Village East

Village East is a restaurant and bar on bermondsey street run by the people who own the Garrison. Populated mostly by fashionable looking 30 and 40 somethings it has a lively atmosphere, good (ie flattering) lighting and is deceptively large. The bar is at the front and also has a mezzanine level and the restaurant is at the back, again on two levels.
The waiting staff are efficient if not exactly warm and cuddly, which is probably exactly what you want from people serving you food. The place was busy in a Saturday night and the only minor irritation is the insistence on background music which I never really understand in restaurants.
The food was good, a fairly wide range of vegetarian stuff, including roast vegetable couscous with halloumi, artichoke salad with broad beans and peas, and roasted aubergine soup which we didn't have but which sounded lovely.
The food was well cooked, the veg fresh and not too oily and the green beans served with plenty of butter, which is the best way. In fact we had a vegetarian meal containing a huge variety of vegetables, which is not always the case when eating out.
We shared a starter, a main each, three sides and a beautiful crumble to finish. This, plus two glasses of reisling each came to £77, not cheap but to my mind good value for a decent meal, good wine and well lit, well designed surroundings.

The Milk Bar

The Milk Bar is the sister coffee bar to Flat White, both are antiodean and both serve fantastic coffee, including a flat White. The Milk Bar is on Bateman street in soho and is small and generally busy with wooden tables and funky staff. As well as coffee they serve
lunch and brunch including a very good plate of scrambled eggs, which was just the right creamy consistency and a vegan carrot cake crammed with pumpkin seeds. Vegan cake is never as good as non vegan cake but this was a pretty good attempt. Lunch was £15 for 2 coffees, 2 scrambled eggs on toast and one piece of cake. Recommended.

Rosso Pommodorro

We are back at Rosso Pommodorro in Covent garden and it is still delicious and still worth visiting. Huge and authentic pizzas with proper creamy, smoky mozarella and rich tomato sauce, great service, good wine and lots of Italians. Need I say more.

Test

Hi, this is a test post from my phone. I am hoping to be able to blog whilst out eating, or having just eaten, so here goes...

-- Posted from my iPhone


And here is test picture from lunch at Yalla Yalla.

Saf

Botanical cuisine is what Saf promises and it is exactly what is delivers. Don't come here if you don't like fruit or vegetables. Or if, like countless reviewers I have read, you insist on going on and on a out how much you like meat. Good for you. However, this is a vegan/raw food restaurant so it doesn't promise much in the way of meat. And also this, presumably is only one meal of many, so even if you love meat with an unsuual passion, missing it for one meal shouldn't be too difficult.

Now we have that out of the way, on to the restaruant itself: Saf originated in Istanbul and is a vegan/raw food restaurant. It looks good, and if you have been to many vegetarian restaurants you will know that this is unusual. When we arrived they seemed to have mislaid our booking, which could have been embarassing, but they found us another table with minimum fuss while we parked oursleves at the bar.

The cocktail bar is small but the cocktails are fresh and unusual, I had a Jasmine Pearl Martini with Jasmine tea infused vodka. How much of the jasmine tea infusion I could taste didn't really matter, it looked pretty and tasted even prettier. Joff had a Barber Shop Bourbon (pictured) adorned with cinnamon sprinkled apple slices. Given that the alcohol content was most likely quite high, both of these felt as if they were doing you good.

The menu references many 'real' dishes, another thing which seems to have snuck under the skin of some reviewers. How can you call something Lasagne and then not deliver lasagne. This is a raw food restaurant so you were never going to get lasagne. I imagine that naming things this way is necessarry, as vegan/raw food dishes don't really have names, not that people would recognise anyway and just typing a list of ingredients without naming them is probably taking things too far. Some of the dishes are hot (not many but a few) and this is clearly marked on the menu. Joff had all things hot and I had all things cold, and raw. To start I had vegetable maki, with parsnip rice, which was actually raw parsnip which sounds horrible but tastes, in this combination, stunning and intensely savoury. See what I mean about naming? Raw parsnip, bad, parsnip rice, good. Joff had dumplings which I didn't taste as they had mushrooms in them but he said were lovely and suitably mushroomy.

