There are not many Chinese restaurants where we have seen Shredded Mooli Cakes on the menu. Princess Garden is one place that offers them and Shanghai Blues is another. Traditionally I think Mooli Cakes comes out for Chinese New Year but both restaurants offer this item all year around. I don’t know what it is about them but they are super tasty – think it’s the combo of the light crispy outside mixed with the mushy stuff in the middle. Yum!

For something new we also tried out the Black squid-ink and white rice flour dumpling stuffed with roast duck and earthy preserved vegetables. It was, surprisingly, nothing special. Looked pretty dramatic though!

I had a £50 voucher for the Virgin Group and it seemed fitting that I spend it on one of my favourite activities: eating! LOL. Babylon at the Roof Gardens is part of the Virgin Group so I decided to treat my brother and I for lunch.

The day wasn’t as sunny as my last visit but it was still a pleasant venue to spend the afternoon. Plus we had a rainbow!

The only problem was that I was suffering from a cold and could not taste a thing! Still, it looked yummy enough though Pat says the food was a little over-salted.

There was even a magician for the children there today.

After lunch it was a mandatory stop to see the pink flamingoes:

Had the smallest dessert ever tonight at Fire and Stone. My cheesecake was served in a glass about the size of a shot glass!

Caught up with Jo tonight for some Singapore Chilli Crab. We went to Kiasu since it seemed the most convenient and also the last Singapore Chilli Crab I had there was fantastic. Jo wanted to try the soft sell crab this time around so that was rather different. Infinitely easier to eat but if I’m totally honest it wasn’t as good as the hard shell variety. I guess there is just something to getting your hands totally dirty which adds to the taste experience.

My only problem with Kiasu is that service is utterly atrocious. I can handle disinterest if our food comes but not once but twice they forgot to bring dishes tonight and the ones they did they brought in all the wrong sorts of order. Any other restaurant and I’d never come back but, lucky for them, I can’t go past their Singapore Chilli Crab.

Jamie Oliver seems EVERYWHERE at the moment. His latest venture is a chain of “affordable” Italians. It started with an opening in Oxford, followed quickly by openings in Bath, Kingston, Brighton, Canary Wharf, and Guildford, Cardiff opens tomorrow and there are four more to follow in 2010: Cambridge, Reading, Leeds and Liverpool. The restaurants seem to be opening up quicker than Starbucks!

I met Nate, Caro little baby Gaspar and Caro’s Mum at their home in Earlsfield. Caro had hired a car for the day so that we could all go together to visit the Kingston Branch. It was nice to be able to go out with them all as a whole family! In Jamie’s Italian Jamie is trying to evoke the feel of rustic, simple, good genuine Italian food but alongside this he wanted to create an environment that was relaxed, “neighbourly”, accessible and affordable. As a result you won’t find any posh attitudes at Jamie’s Italian and you’re welcome to stay and relax as long as you want. You can’t book ahead, its first come first serve, though if you’re in a group of 8 or bigger they can attempt to reserve a space for you. We thought there might be queues out the door so we aimed for getting there rather early. Despite traffic we arrived at the perfect time and were seated pretty much straight away.

Inside the restaurants is very attractive and very welcoming. Great lighting especially in the room we were in with the sun roof. What I immediately loved about the restaurant, other than our extremely cute French waiter (heh heh), was the fact that it felt so warm inside. It’s a very family friendly restaurant and there was great buzz and atmosphere. What I loved second was the menu – no pizza in sight! Don’t get me wrong I love a good pizza but I love a good pasta or other Italian type dish more.

We started by sharing a meat antipasti (seasonal cured meat, italian cheeses, buffalo mozzarella, pecorino with amazing chilli jam, and pickles, curly green chillies, green and black olives) and a gorgeous selection of bread (focaccia, ciabatta, sourdough country bread, grissini sticks and ‘snappy music bread’ with lemon and rosemary gremolata) served with extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar. The antipasti is presented on a wood plank served atop two giant tins of tomato. Nice touch of the rustic! Oh, we also couldn’t resist the “Post Truffle Chips” – chips served with truffle oil and parmesan. Really lovely, and loved the parmesan on top, though I couldn’t taste the truffle – I never can!

For mains everyone but me went for pasta. Its hardly Italian but I couldn’t resist the South Coast Fritto Misto – a fried selection of fresh seafood served with a healthy dose of Italian tartare sauce. I’ve read actually that it’s the pasta you should focus on when coming to Jamie’s – next time! The pasta was a pretty big hit – Nate, Caro and Caro’s Mum only had good things to say. On the other hand my fried fish dish was almost too much for me portion-wise. I could barely finish the combination of sardines, calamari, prawn and fish. It was good however had a bit of a sameness in each bit. Too much of one flavour for me.

However, someone was clearly still hungry 😉 :

I really wasn’t to have any dessert as I didn’t think I could fit any more in but Nate convinced me I had to (okay – I’ll be honest I didn’t take much convincing – heh heh.) Lemon ricotta cheesecake – yes please! The portion was pretty generous, though the spoon was even bigger!

Price-tag – Caro’s mum treated me, how nice!, so I don’t know what the total bill was but from what I saw on the menu I did expect prices to be a little cheaper. Though prices were about what you’d pay at Strada and a just a touch more than what you’d pay at Pizza Express. Still perfectly reasonable prices though I did expect the prices to be sub-London prices for some reason.

