Category Archives: Food

The L Restaurant

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Eating out in London, particularly during the early week day nights, doesn’t necessarily have to be expensive, especially with websites such as Top Table and London Eating which, at the moment, seem to be offering lots of discounts and deals. Tonight Sandra and I were meeting to plan our upcoming weekend at the Isle of Wight which of course was just an excuse to have some yummy nosh. We ended up at The L Restaurant near Kensington High Street. I’d told Sandra that I had to cut back on my spending for eating out because it has gotten a little out of control lately but when I looked at the menu during the day I already knew that I was going for 3 courses if I could fit it in! Luckily there was a 50% off a la carte food offer we were able to take advantage of.

We got to the restaurant just near 6.30pm tonight and it was fairly empty. Not entirely unexpected on a Monday evening though it didn’t take long before the restaurant became pleasantly filled. The restaurant section of the, well, restaurant was long bright and airy with a glass roof and basically a wall of mirrors down one wall so it gave the illusion of being larger than it was but also allowed the light to bounce around.

The service was very friendly the whole evening though I must say that after we’d finished our meal we were sort of left alone which was nice and we never felt like we were being pressured to leave. During our meal we never had to wait very long for each course to arrive. Here are our selections for our starters and mains:

Sandra’s Selections My Selections
Starters
Mains

My starter of Seared King Scallops with Granny Smith & Dandelion was nice and fresh if a little unchallenging to the pallette and, although disappointed that the Half a Grilled Lobster with Tagliarini, Chilli, Parsley & Garlic published on their online menu (sounds divine right?!) wasn’t available, I was more than happy with the gigantic rib eye steak I had for my mains. The sides of Sauteed Potatoes and Spinach were also quite delicious. I think Sandra was fairly happy with her tuna and veal carpaccio though she really couldn’t tell the difference between the two taste wise and she said her monkfish and shellfish stew was tasty though she wasn’t quite game to try the Sambuca sauce that came with it.

Finally as a dessert Sandra and I both just could not resist the Creme Brulee. We were not disappointed in flavour or side but it might have been nicer if it hadn’t come out lukewarm – either hot or cold would have given it a nicer texture.

Afternoon Tea at the Dorchester

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A google search for top afternoon teas in London and guaranteed amongst the venues that your search results throw up will be The Dorchester on Park Lane.

As expected from the posh location, the expensive cars outside, the numerous doormen milling about and the diamonds/gold/jewellery in glassed cases The Dorchester is very swanky. Afternoon Tea is served in The Promenade which is the so-called heart of The Dorchester. The space is long and elongated so you have plenty of space between you and all the other tea-goers. The colours were golden, green and just generally warm and welcoming. The couches/chairs we were escorted to were also very comforting. Our table was seated right next to the grand piano. It was nice to have the piano music playing in the background and I must say the pianist was very friendly! All told it felt quite elegant indeed.

There is a definite format to the afternoon tea set-up which consists of the three traditional “courses” – sandwiches, pastries/cakes, and then scones. However, it has been interesting to note the different twists each venue uses to differentiate themselves.

The Dorchester’s sandwhiches were surprisingly, or maybe not?, traditional with the selection including cucumber and cream cheese, egg mayonnaise, chicken with wholegrain mustard mayonnaise, and smoked salmon. The differentiation came from the waiters/waitresses serving you your sandwiches. I’m not sure if this was to prevent diners over-eating or to give the impression of being constantly waited on. Nothing too exceptional on the flavour front but the chicken sandwich was definitely the clear winner in this bunch for me.

Another differentiation by the Dorchester was to serve a “pre-dessert” parfait of peaches and yoghurt with pepper. An interesting combination.

After our “pre-dessert” the cakes were then brought out together with the scones. The cakes were placed on the top tier of the serving rack and then scones were separately served to us by the waiter before he placed the remaining warmed scones inside cloth napkins on the lower tier of the serving rack. As a result we weren’t sure if we should eat the cakes or the scones first! The scones also came with an amazing clotted cream, mmmm …., and strawberry and “rose”berry jam (though I think after tasting it we think it was actually raspberry jam ..)

