The Wharf, Crossways, Dartford. Pub Grub but not quite.

I went with some colleagues for a lunch to the Wharf Pub as there is nowhere else to take visitors on the Crossways business park except Burger King. If you were an overseas visitor, this would be a strange first impressions of an English Pub. It looks like a Country Chalet and extension that has been left by the side of a lake, and if you look at it from the lake, it could be most picturesque. I think most of the other reviews found on the Internet have been for weekend or evening visits, but during the working day, it is full of office workers and (I am guessing) warehouse workers from the industrial estate. Without want to sound judgmental  you can tell by their uniforms.It gets a lot of business.
The Wharf, which describes and pictures itself as being at the edge of the Cotton Lake, is a sort of chocolate box half timbered chalet in the middle of an industrial and business park, built on disused gravel pits. Whilst many destinations make an attractive feature out of famous bridges in the background, the Dartford Crossing does not do it for me. The lake is probably the high spot of the park, and today, during a frosty period, as well as common water fowl, also hosted two cormorants, and a heron was seen close by.

Check out the web site at http://www.shepherdneame.co.uk/pubs/dartford/wharf .
 For a pub, the grub is not cheap, with a sandwich costing around a fiver and a main about £8-10. If I did not look at is as a pub in a business park, but a restaurant pub, then that would be different.
But just how much of a restaurant is it? Well, that has been puzzling me. I stopped going there completely about 2 years ago because I thought the food was very low quality: I preferred to not eat as an alternative.. But now I discover that Shepherd Neame, the tied brewers, are actually making most of their profit from food in their pubs. They have ramped up their efforts, and I have to say that the chicken breast stuffed with mushrooms and chorizo was actually not bad at all.

I appologize for the picture, as the vertical view makes it look like an indistinguishable hunk of pink flesh, but it clearly was chicken, warranting a 7.8 on the CHOF scale - for a cold day it could just have been that little bit hotter. It was well cooked, attractively presented, had the interesting taste of chorizo, with a pleasant sauce, but had that slight essence of a prepared food meal taste.
As to its sourcing of the food on the menu, we can only guess, as the sheer variety of dishes, thoroughness of cooking and the speed of delivery suggests that these are pre-prepared, and the chef does the artistic bit making them look better than pub meat and two veg. A colleague who had a burger said that it looked as if it had been prepared (rather than extruded), and seemed freshly cooked.
I still do not care for the workplace atmosphere that pervades at lunchtime, and will probably decline all but the most insistent invitation to go to the pub during the working day.