Overall I have to say that we had a really lovely experience today. Part of it I think was the fact our waiter was French and enjoyed talking to Caro and her Mum in French so he seemed extra friendly. The atmosphere was wonderful and there was never any pressure to rush with our meal. Food was pretty much as expected – nothing spectacular but good and hearty.

We (Su Yin, Leo, Kelly and I) dropped in to Rasa Sayang for a quick bite before our movie. And quick it was if the restaurant could help it along any! Rasa Sayana is a Malaysian restaurant located in the China Town Mall (well, its up that middle bit opposite my favourite Chinese bakery Golden Gate.) It was clear from the get go that the trade mark of Rasa Sayang is HIGH TURNOVER!

Food at Rasa Sayang is very reasonably priced with decent portion sizes. Taste-wise it is pretty damn fantastic. The only problem was that we didn’t feel we could sit back and relax because at any moment it felt like the waitress was going to swoop in and clear our dishes! At one stage Su Yin was still trying to finish off her main meal, put down her chopsticks for a second and the next thing we knew and before we could really protest the whole ensemble was whipped away. It was almost funny.

This brusque service is the only real negative to this bustling restaurant. Always fully packed when I walk by with sometimes lines out the door – the food here is good and cheap enough that it will always have return customers. Me included!

It has been less than a month since my first visit to Plum Valley however when Caro said that she has hardly eaten Chinese in her life she jumped at the chance to try Plum Valley for our catch up tonight. I didn’t mind as there are plenty of other items on the menu that I’m still keen to check out.

This time we were brought upstairs and like last time we started as the diners up there (in fact they had to switch on the lights still!) but by the middle of our meal had been joined by many other diners until the floor was full (there was room for about 15 or so other people.)

Our menu choices tonight were gratifyingly mostly different from what Sandra and I tried last time.

For our first starter we tried a 1/4 Crispy Duck. Entertainingly, unlike other Chinese restaurants, the waitress makes your first pancake for you. Now that is service. Everyone I know who is new to Chinese duck and has had Crispy duck pancake has immediately fallen in love with and developed an addiction to Crispy duck and I suspect that Caro has fallen under the same spell. She absolutely loved the duck!

For our middle dishes (ha ha!) we tried the dim sum platter (attractively delivered in a square steam box) and, I couldn’t resit, we had to have the smoked jasmine rib again. Loved both dishes!

For mains I chose the King Prawn Curry and the Mongolian Fillet Steak. The King Prawn Curry was delicious and we were given quite a few very large prawns. The prawns were cooked to perfection. However the star of the night for me was the Mongolian Fillet Steak. I don’t know what they did to it but it was mouth-wateringly tasty and I could have eaten it all if good manners hadn’t stopped me. LOL.

Another successful night at Plum Valley (and another convert to Crispy Duck – I should buy shares …) I wonder if I can make it three times in one year?

PS No mention of dessert coz we didn’t have any. Too full!

There is a secret restaurant that antipodeans, or really the Kiwis, have kept secret from the London public – and its called Hell Pizza. Was it Heaven or Hell? It was a bit of both.

This is not an ordinary pizza place with pizzas such as Brimstone, Damned, Cursed, Envy you know you’re going to have a devilish time. The venue is dark, cozy and very very informal. Greed, ironically one of the pizzas on the menu, motivated a group of us to attend Hell Pizza’s Tuesday all you can eat night. For £6 they promise you can eat all you want between the hours of 6pm-9pm.

My tip? If you go on a Tuesday get there early to nab a seat near the kitchen. We got there for about 6.15 and nearly all the limited seating had already been taken. We had to find a spot for about nine of us which wasn’t easy. We squeezed on to a table right near the front door and, unfortunately, very far from the kitchen. By the time 7 rolled around the place was packed with people desperate enough for Hell Pizza to stand.

Alternatively get a group of 8 of you and you can have an all you can eat night to yourself.

This is the way all you can eat night worked for us tonight: our one waiter for the night emerged from the kitchen with around three pizzas on his or her stand every half hour or so. He would make his way around the tables so if you’re unlucky enough, like us, to be by the door then you are likely to get served last which we did. However, he does make an effort to then start from a different spot the next time so sometimes we did get first pickings of the pizzas. Be warned you can only get one piece at a time (though vegetarians are sometimes pitied and given up to three slices at once and if you know the waiter you’re likely to get a couple of bonus pieces too.)

Early on in the evening the wait between pizzas was about 20 minutes? However the later it got the less crowded it got in the joint and the more quickly pizza started arriving. And then eventually towards 9pm the pizzas change to dessert pizzas. We probably all ended up with the equivalent of one whole pizza each by the end of the session.

Drinks are buy at your own pace from the bar. Bottled drinks and pints only I think.

The heaven was that the pizzas that we got were pretty tasty and I love the combinations (such as camembert, chicken, bacon, pineapple and salami – Trouble, or chicken, smoked cheddar, bacon, gherkins, ham, onions, honey mustard – Cursed, or chicken, bacon, chorizo, green pepper, onions, smokey bbq – Morder.) Pizzas were also clearly baked fresh and it was a cheap cheap cheap night out. The hell was that pizza came around way too slowly, there is not enough seating area in the joint and you didn’t get to choose the pizza flavour that you liked.

I think I’d like to go to hell again. If just to see what its like on a more normal night.