The cakes were slightly disappointing with the majority being quite heavy and rich. For once we didn’t even finish them off!

And last, but not least, there is the tea.

In addition to each venue’s own blend, there is normally a range of 20-30 assorted black, green and caffeine-free or herbal teas on offer. The Dorchester was no different and the selection was quite varied and pleasing and was much wider than that at The Lanesborough. The Bangkok green tea blend (lemon grass, ginger and coconut) was refreshing and the Paris black tea blend (fruit, Bergamot and caramel) complimented my cakes and scones nicely.

I’m finally getting the hang of not over-eating or over-drinking at these afternoon tea sessions though I do wonder if it was more from the fact that the food, though no doubting the high quality, was fairly unadventurous? Still, another excellent Sunday afternoon spent with my Afternoon Tea Clique.

30 Years in the Making – Part Deux – Babylon Restaurant at the Roof Gardens

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For my birthday Akhlaq arranged for a small group of us to dine at Babylon at the Roof Gardens. As per the website the Roof Gardens is “Sir Richard Branson’s urban oasis in the heart of London” and is 1.5 acres of green sitting on the 6th floor of a building in Kensington High Street. Normally the gardens are open to the public but tonight they had been booked out for a private function and wasn’t the man at the front door a bulldog about letting us up! I only make a point of this because it was funny watching this small old man (think great grandfather!) interrogate everyone coming to the door. And even though we had a booking for the restaurant it felt like he still gave us a grilling.

As we were slightly early for our booking we were escorted to the balcony to enjoy some drinks and views over West London. The Restaurant is located on the 7th floor so you can kind of look down over the balcony into a part of the garden. It was a nice clear evening so the view was fantastic. It was unfortunate a private function had taken over the gardens as it would have been nice to see it in the day time (we did later go down but it was rather dark by then.)

I could probably go on and on about Babylon so I’m going to review it on the following basis:

Atmosphere. From the moment you step out of the lift into Babylon Restaurant you know that you are stepping into one classy joint. From the sunken “reception” area surrounded by a colourful aquariums, to the coat checking room, to the classy bar that you walk by to enter the restaurant proper, to the rest rooms with Molton Brown products (liquid soap and moisturiser), to the tables that are overflowing with glasses so there is no room for your food, to the wall of stones and lights, to all the beautiful wood and glass panelling, to the fireplace, and to the sheer number of waiters and waitresses running around, all with a friendly smile and word for you.

The Service. The service was excellent and you are certainly treated like royalty from the minute you enter the restaurant including ensuring you were well liquored … I mean, ensuring you were never without a drink. The great thing was that although there were waiters and waitresses moving about constantly in the background it never felt like they were intruding – just seemingly appearing when you needed them. I noticed though that many of the waitresses were Australian so it almost felt like I was in a restaurant back home!

The Food. The menu at Babylon is almost overwhelming with its diversity and descriptions of strange ingredients. I wanted to try everything but sadly could only stick with three courses (though I did pick at Akhlaq’s cheesecake dessert (weakness!). My dishes were as follows:

Salad of Grilled Quail with soft boiled quails egg, golden raisins, quince chutney and red chicory Griddled Kilravock Free Range Pork with bubble and squeak, baby onions, fried sweet potato, baby leeks and jus with a side of Brocolli and Snap Peas with Almonds Peach Melba with poached peach and vanilla ice cream, candy floss

Great presentation on the food and taste-wise it was all pretty divine although I must say that I found my Quail salad start a touch oily and the Pork main was just a little over-cooked. I also especially liked the novelty of candy floss on my Peach Melba and was quite amused by Sandra’s starter of Langoustine & Crab with other bits and pieces. Look at this face … it was almost too cute to eat!

Value for Money. Hmm … tough call on this one. We averaged £60 per person for three-courses. Admittedly there was one bottle of wine in that total but I thought the final bill was a just a little bit steep. Having said that we did have very good quality ingredients. Unless you’re made of money you probably wouldn’t eat at Babylong everyday but it made a nice treat.

