A girl has to eat, and this time it’s Japanese food! So check out my latest review on Tsunami Japanese Restaurant as I storm my way through a multitude of dishes. I’ve posted it as part of a blog exchange with fellow food blogger, Londoneater.
So to read all, and savour the yummy dishes, click here ‘Tsunami Restaurant Review’.
And be sure to come back here on Wednesday to check out Londoneater’s post.
Happy eating!
Pre-dessert of poached beetroot and beetroot sorbets
Although I have been to the one-star Michelin restaurant The Greenhouse before, this lunch was my first visit since it was refurbished in January 2008. My previous visit was at dinnertime, and my memory of the restaurant was that it was rather romantic. However, this time round, the dining room seemed a little more sombre. Perhaps my original impression was influenced by the volume of champagne I had drunk, or by the person I was dining with that evening. And being daytime, there was also no soft hue emitting from artificial lighting to provide a more seductive feel, instead there was a lovely, albeit slightly harsher, natural light pouring through the windows instead. Nor were there the lights that shimmer of an evening along the length of the pathway leading up to the entrance, and which also serve to illuminate the lovely landscaped garden. And rather than a clientele who might dine at night for the primary pursuit of culinary pleasure (or other pleasures), the lunchtime crowd appeared to have a more business focus. And my dining companion: he was just a very good, platonic friend.
A call to chocolate lovers! The 2009 Chocolate Festival will be coming to London’s Southbank between Friday 3 to Sunday 5 April 2009 (11am to 8pm daily, 6pm Sunday). And it’s free to attend! There will be chocolate tastings (yum!), chocolate cakes, chocolate workshops, chocolate fountains, chocolate art, chocolate books, chocolates with wine, chocolate demonstrations, chocolate truffles, organic chocolates, chocolate milkshakes, hot chocolate, and even chocolate beauty products. What more could you want?
William Curley, the winner of the 2009 Best British Chocolatier prize for the third year running (as awarded by The Academy of Chocolate), will also be hosting a stall.
And here’s another date for your diary. Chocolate Week 2009 will run from 12 to 18 October 2009.
Summary information:
The Chocolate Festival at:
Southbank Centre Square
Belvedere Road
Outside Royal Festival Hall
Friday 3 – Sunday 5 April 2009
11am – 8pm daily (6pm Sunday)
Email: thechocolatefestival@yahoo.co.uk
Web: http://www.chocolate-festival-southbank-london
I am hoping the sunny, beautiful weather that we’ve been having in London for the past few days is a sign that this summer will be a brilliant one. For me, one of the highlight events of the summer is the food festival, the Taste of London. It surely is one of the best foodie events that London has to offer, what with some of this city’s top restaurants setting up camp at Regent’s Park so that we can taste our way through each one. The first time I went was in 2005, and that day was one of the hottest of the year. You couldn’t have asked for anything better; food, booze, and lots of sunshine.
Taste of London 2009 is almost upon us again and tickets are on sale now. It’s on between 18 – 21 June at Regent’s Park, so put these dates in your diary. Here’s to a great summer.
Web: http://www.taste-of-london-2009/
A taste of the line-up *
Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester • Asia de Cuba • Benares • Boxwood Café • Bumpkin • Cinnamon Kitchen • Cocoon • Croque Gascon • Fino • Kai Mayfair • L’Anima • L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon • Launceston Place • Le Café Anglais • Le Gavroche • Le Pont de la Tour • Odette’s • Pied a Terre • Quo Vadis Refettorio • Rhodes Twenty Four • Salt Yard • Sumosan • Tamarind • The Grill at The Dorchester • The Landau • Theo Randall • Tom’s Kitchen
* From the 2009 Taste of London website. Correct as at 20 March 2009.
Dear fellow food lovers, here’s a quick reminder about the upcoming London Restaurant Week which runs from 16 to 29 March 2009. In conjunction with Visa and Lastminute.com, over 100 restaurants in London will be offering some top value menus: two course lunches from £15, and three course dinners from £25. Restaurants include the gorgeous looking Landau, and some Michelin-starred eateries such as Nahm, Quilon, Benares, Tom Aikens, and one of my personal favourites, the Foliage at the Mandarin Oriental. Just as well London Restaurant Week runs for two weeks.
To book, go to www.londonrestaurantweek.co.uk
Polenta with parmesan and poached farm eggs
A girl has to eat, and when a girl has to eat, a girl has to eat well. A fellow girlie friend happened to have the day off from work, and so I had to think of somewhere nice for our girlie lunch. I cranked through the inner recesses of the restaurant database in my brain. Hmm, perhaps something a little bit upmarket. Yes, a Michelin-starred restaurant would be a nice touch. After all good food is what one would expect a girl to eat. Mayfair came to mind, perhaps somewhere near the Elemis spa in case we feel like a bit of pampering afterwards. Aah, what about Angela Hartnett’s recently crowned one-star Michelin restaurant Murano I thought? One-star Michelin, Mayfair, and with Angela Hartnett, one of the most successful female chefs in the country at the helm, it seemed only just to support her restaurant as a nod to girl power.
There is just something so inexplicably attractive about Truc Vert that draws me back time and time again. A delicatessen by day where hordes of lunchtime crowds flock in to purchase goodies such as quiches, salads and scrumptious cakes, in the evening it transforms itself into a quaint and charming French restaurant with white tablecloths and tealight candles.
So what makes it so inexplicably attractive? The place has charm and warmth and it’s hard to miss from the moment you walk past its windows, peering into the restaurant as you do so, before eventually making your way over the threshold. It has a feel of a warm country cottage with its wooden furnishings and wooden floors and the simple touch of comforting paintings dotted throughout the room. It’s unpretentious and a seemingly safe haven from the throngs of shoppers that populate Oxford Street.
From the daily changing menu, the food is solid, competent fare, with few frills, but extremely tasty all the same. The ingredients are always fresh and wholesome, the dinner portion sizes satisfying, and all round the standard of the food is enough to make you think that £18 for two courses and £22.50 for three courses from the prix fixe menu, which is available between 6pm to 7:30pm, is truly great value. And there are a reasonable number of choices on the menu too, with five options for both starters and mains. For even more variety, there is also the a la carte menu where starters are priced at about £6 to £10 and mains at £15 to £18.
Sautéed squid with Thai style vegetables
On this visit, I settled on a sautéed squid with Thai style vegetables, bok choy, egg noodles and soy and spring onion sauce from the prix fixe menu. For a starter, the portions were overwhelming generous. The squid was exquisitely tender although the vegetables were overpowered by too much soy sauce.
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.