I don’t know if I’ve ever blogged before about GBK but I’m sure I’ve eaten there nearly ten times in the last five years. For me it’s the kind of place which is good, no make that great, when I’m there but then for some reason as soon as I’ve walked out of the restaurant I would happily not even consider going there for months if not a whole year. Why I have no idea as I always enjoy the food and the company when I’ve eaten there. The clue to GBK, or Gourmet Burger Kitchen, is in the name – a restaurant specialising in gourmet burgers. Created by three Kiwis they not only do a mean selection of burgers they have the most awesome fries I’ve had in London. Their milkshakes (coming in flavours including lime, banana, oreo) are kick butt too. In addition to the “regular” burgers they also have some special items which currently include buffalo and wild boar. I’ve yet to try out these specialties … maybe next time!

Tonight I had a catch up with Caro and Nate and a good friend of Caro’s Philippe (he is her sister’s boyfriend’s sister’s boyfriend – I think I’ve got that right! who I met him Caro and Nate’s wedding in France last year) at the GBK in South Kensington. Whether its due to the credit crunch or other reasons GBK have had long running offers where you can get 2-4-1 on burgers / salads. Tonight the boys took it literally and opted to get two burgers each!! Let me tell you that the burgers at GBK are not tiny little things and combined with a side order of chips one burger is more than enough to put me on the way to being so full that I literally feel sick after meals at GBK. Hilariously, I don’t know if its because Nate was just getting carried away, he ordered us five orders of chips to share between the four of us! It was quite funny when they brought all the food out – I didn’t think we’d have room on the table for it all!

To my disbelief, and their credit, the boys polished off their two burgers and a fair amount of the chips. In fact Nate finished his two burgers so quickly that I think I was still working on my burger just as he was finishing his second! Caro and I could only shake our heads, and rub our stomachs in pain from eating too much, at their antics.

Then, unbelievably, we headed to a gelateria for some ice-cream …. 🙂

My brother gave me three options for lunch today – National Dining Rooms, Baozi Inn and Little Lamb. The first two were on my to do list and the third I’d never heard of. I did at first say I’d like to try Baozi Inn but Pat seemed a bit disappointed that we weren’t going to Little Lamb so I changed my mind. I asked Pat what Little Lamb was all about and he started to say something about Mongolian bowl. In my head all I heard was Mongolian barbecue for some reason so I was surprised to find when we got to Little Lamb that actually Little Lamb was all about the hot pot, or, what I more commonly call it, steamboat.

Steamboat, for the uninitiated, is like a Chinese fondue but instead of the usual cheese or chocolate sauce you have a stock or broth bubbling away in front of you. You then have a selection of ingredients, generally raw, which you cook as you like and eat when its ready.

During the winter, or when packed out (its not a big restaurant with about 8-10 tables seating 4 people at each table), the windows are often steamed up by everyone’s stock pots bubbling away. Today we and only other table were diners so no steaming up of windows. This certainly made for some rubber-necking and we got more than our fair share of interest from the passers-by.

The way it works is that you choose a stock-type, a sauce (if you wish though recommended for adding a different flavour), and any number of plates of your choosing. Alternatively for £20 per person you can have one stock and five plates each. We ended up taking this latter option thanks to the waiter pointing out that our initial selections, chosen because we didn’t think we’d get up to choosing 10 plates, added up to £39! We decided on a three-way pot for our stock to give us three different flavourings: chilli, herbal and some other sort of broth which we couldn’t identify. You can choose to have two stocks or even one if you don’t need too much variety! For our plates we went for: Beef, Pork, Prawn, Crab, Prawn Balls, Beef Balls, Pak Choi, Oyster Mushrooms, Tofu Knots, and noodle. All of this simmered over an induction cook top which was pretty cool as it was literally cool to touch but still heated up the pot.