Overall Babylon Restaurant provided an elegant rooftop dining experience with a nice ambience, great service and quality food. Thanks to Akhlaq for organising the night out. These photos are just for him:

Obligatory Akh shot Jenny and Sir Cartier Sir Cartier soaking up the atmosphere

Lobster Noodles at Royal China, Queensway

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As a treat my brother took me to Royal China for some Lobster Noodles. Royal China, as a posh Chinese restaurant, certainly looks the part with dark panels for the walls, low lighting, glass topped walls between dining sections, gold-plated cutlery and
waiters/waitresses dressed to the nines. If only their food lived up to these expectations!

For our meal, my brother and I started off with some wonton soup. The portion size was definitely not the biggest I’ve ever had and therefore I was expecting something special in the wonton itself. Well, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was horrible, it was nothing special. Pat reckons it was because the wonton had more prawns in it than normal but I wasn’t too sure. Something in the flavour just wasn’t quite right for me.

We then moved on to our main course of Lobster Noodles (with ginger spring onion) with a side of bak choy in garlic. The Lobster Noodle is apparently one of Royal China’s signature dishes so once again I was expecting something stunning. The lobster itself certainly looked good but was let down by the noodle and overall taste. The sweetness and succulence of the lobster was let down by the fairly bland ginger spring onion sauce. I could barely taste the ginger and the only time I could get the flavour was when I was chewing on the gigantic ginger pieces! The noodles also failed to absorb any of the juices of the dish and in fact I would even say that I felt the noodles cheapened the dish’s overall appeal.

I hate to give Royal China negative press as the only other time I’ve been in here was for the dim sum (which was pretty good if on the expensive side) but sadly it was a thumbs horizontal for me tonight.

Photos courtesy of my brother.

30 Years in the Making – Part Un (Day 3)

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The weekend’s final event was Thorpe Park. Everything really conspired to work out for us – the weather behaved, James supplied some discounted tickets, we had a car to make getting to Thorpe Park easier, not too many people at the park and Jules – who has before today been deathly afraid to visit a theme park with us – could hardly refuse our request to go on this “special” weekend. *grin*

The first time I visited Thorpe Park in April last year I ranked all the rides. No need for that this time though having read what I said about the rides and my rankings I think I still feel pretty much the same way. If there was one thing I didn’t mention it was the ribs – Thorpe Park has some of the best BBQ ribs you will taste anywhere and the hashy chip things that accompany them are to die for!

Tidal Wave remains the number one ride in the park for sure. It was the first thing we got on when we entered the park and we loved it so much we rode it twice. Got an absolute hammering from the water of course so Jules and I were soaking. James and Sandra seemed to avoid most of the water with their hoodies. Darn them. Admittedly I brought a jacket along but thought it was more in the spirit of the day not to wear it. Silly me!

Check out Jules having a bit of a Just How Wet Am I moment:

I had an absolutely awesome day today – I’m so proud of the fact that not only did Jules get on the bigger rides, including Stealth which probably gave him nightmares all last night!, but he also rode them all at the front!

30 Years in the Making – Part Un (Day 2)

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Waking up with a cooked breakfast was definitely a nice way to start my birthday. Although these poor bits of bread got the life toasted out of them Jules did pretty well with the rest of the nearly Full English. Considering he didn’t actually have a toaster I thought he managed to balance the cooking fairly well. It was delicious and certainly filled a hole. Thanks Jules!

After our Lakes District plans were skuttled we had to come up with a game plan to occupy us for the rest of the weekend. I was willing to let Jules and Sandra off the hook so they didn’t have to feel obligated to spend the whole weekend with me. However they seemed game for whatever I could come up with so Planning-Me kicked into action.

The weather was actually fairly decent (in comparison to the day prior anyway!) so I thought since we were fairly near the St Alban’s Pitch and Putt it would be a brilliant day to tackle it. We managed to drag Akhlaq along for the outing as well and we splent a pleasant few hours out on the course.

