CaterPlate®

Last weekend was spent eating and boozing in Oxford and no trip to The City of Dreaming Spires is complete without a visit to the quaint and slightly anachronistic department store Boswells. If you walk through the luggage section, past the Oxford tourist tat, turn left and go downstairs to the basement, you will happen upon an excellent and well stocked kitchen department. It was down there among the thermos flasks and novelty teapots, that I came across the ‘CaterPlate®’. Obviously at a mere 79p a pop I had to buy one and take it back to the yumblog® lab for testing.

‘The use of food trays has become unnecessary thanks to the CaterPlate®’

Upon returning to London I went straight to the manufacturer CaterBrands’ website in search of the provenance of such an innovation. I was anticipating the usual shoddy, design-free, static html site which is the norm for small manufacturing companies, but was instead greeted by a reasonable image-rich Flash hybrid which even had a video of the CaterPlate® in action.

The CaterPlate® made its debut on a Saturday brunch-time and over all our lab technicians were fairly impressed. The general design was sturdy and the knife was sufficiently sharp to cut its way through the multigrained toast. The fork forked adequately without breaking any prongs and the sauce compartments held a generous duo of sauces without sloppage.

Our skilled team hard at work in the lab

Less satisfactory was the stemware holder which had an opening slightly too narrow for my glass of tea, compelling the use of considerable force to get it in and out of its docking position. Our Health and Safety expert noted that this could lead to unwanted spillage and potential red wine staining.

The ‘snap off & clip on’ cutlery worked fine apart from the spoon which snapped off ok, but couldn’t be persuaded to clip on again.

These last two points were considered so significant that our lab could only issue the CaterPlate® with the Bronze Yumblog® Chartermark.