Eating all of these bits and pieces was certainly an experience with lots of the food ending up on the table rather than in my mouth, especially the crab and the prawn (hint: use hands!). Heh heh. It probably didn’t help that Little Lamb have the the smallest possible plates and bowls I’ve ever seen! When having steamboat you can cook your things one at a time or dump ingredients in all at once or go somewhere in between (which is what we decided to do.) Half the fun is going diving into the stock to find your food though you may end up competing with your fellow diners to find the treasures. If you’re stock starts to drop the staff are more than happy to top up with more hot water so no need to worry that you’re taking too long to get through your meal!

Don’t expect any thing special with Little Lamb service. Admittedly once we got the waiter’s or waitress’ attention they were very friendly and efficient in giving us what we want and the waiter does get a point for recommending that for £1 extra we could choose another three dishes, however, getting their attention was a whole other experience altogether. Both stood behind the counter the whole time with the waitress reading a magazine and I’m sure I caught the waiter actually sleeping on his feet on at least two occasions.

We paid £47.30 which includes 2 meals at £20, £1 each for tea (Little Lamb loses points for not offering tap water – which was a bit ridiculous considering how salty the stock and food was) and service. From an objective perspective this may seem a bit more expensive than you would normally pay for a Chinese meal (we normally average £30-£35 for dim-sum for example) however, considering the quality of the ingredients and how much you get its quite good value.

The Little Lamb was certainly a different experience from the norm and, taking nearly two hours, was twice as long, if not more, as a regular visit to a Chinese restaurant. Strangely for all the food we ate I wasn’t exactly feeling super full at the end of the meal though Pat said he felt suitably stuffed. The food is supposed to be quite healthy and from the view point that there was no deep frying involved it certainly was. However, the overwhelming feeling was one of over saltiness which was a bit worrying. (Did I mention my fingers are so swollen that I can’t take my rings off?!) I can’t say that I’d be running back again to Little Lamb soon but if you’re feeling a little adventurous I’d say drop in!

The Vietnamese food that I adore comes in one shape – barbequed or actually grilled I think is the more technical term. However, that doesn’t mean that I’m not willing to give other shapes and sizes a try. Tonight I caught up with Pauline and Sandra and we decided to check out Pho which had a cool 50% off food offer on top table. Pho has had one restaurant in Clerkenwell, near where my brother lives actually, since 2005, a second branch opened near Oxford Circus just last year and a further third branch in the mega shopping mall that is Westfield at Shepherd’s Bush. Tonight we were checking out the Oxford Circus branch.

Pho markets itself as a street food restaurant specialising in the title-name Vietnamese dish, Pho (a noodle soup) but also serves a few other dishes – mainly noodles but also a couple of rice dishes and a variety of appetisers. Disturbingly their drinks menu is larger than the food menu!

We decided to share two appetisers between us and then had one noodle dish each – choosing from the three varities: Pho, Bun and well, stir fry (I can’t remember what the Vietnamese word for it is.) We started our meal with the Goi Cuon Tom (summer roll with prawns) which is basically a cold spring roll. The dominating flavour in this spring roll (of which you get two which are then sliced up to give you four pieces) is mint. I didn’t taste much of the prawn but at least it was quite fresh. Our other appetiser was Banh Xeo Tom Ga (a Vietnamese crepe filled with prawns, chicken and beansprouts.) I wish I’d taken a photo of the crepe – it was basically crispy fairly thick batter fried (it looks kind of like an omelette but has the consistency of something like a parmesan crisp only thicker) which was folded in half and in between lay the filling. You are supposed to break up the crepe and then put bits into a lettuce leaf which you wrap and eat. Interesting concept but difficult to make the lettuce last through all your filling and I thought a bit disappointing in the meat ingredients. We had more then enough beansprouts on the other hand!

For our mains Sandra tried a Pho Tai Bo Vien (steak and meatballs), Pauline the Bun Cha Gio Bo Xao Sa (lemongrass beef) and I went the stir fry noodle with lemongrass beef. All were quite tasty from all reports though by the time that both Sandra and Pauline (both their servings were ginormous) finished the ingredients and interesting bits of their respective dishes they were left with quite a lot of noodle. My serving was a bit smaller but being a bit greedier anyway I managed to finish mine off. It was fairly tasty and rather spicy, especially after I added the Nuoc cham (a kind of chilli garlic fish sauce thing) it was quite a lot spicier.

