Wild rabbit starter for two

I suffer from a disposition that I call ‘geographical disorientation’, an affliction which I liken to not ‘knowing’ where something is. It usually strikes when I am trying to remember where I have last parked my car, and most inconveniently when I am in a desperate hurry to go somewhere. I usually can’t remember, a debate ensues, which ultimately results in me having to guess. Living smack bang in the middle of my street, there is roughly a 50/50 chance that I have parked the car either to the left, or to the right of my flat. But it is not unheard of for me to occasionally guess wrong, which means that I invariably have to walk back on myself. Sigh – what to do?

The situation wasn’t particularly different when, over coffee the other day, I was trying to tell a foodie friend of mine, D, that the next restaurant on my agenda was the Harwood Arms in Shepherd’s Bush. ‘Oh no, it’s in Fulham’, she said. ‘No, I’m pretty sure it’s in Shepherd’s Bush’, I insisted, and so it went. But now that I have actually been to the Harwood Arms, the consequence of which was that I had to drive to, umm, Fulham, and not Shepherd’s Bush (and this was after finally locating my car), I now have no option but to swallow my words and admit to D that she was correct. Sigh, what to do?

(Continue reading her story…)

Rose & Crown

Sometimes, it takes me a while to make my way to a new restaurant, even if I am desperate to try it. I put this down to having too long a shopping list of places to visit (or maybe I am just slow!). Take Bocca di Lupo for instance – it look me months after it opened before I finally went. And Rose & Crown, a restaurant which opened in Highgate in February was no different in this respect.

What initially caught my eye about Rose & Crown back in February was that the Chef and proprietor, Gareth Thomas, had trained under Jean-Christophe Novelli at Auberge du Lac; at Le Quartier Francais, a boutique hotel and restaurant in the Franschhoek region near Cape Town, South Africa, and which was at the time number 46 in the San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants; and under Gary Rhodes at the Michelin-starred Rhodes 24. It’s not a bad CV, which led me to wonder if I might be onto a winner. And seeing as there are so few reviews written on it, I was also wondering if I would be the one to uncover an undiscovered little gem. Make haste I thought, try and be a good little blogger, go before anyone else beats you to it. But no, in my usual slow crawl mode, I only made it there last week, some 3 months after I first heard about it.

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Roasted partridge with white truffle broth

I once entered into a humorous discussion with an American about English slang. And by that I mean slang used by British people for he really didn’t consider it correct to call such slang ‘English’. He was American after all, and from cowboy country – Texas to be exact, with a cowboy hat to show for it. Newly arrived in London, everything was quite astoundingly strange to him. For those of you who have ever had the experience of being an expatriate, the feelings of perplexity around the unfamiliarity of a new country might resound. But perhaps the most perplexing thing for him was the ‘language’. “Bob’s your uncle?? Now what is that suppose to mean?” he would say.

Hmm, I take his point. I too am an expatriate in London, but I do know what ‘Bob’s your uncle’ means. Jamie Oliver has used it often enough on his cooking shows, but I don’t know why it means what it does. But then, I’m hardly one to ask. Not having grown up in Britain, I’ve not been exposed to certain ‘English’ slang. Take for instance the idiom ‘pig’s ear’. Goodness knows I had no idea what an ear of a pig meant until it was revealed to me at an eating expedition to the gastropub, The Pig’s Ear, as rhyming slang for beer.

The Pig’s Ear had come to my attention on account of a similarly piggy friend of mine murmuring into my little piggy ear something about having recently dined there and thoroughly enjoying it. Browsing through Peter Prescott and Sir Terence Conran’s book, Eat London, I also happened to stumble across the write-up for The Pig’s Ear. They rate it as one of the best gastropubs in London. This meant only good things, which was why my friends, S and T, and I went in search of a little piggy adventure.

(Continue reading her story…)