For a main course I had Raw Neat balls Spaghetti, which was a platefull of thinly grated vegetables in a lime, pomegrante and coraiander dressing with some rich and nutty (meat) balls. It was again delicious, nicer than it sounded, and incredibly fresh tasting. Instead of feeling weary and in need of a nap after I had eaten it I felt invigorated and ready for pudding (a raw apple crumbly thing with ice cream, which had a savoury edge and wasn't too sweet). Joff had a thai curry and rice, which was strange as he normally won't go near thai food. He liked it, I didn't taste it so I won't elaborate.

Service was good, food was delicious, atmosphere properly restaurant like, a good wine list and, no, I wasn't hungry afterwards. Yes, I would go back and yes, I heartily recommend it.

Costa Coffee, Heathrow Airport, Terminal 4

We were saying goodbye to my Step son and his wife as they were emigrating to Israel and obviously after all that emotion, blended family dynamics etc, we were hungry. Terminal 4 is very small, Heathrow Airport is a food desert and the outlook was not promising. Costa Coffee was bascially the only option apart from a Wetherspoons pub, which isn't really an option at all.

So, since I am now reviewign pretty much everything I eat outside of the house (althoug there is a lot to catch up on) here it is: the egg sandwich was pretty decent, no foliage just egg and mayo on soft brown bread. A slice of carrot cake was large, sweet and sticky, and the coffee is only really drinkable if youhave an extra shot. Pretty basic but not terrible, and apart from the fact they tried to put Vanilla syrup in my coffee, not a complete disaster at all.

Parties

The Garrison Pub on Bermondsey Street is a gastro pub, which we have stopped eating at as we have had too many dishes that were not properly cooked or that were cold. However, they have an excellent private room there which costs £50 to hire and which has a projector, space for 30 people, air conditioning and fantastic shabby chic decor. We had my Step son's leaving party there and it was an excellent venue. You can set it up however you like, we pre ordered some wine and then afterwards people fetched their drinks from the bar. You can order canapes but we (being cheapskates) made the bar menu available for people to order from if they wanted to. It was just right; chips, bruschetta, fishfinger sandwiches etc...I would heartily recomend it for a small party, film club or soireee type thing (which I beleive is popular again now).

I do not have a proper picture of the room so have posted one of Joff's head instead.

The Market Coffee House

The Market Coffee House in Spitalfields is an old style cafe opposite Spitalfields Market. It is family owned and so has a little more character than many of the other chain establishments around this area. This character shows itself through the look of the place, all wooden furnture and nooks and crannies, including a lovel old tiled floor down in the basement where the loos are. The food itself sells itself as 'home made', freshly baked rolls with egg, sheese, ham etc, and an excellent bowl of hummus with a huge slice of bread. It is all fresh tasting and not too expensive (egg and cress roll £2.50). The cake counter is pretty irresistible, so far I recommend the banana cake, although it does have chocolate chips hidden in it which I count as a bonus but Joff sees as an ambush, and the individual bakewell tarts. the coffee is good and strong (I think they use Monmouth) and there is always somewhere to sit. I have only one quibble and that is the service; the servers themselves are all very decorative adn look as though they have been bought in bulk form an art School but there are a lot of them and it seems to take them a long time to do anything, which isn't helped by the fact that they all seem to do the same thing at once. No system! This doesn't ruin the place by any means and it is fast turning into my favourite lunch spot in the area. I read on their blog that they are opening a restaurant this year, which is good news.

Bob Bob Ricard?

Has anyone been to Bob Bob Ricard? I would like to go and am keen to know what it is like. I am mainly attracted to the large variety of egg dishes on the menu, oh and the Champagne bell.

Comptoir Libonais

Comptoir Libanais is a small chain of Lebanese cafe style restaurants, we visited the one in Wigmore Street but there is a branch in Westfield and one opening in Paddington soon. The food is available to eat in or take away and there is red bench style seating at the front and a few tables and chairs towards the back, the decor is chic and lively with black and white floor tiles and old Harissa tins to hold the cutlery. The staff are friendly, and even though the serving system is a little chaotic we were served fairly quickly.