Service at Pho was very good. Friendly and efficient though I didn’t like the fact they served my juice warm (I think Pauline’s drink was also warm) and they did at one stage forget to bring Pauline her requestes fork! There is good atmosphere in Pho because it’s a relatively cosy venue and has a constant turnover of patrons so its quite loud (but not as loud as somewhere like, say, Wagamama) and with a good buzz.

Overall, Pho is pretty decent value even without 50% off though they could do with upping the ingredient to noodle ratio in their dishes.

However, though we were done with Pho, the night wasn’t quite over. We could have easily finished our evening there Pauline and I had dreaming of waffles ever since we walked past a couple hot waffle stands on the way to dinner so we trooped off to Häagen-Dazs in Leicester Square. Unfortunately couldn’t convince Sandra to indulge – her resistance was too strong! The last time I had a waffle was in the Häagen-Dazs in Brussels so the waffles here had a lot to look up to. Mine is the dish on the left, the one on the right is Pauline’s. Unfortunately the waffles weren’t quite up to the same standard but the ice cream – oh the ice cream – divine. I could not go past the Caramel Apple Crumble and Coconut Macaroon (yes two scoops.) Yummmm!

Patara, Thailand, has won numerous awards since opening in 2002. There are now 14 branches of the restaurant worldwide, not including the original Patara in Thailand. There are four alone in London but the one that I always seem to walk by is the one in Greek Street, Soho. We decided to try Patara tonight at the last minute and it seems we’ve picked a busy night as the restaurant was fully booked but managed to fit us in for a 7.00 – 8.30 slot.

The restaurant is gorgeous inside. Amazingly the first half of the top floor is taken up by large couch areas. I guess to seat the people who are willing to wait to sample Patara offerings. In typical Thai style service we were immediately welcomed into the restaurant with big smiles and directly taken to our tables. Our waitress was also very quick to come over to us with a big smile of her own. I was heartened to see that we were left enough time to choose a drink from the menu. Nothing more I hate when, after being seated, you are immediately asked what drink you would like.

At first, looking through the menu, we were a bit baffled by the extensive choice which covered appetisers, soups, salads, meat-poultry dishes, curries, fish-shellfish dishes, vegetable dishes, side dishes and desserts! The first page is, helpingly, the Chef Recommendations and did contain a few dishes that caught our eye. The menu is authentic Thai but options have innovative twists which make worth coming to this restaurant, and paying a bit more, worth the visit. I wanted to sample everything but Pat was thankfully a voice of reason and we managed to come up with what I thought was quite a balanced choice, if a little heavy on the meat side.

We decided to forgo starters in favour of desserts so we headed straight into our main course which consisted of: nua tom kati (Slow braised beef in aromatic coconut reduction with fresh lime, lemongrass and chilli), massaman osso buco (Veal osso buco braised in massaman curry with lotus seeds accompanied by cucumber salsa and pita bread) and pad makua yao (Thai long aubergine sautéed in spicy yellow bean sauce with sweet basil.) It was lucky we limited it to those three dishes as they all just barely fit on to the table. All three dishes were presented nicely, extremely yummy and, granted the price was a little higher than the norm (average of £14.50 for the two meat dishes), had a fair amount of substance to the dishes. Between the two of us, along with two servings of coconut rice, it was more than enough to fill us.

For desserts we tried the gati sod sundae (Home made coconut ice-cream with exotic fruit) and kaoneow berries (Sticky rice pudding served with seasonal fresh berries, vanilla ice cream and palm sugar sauce.) Extremely yummy though interestingly it was my sticky rice pudding which resembled a sundae more than Pat’s coconut ice-cream.

We had a lovely time in Patara. The service was fantastic and friendly, the food was top-notch (and I liked the twists on ordinary thai dishes) and the atmosphere was great. Minor complaint was that our table was rather close to the table next to us however this is something you have to get used to in London and is not something unique to Patara.

Definitely recommended. Total bill, including 12.5% service and two non-alcoholic drinks, was £68.