Shepherd’s Market in Mayfair is one of the most charming places in the capital. It’s totally unique.
By contrast, Turkish resto Sofra, has a number of branches across London. My myopic view of restaurant chains is that they totally lack flair and employ cooks rather than chefs to dish out someone else’s imagination…poorly.
So when invited to Sofra (Mayfair)Â I attended with some trepidation, that turned out to be totally unwarranted.
Very trendy these days isn’t it? Being “green”. I was at Live Earth (Wembley) last weekend joining Al Gore’s hordes of pledgees, determined to waste as much energy as possible in telling other people to save energy.
Staying at the Headland Hotel on Fistral Beach in Newquay you have to just sit and imagine how grand it must have been when first built. The Edwardians must have enjoyed travelling from London and judging by the elegance of the dining room they dressed for dinner. They probably dressed for surfing I suspect….
We didn’t exactly dress for dinner but we did feel compelled to look fairly smart.
(With apologies to anyone who speaks proper Italian out there….)
I was mooching around Deansgate in Manchester looking for a quick bite on my own. I decided to try Pesto (website under construction at the time of writing). As best I can make out, this is an Italian take on tapas. Yeah, that’s exactly what I thought!
Somewhere roughly east of the Eden Project in Cornwall you may stumble across Newquay and Watergate Bay. Here you will find another highly commendable charity establishment. Fifteen Cornwall is Jamie Oliver’s project to give young (and often disadvantaged) young people the opportunity to make something of their lives, by learning how to cook very very expensive food.
As it was the first anniversary of the opening of Fifteen Cornwall and this marked the graduation of the first batch of trainees we thought it would be rude to turn down the opportunity to try the highly popular place. OK then it wasn’t exactly a personal invite from Jamie but it was nice to be there.
A few days in Newquay, Cornwall had me looking and talking like a surfer dude in no time. Fistral Beach is the centre of all (cool) surfing activity in England., So seeing as we were staying at the Headland Hotel next door, why not skip down to the beach and Fistral Blu, a trendy eatery, we thought.
It claims to be fine dining but falls a bit short of that. In fact I was left unsure as to what exactly it was trying to achieve. Do they want surfers fresh from the beach, or the rich and famous of Newquay to drive down to eat?
Deep in Jack the Ripper territory just behind Bishopsgate Police Station lies a dark secret. Whitechapel is legendary for the murders committed by one of the first serial killers to gain notoriety. Nowadays an altogether different cereal is found in the back alleys, and the only murder is evidenced by an occasional squealing lobster.
The back alley known as Widegate Street is where I found Sri Thong, a Thai restaurant with a name that brings back haunting memories of that famous and heinous picture of Peter Stringfellow on the beach.
I normally follow Jeff Nolan for his views on enterprise software but this post caught my eye in relation to restaurant reviews.
An advert is only going to make me aware of a restaurant. The next step is to find out what common customers think. I don’t trust the reviews on Top Table and similar “guide” sites because it is too easy for them to be rigged.
Why don’t more people (especially in the UK) blog about their dining experiences?
If you click on the “Food” link under Categories on my home page you can see all the reviews I have done so far and there are lots more to come.
So come on everyone – let’s get busy! Anyone who knows of any good blogs in this regard, please let me know and I will publicise them on this site.
My day job took me to the City and after a morning of extreme hard work, a lunchtime visit to TKs on Lovat Lane.
Paul Hacker took me so I figured we might be there all afternoon.
When you join a wine club, the first thing they do is try to get you to commit to a monthly/annual/quarterly case of wines “to help you explore the wine world you might not otherwise experience”, whereas you are stupid if you don’t realise that it’s just a plan to get a commitment to spend.
On this basis I was once stupid enough to subscribe to the Sunday Times Wine Club’s “Cellar Classics”, a six monthly case of 6 reds and 6 whites of about £10 a bottle. In the end I decided I could pick the wines better myself and cancelled.Â
Stumble It!
