Pie fans ahoy! With over 600 pie reviews, Pierate is surely the web's premier pie resource. We've been eating and rating pies according to the 'Seven Cs' since 2009. Follow us on @pierateers. pierateship@yahoo.co.uk
Showing posts with label NIA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NIA. Show all posts
Friday, 6 March 2015
A smashing pie at the Badminton in 2015?
Barclaycard Arena Chicken and Mushroom Pie Review
Some of you may remember that last British Pie Week Pierateer RAS was at the National Indoor Arena (NIA) in Birmingham to help with the Yonex All England Badminton Championships 2014, but also got a chance to rate the NIA Chicken and Leek Pie. While back in 2013, an NIA Apple Pie was on the menu and got rated on the 7 Cs of pie rating. And with scores of 4.43/7 and 4.2/7 respectively, they both got a decent score but there were a few service faults and certainly room for improvement.
 |
| Barclaycard Arena Chicken and Mushroom Pie Review |
The filling spread all over the plate and it was great to have a decent amount of chicken, which was tender and quite flavoursome in the sauce provided. However it is very difficult to judge the capacity with such a lack of pastry structure to support the pie. There was a bit of mushroom in it to bulk out the pie filling, which was quite firm, but it was certainly mainly chicken. At £7.50 for the pie meal, this isn’t really a price I’d be making a racquet over.
While the Barclaycard Arena canteen staff have once again done well to show their support to British pie for all the international guests at the badminton in British Pie Week (as they did in 2011, 2013 and 2014), I would like to have seen them encase the pie in pastry. However, all in all, it was quite a nice top-crust pie meal without challenging for the top seeding.
National Indoor Arena Chicken and Mushroom Pie
Score: 3.79/7
[Colour 4, Capacity 4, Consistency 3, Condition 3, Chewiness 6, Cheapness 2, Content 4.5, Total: 3.79/7]
RAS
Pierate is a pie review website charting a course to find the ultimate pie. For all the pies we have reviewed have a look at our Pie Rankings or find pies of a particular flavour under Pies: Categorised.
Make sure you Follow @pierateers
and let us know your thoughts!
|
Thursday, 6 March 2014
A Smashing British Pie Week at the NIA Badminton?
National Indoor Arena Chicken and Leek Pie
Some of you may remember that last British Pie Week Pierateer RAS was at the National Indoor Arena (NIA) in Birmingham to help with the Yonex All England Badminton Championships 2014, but also got a chance to rate the NIA Apple Pie. And at 4.2/7 the apple pie got a decent score but there were a few service faults and certainly room for improvement.
 |
| NIA Chicken and Leek Pie |
Back again this year, the NIA have this year got some meat pie on the menu and we have rated the Chicken and Leek pie. As you can see from the photo, this is just a top crust pie. At www.pierate.co.uk we are quite pie purists, so we would prefer to see a pie fully encased in pastry, however it was good to see the top pastry was quite golden. This top pastry layer was quite tasty, though not very crisp and there were also definite murmurings of a lack of pastry by fellow pie eaters. Without a pie casing, the filling just spilled all over the plate and so the condition wasn’t great.
The filling spread all over the plate and it was great to have a decent amount of chicken, which was tender and quite flavoursome in the gravy provided. However it is very difficult to judge the capacity with such a lack of pastry structure to support the pie. There was a bit of leek and onion in it to bulk out the pie filling, but it was certainly mainly chicken. At £7.50 for the pie meal, this isn’t really a price I’d be making a racquet over.
While the NIA have once again done well to show their support to British pie for all the international guests at the NIA in British Pie Week (as they did in 2011 and 2013), I would like to have seen them encase the pie in pastry. However, all in all, it was quite a nice top-crust pie meal without challenging for the top seeding.
National Indoor Arena Chicken and Leek Pie
Score: 4.43/7
[Colour 5, Capacity 5, Consistency 5, Condition 3, Chewiness 6, Cheapness 2, Content 5, Total: 4.43/7]
RAS
See where this pie ended up in the Pierate Pie Rankings or find other pies of a similar flavour.
Make sure you Follow @pierateers
and let us know your thoughts!
|
Thursday, 7 March 2013
Making a racquet for the NIA Badminton Apple Pie
Birmingham National Indoor Arena Apple Pie Review
With the
world’s top badminton players descending on Birmingham’s National Indoor Arena
for the Yonex All England Badminton Championships 2013, it would be a crime not
to share Britain’s top pastry product with the visiting world. The fact that
the Badminton Championships always coincide with British Pie Week make it an
absolute certainly that pie must be served! And the smashing news is that Apple
Pie made it on the menu today, providing a top English pudding when all the
English Badminton players were sadly struggling to live up to expectations. But
let’s not court controversy by over-hyping this apple pie: while it was a
tactical display of crunchy apple and crisp short crust pastry, we certainly
shouldn’t get carried away that it would be winning the title of pie of the
week at the end of the tournament.
 |
| NIA's Apple Pie at the Yonex All England Badminton |
For while
the serving was packed with chunky apple content and the pastry was on the
whole very crisp and tasty, there were a few service faults. Firstly, the apple
did not taste particularly fresh and was unnecessarily over-sweetened in my
opinion (this may have been a side effect of being sliced up and left in a refrigerated
unit for a while). This meant the apple filling was not as delightful as I have
experienced in other apple pies recently, which was a shame because the pastry
on the whole was very crisp and tasty. There were a few patches of slightly
soggy base pastry, but on the whole the pastry was good. It was just the overly
crisp and sweet apple filling that let this mixed pair down.
It must
however also be acknowledged that the NIA cafe do a great job of providing me
my fix of pie during British Pie Week year in, year out (for example, who can forget when British Pie Week fever hit the NIA in 2011?!) While there is a bit
of room for improvement in their apple pie, there’s nothing there that a few
hours on the practice court wouldn’t fix!
Birmingham
National Indoor Arena Apple Pie
Score: 4.2/7
RAS
See where this pie ended up in the Pierate Pie Rankings or find other pies of a similar flavour.
Make sure you Follow @pierateers
and let us know your thoughts!
|
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)