As you may have guessed, I am of the firm belief that a girl has to eat. By that I mean good food. Hopefully of the gloriously delicious kind: the kind so wondrously tasty, so mouth-wateringly yummy, so tantalisingly good that on first contact with your taste buds it stops you dead in your tracks and sends you immediately to high heaven.

At Floridita’s (a bar-cum-club-cum-restaurant), one gets the sense that it isn’t the kind of place that is about the food one eats. Floridita regularly showcases live Cuban bands, flown in all the way from Havana, that churn out sexy, sultry, seductive tunes. Lots of guys and gals float around the bar, downing copious amounts cocktails (starting from £7.50) and other beverages of the alcoholic kind. Those that are deft at salsa dancing demonstrate their spicy Latino moves to the beat of the hypnotic Cuban rhythms. And for those who don’t make it onto the dance floor early on in the evening, as the night wears on some inhibitions are invariably lost, and the dance floor becomes a concentrated mesh of human flesh. In the context of this setting as backdrop, it therefore seems rather appropriate to paraphrase my favourite saying to describe the kind of intentions at Floridita: “men are meat”, and yes, yes, “a girl has to eat”.

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A few months ago I debated the merits of buying this smashing pair of Prada sunglasses. I mention them because sunglasses rarely look good on me and these ones did. However it came at a price of course, and so whilst my foxy inner angel in fishnet stockings and slinky stilettos went “go, go, go”, my sensible inner angel in her matronly outfit then counterattacked by asking if I could actually afford them. ‘Sensible’ eventually won over, but months later I kept wishing I had succumbed to my inner yearnings.

Sitting at dinner at Inamo, I was again washed over with that wave of “I wish I had bought those damn sunglasses”. Playing with the table, I was being blinded by the kaleidoscope of ever changing patterns and colours that were flashing up at me from this new toy every two minutes.

To explain, Inamo is a restaurant with an interactive ordering system. The menu is displayed through the table and once you’ve decided what you want, you order through the table. There are also games, even a function to allow you to call for a taxi home, and you can also choose the patterns and colours of your table to design your own personal look. But we were being all too clever, we were. We had decided on the random select mode and our table therefore changed patterns and colours every two minutes. So really, I only had us to blame for being blinded, by of all things, a table.

Our shiny table on random shuffle

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Note: This write-up was based on a dinner I had before the fire earlier in 2009 which closed the restaurant for a number of months. The restaurant has since re-opened.

The mouth-watering chicken at Bar Shu

Walking down Frith Street to my destination of Bar Shu, a Sichuan (Szechuan) restaurant, I happened to notice Barrafina. But then Barrafina is rather hard to miss. With big glass windows, shiny white walls, plenty of elegantly dressed people perched high up on bar stools, it generally seems to sport an all round hip n’ happening crowd. It’s won many plaudits, but after the success the Hart brothers (Sam and Eddie) had with Fino, this was bound to be a sure thing. I would rather like to eat there, but one key factor has always held me back – their no bookings policy. Despite having shown my face at Barrafina on a couple of previous occasions, I was unable to secure a table without a very protracted wait and have invariably ended up leaving.

No doubt I would have enjoyed eating there tonight. So mark a no reservations policy as a major dislike in my world of dining out. But for those restaurants that do take reservations, just as irritating can be time restrictions, when you’re told after making a booking that they need the table back after two hours. It’s irritating because who would want the indignity of being rushed through a meal that you’re going to pay for?

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It’s mid-term and schools are out. There are no classroom lessons, but lessons from parent to child are taught on a daily basis. Some will be of the practical kind, like how to tie shoelaces, looking both ways before crossing the road or how to properly brush teeth. The kind of teachings about life that when we grow older, we simply take for granted.

Some of my life lessons I also learnt in my father’s kitchen. Like the one about always heating the pan first to the appropriate temperature to allow meat, etc, to brown. As a youngster, I knew not the science, but I knew it made food taste good, intensifying flavour by creating that little bit of extra crispiness on the surface of the food.

At a more technical level, browning occurs as a result of the moisture on the surface of the meat evaporating when it comes into contact with high heat. Consequently, a chemical reaction takes place whereby the proteins on the surface of the meat develop. It then leads to the caramelising effect which ‘browns’ the meat, adding not only flavour, but also a more appetising appeal with the added (brown) colour. ‘Browning’ is also known as the Maillard reaction, so named for the French scientist who first investigated the reaction. It is one of the reasons why when we partake in our beloved BBQs we always make sure the heat is high so that we get that wonderful outer layer of flavour and crispiness on our steaks and sausages. It is also the heat that creates that mouth-watering aroma of smoking, sizzling meat which makes the wait for the cooking food sometimes unbearable.

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