This is the private dining room in Simpsons-in-the-Strand. It’s the location of our annual awards bash for this year and Ginny is not looking off into the distance thinking she’d rather be somewhere else – she’s looking at our display stand to see how it looks, while Louise is just out of shot finishing placing the panels on the stand.

This year, we have broken with our tradition of not having any promo materials at the event, simply our logo on all of the awards and the presentation slides. This year, we decided to take three stands, the biggie and a couple of roller blind style stands like the one you can see in the corner of the room.

I’m very happy that we’ve got our format right for this event and that it’s going from strength to strength. We had a really good turn-out from industry and people seemed to really enjoy themselves.

Well, that is unless, like me, you’re a veggie. I really object strongly to us veggies being treated like social leper at dos so I make a point of making sure I choose the veggie food and that I sample it before the event so that I am completely happy with what my veggie guests get. This comes from donkeys’ years of getting “the after thought” whenever I go to a formal dinner or to be honest even many restaurants treat us veggies like that too if we’re choosing a la carte.

So, I pride myself in making sure that all guests get treated properly. Our meat-eaters got roast beef – the restaurant’s signature dish, which had been sampled by Ginny and Louise in advance. We veggies were getting an appetiser with asparagus, followed by a caramelised shallot tarte tatin. I’d asked for a minor adjustment to be made to the dish but that’s what I ordered.

When we sat down to dinner, the other guests on my table all got their food, the waiter tried three times to give me smoked salmon and I declined it saying I was veggie. On one of the three occasions, his response was “well, this is veggie” – er no, fish isn’t vegetarian actually! I finally got my food after all of my companions had finished theirs. Then the main course was served and again, my food didn’t arrive until the other diners on my table were almost finished their meal. It was a stuffed mushroom – a single (granted big) mushroom covered in a sauce made with chopped tomatoes and onions and baked. It had no protein component (what’s wrong with these people?), no carbohydrate, which I feel should always be part of a main course at an event where there is lots of free wine flowing to act as soak up food and no caramelised shallot tarte tatin to be precise.

I wasn’t impressed at that point but when I later discovered that other veggies in the room had received worse service than me, I was extremely unhappy. You don’t book a venue like this unless you want to be treated to the best of everything – both food and service.

To be frank, if I was running the place, I’d have found out who was paying and made sure that person was at the top of my list of people to keep happy and yet I felt like a second-class citizen. When I realised what had happened to our guests, I was furious. The head waiter didn’t seem to care and neither do the rest of the staff if today’s (I’m writing this a day late) complete lack of response to our email of complaint is anything to go by.

Otherwise, the event was declared a big success but I am determined not to let Simpsons off the hook. We wanted all of our guests to leave the evening feeling as though they’d had a tremendous experience and a small handful found themselves going hungry. So, my recommendation is don’t book Simpsons-in-the-Strand for a function – my experience is they can’t do it right. Eating in their main restaurant is fine but to be honest, the function just wasn’t properly managed for us.

Last year, I was trying to be a bit more creative than usual!