L’Art du Fromage is one of a new wave of restaurants specialising in cheese. Jenny and I were taking advantage of a groupon offer of £15 for £40 worth of food. The deal sounded like it was too good to be true – and it was! I don’t think groupon agreed the conditions of the deal properly with the restaurant as it ended up being that we could only use one voucher between two people, and then actually, only one diner could use the voucher. I could understand where the restaurant was coming from – they would lost a lot of money which a newly opening business could ill-afford.

Firstly starting with the negatives. They don’t do soft drinks! Jenny wanted a Coke and they didn’t have that on the menu. Instead the only non-wine drink was juice … priced at £5! Yikes.

But that was only really the only negative if I’m honest. Even with the deal we ended up being able to share our food anyway – provided one of us paid for a course (or two). We chose a starter of Brie de Meaux pane being Brie de Meaux cheese coated with breadcrumbs, served on a red fruit coulis, with lamb’s lettuce, confit shallots and pine nuts salad This dish was really lovely quite a good combination and the amount of brie we got was rather generous.

For mains we opted for Tartes flambées with sliced ham and cep mushrooms and obviously we had to go for a cheese dish. The raclette cheese with baby potates, dry meat/charcuterie and pickles won over the fondue – just because the fondue sounded like it would be too much cheese …. The Tartes flambees (basically a pizza but a “sauce” of crème fraiche rather than tomato sauce) was amazing. I could have eaten it all night – the caramelised onions went amazingly with the ham and mushrooms. Gorgeous. The raclette was yummy too but Jenny and I felt way overdosed on cheese just halfway through it.

Despite being over-cheesed out we had to have some dessert .. if only to balance out the cheese. Heh heh.

The restaurant is very intimate and small. Service was good without being overbearing – the manager is very friendly. It’s a shame the restaurant is in a bit of an awkward location – not really closely located to any tube station it requires reliance on bus transportation … which tonight did not go our way as with traffic we were nearly 45 minutes late … but other than that I would definitely recommend dining here. Especially for the Tartes flambees!

Lantana Café is one of those cafes where you’ve got to hear about it to know about it – although that has probably changed after winning Time Out’s Best New Café for 2009.. Not a very large venue the queues for brunch on a weekend can go down the alley sometimes its that popular. Turnover isn’t particularly fast but if you’re patient and you’re willing to squeeze in close to other people, sometimes sharing a larger table, you’ll be rewarded with some awesome coffee made Down Under style and also a brunch menu which is slightly different from the norm, for example, including such choices as Brioche toast w/ vanilla poached pears and raspberry ricotta cream, poached eggs with a Sicilian ratatouille served on sourdough toast with a yoghurt
tahini sauce and a tempting looking corn fritters stacked w/ crispy bacon, fresh rocket, corn salsa and lime aioli.

Oddly service is very laidback and lacking the urgency required to turn people over and get more in – which is a boon if you’re one of the people lucky to be already sitting down and eating, not so much of a boon for you if you’re in the queue! A hit an miss proposition it seems in terms of service but the good coffee and food still has people coming back time and time again.

A new Argentinian Grill which promised great things especially with an actual fire pit, asador, on sight for all to see. Pat and I turned up for our reservation and were glad that we were put near the fire pit – normally I would have expected to be put somewhere away from it just because prime locations like ours seem to be reserved for diners coming later in the evening.

Service was fine tonight – there weren’t many other diners so I would have expected that. Attentive and friendly – it more than met our needs. Complimentary bread (with aioli not butter) is served whilst you’re deciding on your meal for the evening. The only downer was that we were left with unfilled glasses (of water) at various times during the meal and when you’re eating meat you get awfully thirsty!

Pat was feeling pretty hungry tonight so in addition to our starters (two serves of Empanadas so we could try all four varieties) we opted for the A La Cruz Tradicional mixed grill. The grill comes served on a Parrilla, our own personal grill complete with warming charcoal. We also got some salad and a side of big fat cut chips. Yum.

The empanadas were delicious with the beef one being particularly tasty. The grill was massive and a total overload of meat. The picture makes it look deceivingly reasonable but with boneless flank, pork sausages, black pudding, chistorra, lamb and other assorted cuts it was overwhelming. Considering I’m a meat girl – I could only manage about a 1/3 of the grill so poor Pat had to eat the rest of it. Some of the meat, the lamb in particular, was a quite fatty so that detracted from the meal a bit.

The surprising hit of the grill was the black pudding which was extremely tasty, even if it did burst when I went to cut it on my plate. It was really juicy! The sausages were good also and the other grilled meats (beef etc.) was just okay – a little bit dry and just an average amount of flavour.

We went on a voucher deal so good value from money from that perspective. Portions are generous I guess even without the voucher. From our experience tonight I’d say it was good without being great.

Facilities at home are kind of limited – mainly because I don’t do that much cooking so haven’t really been bothered to get the proper supplies. I had to fashion a home-made steamer using my chopsticks tonight to eat my steamed pork bun. Probably not very efficient but surprisingly it actually worked.

To celebrate Pat’s birthday we took the family to Patara – one of the nicer Thai restaurants in London. With a number of venues around town it almost falls into the chain category – but the food certainly isn’t chain quality. You’ll pay a little bit more at Patara but its worth it for the delicious food that you get.

We kind of got excited over the food and ended up over ordering but it was very very good and we just managed to finish it all off.

For starters we tried the satay trio (chicken, prawn and beef satays); tod mun pla – goong (Thai fish and prawn cakes with cucumber salsa) and goong-nua yang baichaplu (aromatic beef and prawns in betel nut leaves on skewers with sweet chilli sauce)

All very good but I have to be a bit partal to the chicken satay. Don’t know what the trick is to getting the chicken so juicy and tender but still with that bbq flavour/essence to it. With our main we ended up getting gai yang kamin – which was sort of similar to the chicken satay in the sense it was a char-grilled chicken on a stick and whilst tender it didn’t actually have much flavour.

The other mains were a pla tod sauce takrai (Deep fried whole sea bass in batter and served with light tamarind-lemongrass sauce) – a really gorgeous fish dish; panaeng nong gae (Tender lamb shank in paneang red coconut curry scented by kaffir lime leaves) – a lamb dish that even I would eat; and massaman osso buco (Veal osso buco braised in massaman curry with lotus seeds accompanied by cucumber salsa and pita bread ). Told you we were greedy! Ha ha! Oh, we also had a side of veg – must have our greens – and a Pad Thai!

For desserts only three of us could fit it in – Baked banana, Sticky rice and Coconut tart. All yum.

Another gorgeous meal at Patara.