We saw some bunnies and then Akhlaq just had to kill our driver! It was pretty funny and wish I’d captured all our reactions to seeing the driver head fly off into the distance. Sadly, the head went further than any of our balls did on that particular hole! I did, however, manage to get some photos of everyone in action – I love the silly grins the three of them had on their faces:

This took us to mid-afternoon. Jules then had to spend a couple of hours dropping Sandra and I off out our respective homes for a bit of a rest before we all joined up again for dinner at Abracadabra. James joined us at what was one of the strangest venues I’ve been to in a long time.

Abracadabra Restaurant, located near Piccadilly Circus, is a magic-themed Restaurant and Night Club. It actually is a fairly funky venue though strangely quiet for a Saturday night. I’m fairly sure that at one stage we were the only diners!

The Restaurant itself has many little sections – from a bar at one end, to tables in the middle, to alcoves with their own personal CD players (bring your own CDs or if you’re lucky, like we were, the manager will rustle up some Justin Timberlake for you 🙂 ), to a revolving table (albeit revolving at a very very slow rate), to bondage themed tables/rooms!! Little screens in the alcoves allow you to put up any sort of message (and funnily enough these even appear on mini screens in the toilets! but more on the toilets below.) You can even do shisha if you wish (currently Abracabra are rebelling against the no-smoking indoors laws – one negative.) Then there is the night club down stairs which was actually very cool looking.

The service was very friendly and accommodating – though I do wonder how they would have coped under a bit more pressure. I get the feeling that as there were not many other diners in the restaurant at the time we were getting quite focussed attention (we even later got a tour of the restaurant hence our finding out about the bondage table!)

The food, if a little on the expensive side, looked and tasted good from what everyone said. I found the veges that accompanied my steak slightly greasy but the steak was cooked perfectly and the serving portions were quite generous. The wine prices, however, were on the killer side price-wise – we found one bottle (admittedly it was Cristal) selling for £29,000!!

The highlight of the Restaurant though was the restrooms – boys and girls. Logistically sometimes the toilets didn’t really work but man they were fun to look at! Check these pics out:

I had a great day today thanks to everyone who could celebrate it with me. Thanks to Jules for breakfast and generally driving us around. thanks to Sandra for surprising me with chocolate birthday cake and thanks to Abracababra Restaurant for playing every birthday song known to man! 🙂

30 Years in the Making – Part Un (Day 1)

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The scenerySo, Friday saw us attempting to drive up to the Lakes District. Anyone who has been in London for the last month or more knows how bad the weather has been lately so I’m not sure why, faced with a dire weather warning for the weekend and with the rain that has so far fallen this summer, we even thought we’d be successful this weekend. I guess I was just hoping that if we drove far enough we’d escape the rubbish weather. I was so wrong.

We’d been on the road for about an hour and a half with rain still falling hard when we decided to pull over and make a decision about whether it was worth continuing. Bearing in mind we’d already seen one crash site, one car on fire!, and the motorway flooded on the other side from us, it wasn’t looking good. To add insult to injury the first service station we pulled into lost its electricity. Armageddon much! We had to vacate as it was apparently dangerous to still be in the service station. That pretty much decided us so we made the decision to turn around.

We were still hungry though so we stopped first at the service station across the road. After a meal fit for a King (KFC burgers and Burger King Ice Creams – yummy!) we headed back to London. Turns out we might as well have just stayed in the service station for a bit longer. Not only did it take us about two hours to get out of the car park, Jules and Sandra nearly came to blows with this dude who was in front of us and not letting people into the line of cars trying to get out. He was surprisingly agressive and wouldn’t even allow one inch of space between his car and the back of the car in front of him! Terribly unusual. Check out how much space he wasn’t letting in!

Finally we got out of the car park only to find that travelling on the motorway was even slower – it ended up taking about four hours to travel what must have been only about two or three miles!

So, after about eight hours of being on the road we ended up in the same spot that we started from Jules’ car park. Our journey was so thrilling I’ve put together the following compilation which includes footage of our drive on the way to the Lakes, the Armageddon that was the service station and then footage of our driving through flooded waters. All set to our theme song for the weekend Rihanna’s Umbrella:

Good times. I know you’re jealous.

