In contrast to the service at breakfast, the service at the end of the day at Tierra Brindisa couldn’t have been friendlier or responsive. Pat suggested Tierra Brindisa for a meal option to give my family a chance to sample some typically Spanish fare – tapas. I’m sure we have Spanish restaurants in Australia but I don’t think my parents or Stephen really frequent that scene. Its one of my favourite types of meals – but in London it can get expensive.

Tierra Brindisa is a small venue located in Soho – small and popular enough that you actually need to book well in advance to get a sitting. Its very cosy inside and as a result if you have any sort of large group near your, or a particularly loud person, it can get very noisy and disturbing. But still, we were famished enough to overlook the very loud table of bachelors sitting next to us …

The menu at Tierra Brindisa is not overlong and it is also constantly changes – in face the menu serves as a kind of place mat. Rather interestingly for tonight we had three different menus on the table! The waitress was a bit devastated … it took some time to work out which was the right menu but we got there in the end.

Food was pretty good although someone certainly had a heavy hand with the salt as most dishes were a tad on the salty side. The toast with the allioli was certainly tasty (though you probably wouldn’t want to be kissing someone afterwards the garlic was that strong) with my favourite items including the chicken croquette, a scallop dish, and leon chorizo.

Things I would pass included the cod croquette (again it was mainly the salt that got me on this one) and a squid dish which was kind of boring. The Patatas Bravas looked good but was a little flavourless – went well with the allioli from our toast! Everything else like the prawns, mushroom and spinach salad, kind of fell in between.

This is the kind of restaurant that I would happily return to – although not particularly cheap the constantly changing menu is appealing in the way that its almost like coming to a brand new restaurant on every visit. In terms of when to come, however, I would definitely try to come when its less busy because after a while the noise of what in total was actually not that many diners almost became unbearable.

Simpsons-in-the Strand is one of the oldest and most traditional English restaurants in London so I thought it would be an ideal please for us to get a great big breakfast to start off our day. There is a large variety of offerings on the menu from traditional English breakfasts to omelettes to fish dishes (e.g. smoked haddock kedgeree and grilled kippers) and other breakfast suspects like eggs benedict.

The item that intrigued me the most was the Ten Deadly Sins breakfast which basically was a full English breakfast with lamb kidney, fried bread, bubble & squeak and baked beans. Yep – I wasn’t going to go hungry for a long while! This is priced at £21.50 with the full English being priced at £19.50 – both prices are ridiculously expensive but justified on the basis that you’re paying for the venue and the price also included toast, pastries, coffee / tea, a choice of choice of cereals, porridge or half a grapefruit, and a juice – so I guess not to bad value.

Breakfast was a pleasant meal but that was purely because of the company! And certainly not because of the service which was ever so disappointing. For a start the restaurant did that terrible thing of asking you what drink you want before even giving us a chance to look at the menu, for another our waitress was sooo not interested in what she was doing that she barely explained how the breakfast worked. The last straw was that Mum’s dish had some strains of a steel wool in it! How that got in there is anyone’s guess. At least the manager had the good grace to comp us the meal – we didn’t ask for it and were certainly surprised he did so since he seemingly begrudgingly admitted the restaurant had made a mistake!

Simpson’s-in-the-Strand today was a restaurant let down by the disinterested and almost what I would consider cold service.