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Dim sum (traditional or modernist) is not the only non-Indian/South Asian food we’ve been eating in London—though it may be hard to tell this from the reviews I’ve posted so far. In fact, the restaurant we’ve eaten at most often is neither Indian nor Chinese (though it is located in Chinatown): it is C&R, a Malaysian restaurant located on Rupert Court, a comically narrow alley that connects Wardour Street (one of the principal Chinatown roads) with Rupert Street, which is in the borderlands between Chinatown and Soho. We’ve eaten there four times in the last two months. Malaysian food is sort of the sweet spot for us as a family: take Indian, Thai and Chinese flavours and ingredients and put them in a blender and Malaysian food is what will come out. And it offers a number of things our boys happily scarf up: between the satays, the Hainanese chicken rice, the parathas, and various noodle soups, I’m not sure there’s any cuisine we like to eat that’s easier to go out to with them than Malaysian. Continue reading
Category Archives: England
British Cheese: Neal’s Yard Dairy
Though I haven’t posted about it in a while, my quest to eat a lot of British cheese during our time in London has been continuing apace since my posts about cheese from Paxton & Whitfield (see here and here). Since then, however, I’ve changed my source up: I’ve been getting my cheese exclusively from Neal’s Yard Dairy. This is not because I’ve encountered a problem with Paxton & Whitfield; it’s just that I’ve discovered that Neal’s Yard Dairy’s Covent Garden store is even more convenient, being just about a 10-15 minute brisk walk from my place of work. And it’s also the case, as people who know British cheese will smugly say that they’d already told me, when it comes to British cheese, Neal’s Yard Dairy is the place to go; that in fact they are at the center of the renaissance of British cheese in recent years. Continue reading
Street Art in East London
There is no denying that I am a lazy bastard. I am not a fan of exercise. This is because exercise is boring. When at home (which is most of the time) I take my dogs for a walk every day—a mile or so at a time—but if not for them I wouldn’t be likely to do it. Nor, unlike some of my friends, am I drawn to walking through the woods or prairie landscapes in/around our little town. But put me in an interesting city and watch me go. I’ve walked miles in Montreal on my two visits (see here, for example) and in London I’m averaging somewhere between 3-4 miles a day and often not in sensible shoes. In fact, I’ve been going out of my way to walk. Such, for example, was the bit of extended perambulation—or flaneurie, if you will—that led to the rather haphazard collection of images of street art in this post. Continue reading
Lahore Kebab House (London)
My review of the The Chilli Pickle in Brighton, posted two weeks ago, included a critique of certain developments in Indian restaurant culture in the West in recent years, having to do with both food and interior design. Here now is a review of a place that continues to ignore all culinary trends and has no interest in decor of any kind: the venerable Lahore Kebab House in Whitechapel.
Before I get to the review let me deal with the objection that this is not an Indian restaurant per se, and that this is signaled in the very name of the place. This is, of course, true and it is not my intention to enact a campaign of culinary colonialism. It’s also true, however, that Lahore is only about 30 miles from Amritsar and passports aside there’s nothing separating the cuisine of Lahore Kebab House from that of the average north Indian curry house. So while it is of course correctly described as a Pakistani restaurant, at least from a culinary perspective we can refuse to go along with partition. Or we could just ignore national markers and call it Punjabi cuisine, which it is. Continue reading
A. Wong (London)
I’d said I’d have reviews of a couple more Indian restaurants this week but I decided to give you a break from Indian food. Accordingly, here is an account of an interesting lunch of mod dim sum and other snacks at A. Wong, located in the borderlands between Victoria and Pimlico and a world away from Joy King Lau.