The idea is that you queue at the front to choose the mostly pre-pepared dishes and order drinks and then carry it to your table, unless you order cooked food and then a waiter brings it. The food is mostly mezze with a few main dishes and everything that we ate was beautifully fresh and tasty. The tabouleh was drenched in lemon juice, the hummus smooth and made with good, flavoursome oil and the Pitta was crisp and freshly toasted. Joff had mint tea made with fresh mint and I had an apple, ginger and mint juice which looked murky but tasted delicious and refreshing. salads are 33.30 for a small and £5.50 for a large, mezze are £3.30 and wraps £4.50. All dishes are perfect for sharing, which makes it basically pretty reasonable price ways and there are a range of foodstuffs such as Turkish Delight and Harissa to buy on the way out. All in all it makes a nice change for lunch or a casual dinner and I will definitely be going back. Oh, and Jonathan Meades was there too, which is a good sign, I think.

Dish Dash

Dish Dash is a Persian restaurant in Balham. I don't often go to Balham and forget that it is actually not that far from me, and Dish Dash is definitely a reason to re visit.

It is a good local restaurant with friendly service, including a waiter from Belfast who everyone asks where he is from, assuming he is from Iran via Belfast, but he is actually from Belfast. The decor is pleasant and unremarkable, but with a relaxed feel. The menu contains things you may recognise from Turkish or Lebanese food but it tastes very different. Persian food, in my limited experience is more aromatic that it's Turkish counterparts, Falafel taste fragrant and subtly spiced as does the hummus. We ordered a mixture of meze priced between £3.50 and £4.50, including; Kookoo, a perisan omellette,Mirza, a lentil and aubergine dip, and Esfenaj, a mixture of spinach and chick peas adn the afore metnioned Falafel and Hummus. All were good, not oily as this type of food can sometimes be, all delicately spiced and, as I mentioned before, fragrant (although I couldn't tell you what the spices were). Oh, and we had Jewelled rice, which is a sticky persian rice with a heap of saffron on the top and which is probably my favourite dish in Dish Dash. To finish we shared three scoops of ice cream; Cardamon, Pistachio and Vanilla. Vanilla is Joff's choice I hasten to add. The cardamon and pistachio were absolutely delicious adn I urge you to order them if you visit.

The meal cost £30 for two, with plenty of food and a cocktail each. Don't order the cocktails they are average, go for wine or beer. A very good local restaurant and worth a short tube journey if you fancy something a little different with excellent vegetarian choices.

The Breakfast Club Soho

The Breakfast Club is a bright yellow cafe on Poland street in Soho. Ther eis also a branc in Islington, but we visited the Soho one. It is named after the 80's film of the same name and of which I am very fond. The music also has a decidedly 80's feel, but in a good way.

Anyway, the food; they serve breakfast of course, at the weekend anyway and a few more lunchy things during the week. We had eggs, scrambled for Joff and fried for me. They also do pancakes, classic breakfasts, yoghurt and cereal, bagels and smoothies, toast etc.

The eggs were good, well I think the scrambled were good and mine were ok, but mostly because they both came with tomato chutney which I didn't pay a lot of attention to on the menu but which I couldn't avoid on the plate. The chutney had an incredibly overpowering vinegary smell that actually made my stomach lurch and I had to shove it to one side before I could tackle the egss. But that may be just me, Joff had no such problems, he didn't actually eat the cutney mind you but it didn't actually make him feel sick. Back to the eggs, they were nice enough (would have been better without chutney) and the toast was lovely thick slices of buttery granary. The coffee however was really very good, nice and strong and not too much milk. We had carrot cake to follow which was also excellent, actually tasted home made and the icing was delicious but not overpowering.

The eggs were £4.00 and the coffee £2.30, which is about right for Soho. The place has a good lively atmosphere, and the decor is laid back student style but without being too grungy. The clientele were youngish and trendy (not necessarily including us). I would go back and probably try the pancakes or the scrambled eggs, strictly no chutney, with lashings of coffee and carrot cake.

