that it came with sweet chilli sauce, and my grilled swordfish was dry. The sweet potato chips were tasty though you can’t really go too wrong when you deep fry something. I think Pat was happy with his whole fish.

With nothing to rave about with respect to food I suspect that the Summerhouse is still going to be quite popular because of the venue itself and the fact that its not great value for money is hardly likely to bother the Maida Vale locals! I do have to admit that there is a great vibe and its really lovely spot to spend a summer afternoon / evening. Rock on the summer!