16 Jul 2024
James Cameron stays close to home to explore the Trestle Theatre’s new café offering…
The area around Highfield Park on the East Side of St Albans is something of a culinary wasteland, and I know of what I speak as this is my manor. Other than a couple of chippies, if you want to go out to eat you’re in Marshalswick or Tyttenhanger before you start having options. It was with great excitement and anticipation, then, that I heard that Fade to Black would be taking over the café at Trestle.
To provide a bit of background on the previous sentence, the Trestle is an Arts Centre in an old church with a fixation on masks that would put a Batman villain to shame, whilst Fade to Black is a Metallica song, but more pertinent to the matter at hand it is a café in The Quadrant that has expanded into a wine bar over time. Put the two together and you have a café in an arts centre.
As you would expect from the pedigree, the space itself is lovely. There are plants and poems and portholes if you wanted to pretend you were a pirate.
I would imagine the café is a godsend to young families in the vicinity, and it even had an adventure playground out the front and a children’s lunch option.
There are treats for dogs as well, and if you want to succeed in the Highfield area then winning over the dog and child demographics is vital.
It has quite variable levels of luminosity, though, and some gloomy corners.
The menu is fairly standard café fare. There are hot drinks and sandwiches and not really very much else, there are none of the more exciting flights of fancy that you would find in say the Courtyard Café.
In the evening they have cheese and charcuterie platters and it is more socially acceptable to drink the beer and wine they have, it sounds like a real scene.
We all went for Chai Lattes to drink, which were delightfully spicy and covered with a proper dusting of cinnamon. The sandwiches are nice, but simple. There’s no side salad or dressing but the ingredients are good quality. The chorizo and jalapeno toastie had good thick sourdough and spicy cheese is always going to go down well with me.
The vegan option was a colourful combination of carrot and beetroot. There was supposed to be turmeric hummus as well but they were out when we visited. They said they would replace it with smashed avocado, but that was listed on the menu already so it doesn’t quite work as a substitution. It was very tasty, but would have been even better with the hummus.
Only two of our three sandwiches ordered arrived, and it turned out one of them had not made it through the ordering process, but luckily it was identical to one that had been brought, which was already cut in half, and the errant one arrived quickly afterwards, so no harm no foul.
The staff are all very amicable, and are happy to adjust dishes as needed. If I’m honest, the main thing that will keep me coming back to Fade to Black is the location, but everything else is perfectly pleasant and it is certainly a step up from getting a bacon bap from the Spar.