Breakfast at Cha Cha Moon

I need to say before we start that I am not a fan of Chinese food. I went to Cha Cha Moon to meet friends and to check out the new breakfast menu, and it was free. So there we are.

Cha Cha Moon has just started serving Breakfast. We went to the one in Ganton Street. The first thing I noticed was how nice it was to be in Oxford street at 10 O'Clock on a Sunday morning. Most of the shops were closed and it was more or less deserted, excellent for window shopping and noticing that actually, some of those side streets are realy quite attractive when not stuffed with shoppers. 

Ch Cha Moon is owned by Alan Yau, he of Wagamama, Yauatcha and Hakkasan. It is basically a noodle bar with a slick interior, comfortable bench seating, low lighting and very friendly staff. The food is very reasonably priced, both for breakfast and dinner. For breakfast the most expensive dish is £6 and most are below that. The menu is short and centres around asian style breakfast favourites, for example Salmon Porridge and Crispy Duck Breakfast Wrap. Both of which sound wrong to me but I think that it is my general aversion to the style of food rather than the food itself. One of my friends ordered the crispy duck wrap and it looked, and apparently was, very good. The duck was juicy but not greay and the wrap was toasted which made it look much more appetising than wraps usually do. The salmon in the Salmon Porridge was apparently well cooked and tasty but the porridge was swimming in cream and went largely uneaten.

I had a taste of Brioche french toast (£3.80) and a whole pancake with raspberry compote (££3.60), presumably on the menu for cowards like me. The Brioche French Toast was a little too sweet but looked soft and fluffy and the 2 year old I was with loved it.  The Pancake was excellent, less sweet than the french toast, very good texture and savoury enough to offset the raspberries.  

And now the eggs: normally as anyone who reads this blog may know I would order the eggs. They came in several styles, scrambled, fried and in a frittata. However, in keeping wth the rest of the menu they were not ordinary hens eggs but duck eggs. Duck eggs! Now call me squeamish but I have tried to eat duck eggs twice and both times have failed to eat more than a mouthful. In my opinion, and I realise that many will disagree, they smell and taste of fish, and I don't want that in an egg.  

The coffee is good and served in attractive porcelain mugs without handles and the smoothies were unusual and tasty.  I would recommend the more adventurous among you, or just those that like this type of food, to try it, if onyl once. The food is cheap and well presented.  And if you feel like I do about this type of food, go, watch others eat duck eggs and order the pancake.

Maroush V

Maroush is a chain of Lebanese restaurants, and we went to number five, on Vere Street just off Oxford street. It looks very grand from the outside but is rather more cafe like inside. There are two elements to the Maroush V experience; the food and the atmosphere.

The food is fresh and tasty, salads liberallly seasoned with lemon juice, falafel just cooked and perfectly crispy on the outside and the hummus has just the right amount of tahini in it. Obvioulsy we only ate vegetarian food but the meats certainly smelled good and from what I could gather by staring at other people's food, looked good too. It is all reasonably priced, apart from the wine, which is available but not the main feature, this being a Lebanese restaurant. We had to ask twice for the wine menu, the cheapest bottle was £18 and there were only a couple of those before it leapt up to £28 a bottle.

Which brings me to the atmosphere; when we arrived there were two couples there both eating studiously and saying not a word to each other. I am sure they were enjoying their food but they certainly didn't contribute to an atmosphere of jollity and frivolity, and I like a bit of that when I go out to eat. The waiters were helpful but grim faced and I was feeling a little uneasy until the rest of our party arrived and we made enough noise to drown out the misery.

I suppose people go there to eat, adn the food is absolutely worth going for, good, fresh, well seasoned food at about £15 per head. However, if you want something a little less functional than simply going, eating and leaving, I would take a couple of lively dining companions to break the silence.

Ottolenghi

Ottolenghi is a strange beast, I refer to the Islington branch as it is the only one I have visited. I have been twice so far and am not sure I will go back. Both times we went before going to see a play at the Almeida (this time, Parlour Song, which we both thought was awful but which everyone else seemed to find hilarious) as it seemed to suit a pre theatre type dinner, what with it's cafe style tables and piles of food on the counters.