Named for the owner, Andrew Wong, A. Wong opened in 2013 on the site of a previous unremarkable Chinese restaurant owned by his father. Well, I don’t know myself that it was unremarkable—I’m pulling that description from Jay Rayner’s rave review in the Guardian from about a year ago. As you will see, if you read his review, A. Wong features pan-regional Chinese food, passed through the filters of contemporary cheffy technique and plating. If you’d ever wished you could eat har gow with a citrus foam on top, or a sesame ball with a dab of foie gras inside it, well, A. Wong may be the place for you (but make sure to get a reservation). But how well is all this done? Read on. Continue reading
London Whisky: Berry Bros. & Rudd
Here is the third in my deranged series of reports from this extended trip of some of London’s best known whisky stores, and the fourth overall (the two previous reports covered the Whisky Exchange and Royal Mile Whiskies and the Vintage House). The first entry was made last August. That gallery focused on Cadenhead’s, Milroy’s of Soho and Hedonism Wines. I had in fact also gone to Berry Bros. & Rudd on that trip but due to an unfortunately timed water pipe leak their spirits section was closed at the time. And so I was resolved to go back on this trip. I’d expected to go in earlier and do a lot of my shopping there for the bottles I am drinking while in London but for one reason or the other didn’t make it in till yesterday. Herewith my discoveries. Continue reading
Borough Market: Shopping (London)
We’ve been in London just over six weeks now. We’ve barely done any hardcore touristy stuff yet. This is not because we are too cool to do hardcore touristy stuff; it’s because we figured we were going to be here three months and so didn’t need to rush to do any touristy stuff. Well, now there’s only another five weeks and change to go and despite living literally steps away from Westminster Abbey, and passing it every day on the way to the tube station, we haven’t yet gone in. Soon we will go in. But first on Friday we took the kids to Tower Bridge and walked back some of the way along the Thames. And when it came time to figure out lunch, we were right by the Borough Market in Southwark (right by London Bridge)—which is yet another iconic London site that we’d been meaning to but hadn’t yet managed to visit. Well, now we have and I have come back with a very large and somewhat haphazard gallery of images that will hopefully convince you to visit Borough Market whether you’re here for twelve weeks or twelve days. (Well, actually I’ve come back with two large and somewhat haphazard galleries of images, but the second will follow in a week or so.) Continue reading
The Chilli Pickle (Brighton, UK)
Back to the United Kingdom, and this time a little further south from London, to Brighton. But first some half-baked thoughts on two major developments in Indian restaurant culture in the West that have gone hand in hand in the last half decade or so.
The first is a move away from the heavy cuisine of the old curry house—ye olde north Indian staples awash in cream and nut paste. This has been a move towards menus that either putatively zoom in on foods of specific regions or offer a pan-subcontinental tour or various versions of street food. (I say “putatively” because it’s the rare restaurant that does not hedge its bets with dal makhani or chicken tikka masala or naan somewhere on the menu.) This development I largely endorse: curry house menus are all substitutable and the difference between fancy curry houses and crappy ones is largely that of price. More places should give us other things to eat. Continue reading
Punjab (London)
Here’s my fourth review in a row of an Indian restaurant in London. After south Indian meals at Quilon and Malabar Junction and two rounds of the Cinnamon Club‘s take on contemporary pan-Indian cooking, here now is a meal featuring the north Indian food that most people outside India think of when they think of Indian restaurants. Yes, my friends, we’re at a classic curry house this week: Punjab. Located in the Seven Dials area, at the border of Bloomsbury and Covent Garden, Punjab is not, however, merely another curry house: established in 1946, and at the current location since 1951, it pre-dates iconic places like Tayyabs (opened in 1972) and Lahore Kebab House (a similar vintage); indeed, it claims to be the oldest north Indian restaurant in the UK. We walked by it after an outing at the British Museum a couple of weeks ago, and remembering a friend’s recommendation of it as a solid place, we decided to stop in. You’ll never believe what happened next! Continue reading
London Whisky: Royal Mile Whiskies + The Vintage House
Allow me to continue with my series of deranged posts filled with images taken in London shops. A few weeks ago I posted a large number of pictures taken at the Whisky Exchange store in Covent Garden (this followed a post from last summer that featured a number of other prominent London whisky stores). And a week and a half ago I posted a large number of pictures of Paxton & Whitfield, a major London cheese shop. This week it’s back to whisky and this time I have a twofer: pictures of the London outpost of Royal Mile Whiskies in Bloomsbury and of the Vintage House in Soho. Continue reading
Cheese and Whisky
Last week, I wrote about my visits to Paxton & Whitfield, the renowned London cheese shop and posted a large number of photographs of the shop and their cheeses etc. However, I didn’t say anything about what I thought of the specific cheeses I’ve so far purchased from them. This is the post in which I do that. This is also the post in which I talk a bit about my experiments in pairing whisky with these cheeses.
