Chains changed: TGI Fridays spring menu

Less enticing news from TGI Fridays, though. They've pared their standard menu down even further with the Spring iteration. There is a bowing to the inevitable, and the cheese planks have finally been admitted to the list of appetizers (who, really, would order four hand-sized slabs of baked mozzarella as a side? Unless they had their own defibrillator on hand?)

Sadly, though, two of the nicer appetizer options have vanished - onion scoops and, unforgivably, the spinach dip. Isn't spinach dip one of the chain's key products? In the US, you can buy it frozen to take home and make yourself feel over-cheesed in the luxury of your own armchair; how can it not be featured in the restaurant?

There's been a bit more fidgeting, too, with what has up until now been the San Francisco Burger - one of the few vegetarian options at TGI - turning into a sandwich. It doesn't make it any better, and its shuffling on the menu seems merely designed to try and stop people asking for different sauces upon it. But, lord, it needs something - even had mine not arrived charcoaled into oblivion, it would need something. The menu promises "a toasted bun", but clearly the half-arsed lobbing of the roll under a heatlamp is intended merely to try and disguise the staleness of the bread. It doesn't work, and attempting to lift the 'sandwich' merely results in the crackling of the bun like the arctic icecap during a particularly warm summer's morning.

Increasingly, the UK menu at TGI is looking like it's approached as an irritant which impinges on a mission of selling unconvincingly-coloured cocktails. Pity.