The decor is all white, the waiters attractive and clad in black. There are several long shared tables in the centre of the restaurant and other smaller, bookable tables around the side. The menu is divided into 'From the Counter' (cold) and 'From the Kitchen' (hot). From the Counter dishes cost between £6 and £8 and From the Kitchen cost about £10 on average. Dishes are 'for sharing' which means that they are small and you have to order a lot, they recommend about 3 each.

There is nothing wrong with this concept it is just that really what it means is cold food and hot food and I slightly resent the tarted up labels. Particularly as when you order a hot dish the waiter leans in and says 'that dish is From The Kitchen and will take a little longer, we will bring it when it is ready (ie not with the rest of the food) is that ok?'. And I suppose it is ok, it's just that what they mean is that they are going to cook it and bring it when it is cooked, which is what usually happens when you go to a restaurant.

The food itself is very good. As a vegetarian you are basically getting small plates of vegetables, but they are very well seasoned, inventively presented vegetables, green beans with chili jam, ricotta stuffed courgette flowers, griddled courgette with artichoke and black lentils. All delicious. However, there is also something unsatisfying about it all. Probably because it is well cooked, simple buffet/tapas style food presented as a 'concept'. And it is expensive for what it is. £8 for a plate of green beans, however delicious, seems like a lot.

I want to like Ottolenghi, which is why I went back, and I think I would like it better if they were a little more honest about what they were serving and presented themselves in a less earnest and aspirational way.

The Table

The Table is a cafe at the bottom of an architects office on Southwark street (just behind The Tate), so as you would expect it is all clean lines and natural wood. The food has all the usual credentials, locallly sourced organic etc, which are now less likely to make a place remarkable. However the food here is good, very good in fact.

I know it will come as no surprise when I say that we go there to have eggs. This could mean that we have a monotonous diet or that eggs are a good benchmark with which to measure most restuarants, take your pick. Anyway we had eggs. So far I have had fried and scrambled and Joff has had poached and scrambled. All were excellent, the yokes runny in the fried eggs and the scrambled were perfectly creamy but not too runny. The bread, from an award winning bakery, is sliced thickly and seemingly toasted on a griddle pan which gives it a smoky, almost burnt flavour. Lovely. The ccoffee is good and the service friendly. As far as puddings go I have only had a slice of banana bread which had a toffee ish consistency and was much nicer than it looked.

The eggs cost £4 and the coffee is how much it usually costs in this type of place, which means I have forgotten but it didn't make me shout so it can't have been a lot. They are open 7 - 5 weekdays and 9 - 3 on weekends.

Supperclubs

Joff and I had a discussion one evening, well over several evenings in fact, about the possibility of opening our front room to strangers and cooking them dinner. Or more accurately Joff would cook them dinner and I would boss him about and welcome people in. Our house is small so we figured we could probably only fit 4 people in happily. We would charge them only for the cost of ingredients and they would bring wine. Well, it seems we were not alone, apparently some food bloggers (notably Ms Marmitelover) are already doing it. Foodrambller was a guest in Ms Marmitelovers front room, otherwise known as The Underground Restaurant and writes about it here. The fact that there have been articles about it in both the Guradian and the Metro means it is sure to spread. We may even have a go, I will keep you posted. Meanwhile Iwould like to hear from anyone who has been to one, or if not, do you like the idea and would you go?

Joe's kitchen

Joe's kitchen is an American diner style restaurant in borough, very close to the station. We go there mostly for convenience, it is nearish to the house and close to the gym, and it does eggs on toast and I like to eat eggs on toast for lunch at the weekend.

The atmosphere is warm and vibrant and the menu pretty much what you would expect:eggs, burgers, pancakes, breakfasts, french toast. The coffee is good and served in decent sized cups, the decor is self consciously 'homey', toys, books, cans of beans, jars of sweets on shelves, that kind of thing.