We wrapped up the day with a delicious meal at Chutney’s in Uxbridge (which was delicious) and a visit to the cinema to see the latest Die Hard (yes the summer of sequels continues …) Review to follow eventually. The movie happened to finish just about midnight and so we were around to see the keen people lining up to get their copy of Harry Potter. I think the funniest aspect of the whole event was the people heading out for a night out clubbing or whatever jumping into the line to get their photo taken with the Harry Potter fans and then running off laughing hysterically.

30 Years in the Making – Part Un

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So the weekend has finally arrived – my 30th Birthday!! Aaargh! Though I don’t actually feel different now that I’m 30 Years and One Day old, leading up to this weekend I felt some pressure to try and celebrate the Monumental Day in some sort of manner (when I say pressured I mean from a global perspective of course and not any group of people in particular 🙂 )

All year long I have been planning to have a pre-30th birthday celebration so I hadn’t actually planned anything for the Monumental Day itself. Note that this celebration has now turned into a “I Survived Turning 30” party (invites to follow when I get around to it) because the first six months of the year have ended up being busier than expected. As it turned out the Monumental Day ended up falling on the weekend that Sandra, Jules and myself planned on trying our luck at getting to the top of Scafell Pike in the Lakes District (our second attempt.) Unfortunately Mr Rain, the kid known as Bad Flooding, and Miss Plain Old Bad Weather all objected and instead this weekend has ended up being a strange mish-mash of events over a long weekend. A fun weekend thanks to some very good and much appreciated friends – click the lnks below:

  • Day 1. Attempted drive up to the Lakes, Chutney’s and Die Hard
  • Day 2. Homecooked breakfast, St Alban’s Pitch and Putt and Abracadabra Restaurant
  • Day 3. Thorpe Park

    • Afternoon Tea at The Lanesborough

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    The perfect way to celebrate a summer’s afternoon and E’s birthday was with an Afternoon Tea at The Lanesborough. Making up the party was Dodo, Caroline, Moira, Lidia and Mike. Having been to The Ritz and Claridges already my expectations for The Lanesborough were very high. Not as glam as The Ritz and not as formal as Claridges The Lanesborough was still an experience.

    As it was E’s birthday we went with the Champagne Afternoon Tea which entitled us to, in addition to the usual courses, a glass of champagne (which, after drinking half a glass, I proceeded to feel very sick … will I never learn!) and a bowl of beautiful strawberries.

    This opening “course” was followed up by the traditional three-tiers which had sandwiches on the lower level, mini-loaves on the second and pastries and cakes. As a bonus we were also served some small quiches. Lovely. But dare I say that it was almost too much! To finish it off we were served some scones and toasted fruit buns. The sandwiches at The Lanesborough are the best I’ve had to date. The smoke salmon was served interestingly in a sweet bun, the egg mayonnaise was nice without being too eggy, the tuna was fresh tasting and even the cheese and pickles was very tasty (loved that one.) The twist on the traditional chicken sandwich was serving coronation chicken in raisin bread. Delish!

    Although the tea menu offered quite a variety of teas strangely enough the first tea offered to us was the Lanesborough special. To me this translated to “a tea that doesn’t have such a great taste and therefore we have to sell it as The Lanesborough special”. It didn’t take long for Caroline and I to switch teas. Disappointingly we weren’t given individual little tea pots which meant having to be waited on if we wanted refills so I was often drinking luke warm team. Still I could understand why they didn’t give us individual tea pots – no room on the table with all the food!

    If there was anywhere The Lanesborough was let down it was in the service. Though friendly it was a little slow. It probably didn’t help that our non-English waiter was thrown by Mike asking for a Rum and Coke (I get the feeling not too many people at Afternoon Tea ask for such a drink!) But our waitress was very sweet and seemed to thankfully know what she was doing though she was often off busy serving other tables.

    I think I’m really getting into the swing of these afternoon teas but I still can’t help over-eating and over-drinking …