If you’ve memorized last week’s post—as I expect you have—you don’t need to be reminded that I have been exclusively purchasing British cheese. And I am pairing them exclusively with Scotch whisky. No, this is not a statement of my position on English cultural nationalism or Scottish independence. Continue reading
The Cinnamon Club (London)
In the past decade and a half or so, London has seen a big upsurge of more ambitious (and more expensive) Indian restaurants, taking the cuisine and the aesthetic—both of the food and of the rooms it is served in—far beyond that of the curry house. Many of these restaurants have gained (and some have gone on to lose) Michelin stars. One that has not yet been so favoured, and which receives far less praise than others of its ilk in the London food press, is the Cinnamon Club in Westminster. For this reason it wasn’t originally on my list of fancy Indian places to eat at in London. However, it is more or less around the corner from where we are putting up in Westminster and when, a week after arrival, we wanted to eat a nice meal without going too far or spending too much we decided to take a chance on their set lunch menu. And we liked it a lot. In fact, we thought the quality of the cooking (and ingredients) was up there with Quilon (which does have a Michelin star and a strong reputation) and that the dining room was much nicer. We liked it so much that we went back a second time the following week to try the next iteration of their set lunch menu (it changes every month)—and we liked that meal even more. Here follows a report on both. Continue reading
British Cheese: Paxton & Whitfield
I like eating good cheese but I’m not the most knowledgable cheese person. If you are not a knowledgable cheese person either and you live in the US—where French and Italian cheese get all the press—you might be forgiven for not knowing just how much good cheese is made in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Well, since I have a number of cheese-positive English friends I did know this—and courtesy Monty Python I know the names of a number of British cheeses—but I hadn’t actually eaten very much British cheese, or had the opportunity to do so. Until now, that is. One of my gastronomic goals during my long’ish sojourn in London is to acquaint myself with a good range of British cheese. Luckily, London has a number of excellent cheese shops and contra Monty Python, they are not uncontaminated by cheese. And they’re not shy about pushing British cheese either. Here now is the first of what will likely be several reports on my exploration of British cheese. First up, a couple of forays into the venerable Paxton & Whitfield on Jermyn Street (almost exactly between the Piccadilly Circus and Green Park tube stations). Continue reading
Malabar Junction (London)
I think I’ve mentioned before that when I was a kid and teenager in India (1970s and 1980s) south Indian food—outside of south India—really meant the idli-dosa-vada complex. Served in small towns all over north India in restaurants with names like Madras Cafe or Kerala Cafe (just as almost every Chinese restaurant was named either Nanking, Golden Dragon or Kowloon) this subset of south Indian cuisines was one of the three national cuisines of India—Mughlai and Chinese being the others. It wasn’t until much later that I became aware that there was a lot more to south Indian food beyond the vegetarian cliches and that in fact south India is more non-vegetarian than vegetarian. For many of us in Delhi in the early 1990s a restaurant in Hauz Khas named Malabar was our introduction to much of this food—it specialized in the food of Kerala and the southwestern coast. Later, restaurants like Coconut Grove and Swagath expanded Delhi’ites horizons further. Continue reading
Quilon (London)
My American friends are sick and tired of hearing me moan about the state of Indian food in the US. Thankfully, there’s far less cause for moaning on this score in London. On my visit last summer I ate at a few of London’s better reviewed Indian/South Asian restaurants and liked them all a lot: from the Michelin starred Trishna to the ever-popular Dishoom to the far more informal Hoppers. It is our plan during our current, much longer stay in London to explore the Indian/South Asian food scene far more thoroughly across different parts of the price spectrum. I know from past experience that even curry houses in London are a world apart from most of their counterparts in the US. Our first outing, however, was not to a curry house but to Quilon, the posh restaurant at the Taj hotel on Buckingham Gate in Westminster. Continue reading
London Whisky: The Whisky Exchange
Last summer I visited a few prominent whisky stores in London (and wrote them up). Thanks to stupidity I did not make it to the Whisky Exchange. For some reason—probably the fault of Florin, Prince of Persia—I came to believe their store was closed on Sundays when it is not, and so I didn’t stop in even though I was right in Covent Garden for lunch on a Sunday. That omission is now being set right with a dedicated photo collage of their Covent Garden store. Located right off the Strand on Bedford St., this store is dangerously within walking distance of our flat and I’ve already contrived to walk by it twice and stop in. On both occasions I have purchased a bottle (Glenfarclas 15 on the first occasion and a bottle of their own Elements of Islay Lg6 on the second) and on both occasions I have confused the staffers by taking many pictures of the store: they either think I’m mad or casing the joint or both. Thus do I sacrifice my dignity for you, my ungrateful readers. Continue reading
Dim Sum at Joy King Lau (London)
The word on the foodie street is that Chinese food in London is nothing very special and that, unlike Indian food, there’s no good reason to seek it out when visiting. Accordingly, when I was here last August I didn’t look at any Chinese restaurants. However, when your visit is not for a week or two but for three months the prospect of going without any kind of Chinese food is untenable—for us anyway. As it turns out, one of London’s better reviewed Sichuan restaurants is a hop, skip and jump from our flat—we’ve already eaten there once and I’ll have a report once we’ve eaten there again. But how about non-Sichuan Chinese food? Continue reading