And now for the quibble, and it is a quibble rather than a reason not to go, because we do still keep going: the service. It is cheerful enough and solicitous enough but erratic doesn't come near to describing it. They take your order, the food is cooked and placed on the serving hatch (you can see through this to the kitchen) and there it sits, sometimes for what seems like 10 minutes. Waiting staff walk past it, sometimes even lean over it to talk to the kitchen staff, walk past it again, talk to other waiting staff, look at it, but only after an extraordinarily long time do they pick it up and bring it to you. This means it is often a little colder than it should be, although not quite as cold as it could be given the length of time it has been sitting there. It has now got to the point where I sit facing away from the kitchen, otherwise I become obsessed with watching the food sit on the hatch while people ignore it.

But we still keep coming back. This is because the food is actually fairly good, it is one of the few places near borough to eat (see previous posts Lunch in Borough Market 1 and 2) and because I am absurdly optimistic. The conclusiont to all this is that there is a market for good, simple lunch places in Borough and that if Joe's Kitchen got it's serving system sorted out it would be very good instead of ok.

Hare and Tortoise - Big Dish, Small Bill

This is the first time I have visited a Hare and Tortoise, a chain of Japanes noodle restaurants. We went to the one in the Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury, which is essentially a shopping centre and so not hugely atmospheric.

The restaurant itself is cafe like, wooden tables, no frills. I have only recently acquired a taste for Japanes food and being a vegetarian I am obviously limited in the range I have had. This said the Hare and Tortoise serves good and extraordinarily cheap food. I had ramen noodles, tofu, and green leafy vegetables in broth served in a vast bowl. I also had a starter of spring rolls with a delicously tangy sauce and shared a small jug of sake.

There were 3 of us, we each had a starter and a giant main course (along the same lines as the one I have just described) a small jug of Sake and 2 cokes. The bill came to £30. £30!! Unbelievable. I felt like a student. And there was so much food none of us could eat it all. And it tasted good, the tofu was covered in a very light batter so helld its texture in the broth, the greens were not overcooked and the noodles firm and more ish.

This is great recession food, I mean surely I am not expected to eat in every night. I shall be visiting the Hare and tortoise again and seeking out similar bargain restaurants, although I suspect this may be hard to beat.

Giraffe

Giraffe is a ubiquitous chain that describes itself as both a 'family' and 'world food' restaurant. Normally all of those things would be enough to make my heart sink but I am fond of Giraffe. It is hearty, friendly (the waiting staff are almost too cheery) and the food is fresh and mostly tasty. It is a good place to go when you have seen or done something or are on the way to see or do something.

We ate here after seeing The Reader ( I liked it but then I liked the book and it meant I could waffle on about it for ages afterwards). I ordered somethign vegetarian but without the mushrooms which they then ran out of. This meant I ordered a Power food Salad and had to order chips, because you can't have salad without chips, not in winter. I was fairly disappointed ordering as it always seems like a last resort to order salad in restuarants. However I was pleasantly suprised; it was very good, with generous amounts of toasted seeds and cashews to add crunch, flavoursome but not overpowering dressing and no goat's chees, which is always a bonus. And the chips are lovely: thin, crispy and salty.

There is a good selection of wine, the atmosphere is lively and the food reasonably priced. It is the sort of place to go when you want to go somewhere nice and pretty safe, where most people will find something to eat, not high end but happy.

EV at home

So, on New YEar's eve we decided not to go to the Real Greek after all (nothing personal). Instead Joff went to the deli at EV in Waterloo, EV is a chain of Turkish restaurants that includes Tas, and EV. The main restuarant is huge, set under the railway arches in Waterloo and does reasonably priced Turkish food, particularly good for vegetarians.

Next door is a bakery and delicatessen selling much of the food served in the restuaraunt as well as bags of dried fruit, beans, herbs etc. For our New YEar's Eve feast Joff bought hummus, tabouleh, peppers and aubergines in oil, slices of a cheese and spinach pie (like borek), turkish delight and baklava. delicious. We supplemented it with other things like more aubergine and falafel but it was dleicious and fresh, if filling.

Off to Giraffe, post cinema, later and will report back tomorrow.