Foliage

My second restaurant week foray was Foliage. Foliage is a very swanky place inside the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park hotel, and I read all about its design going in, particularly how the wait staff picks leaves in the morning from Hyde Park and puts them under the glass plates.

That was true.

The service was spectacular, with a head waiter for every table basically just hanging out and filling our water and whatnot. The food was also very good, but we're going to say the Michelin star was due in large part to design and service as well. It was a little surprising that a restaurant this swanky was amuse bouche-less. That's retrospectively quite upsetting. I guess that leaf counts.

So to start was the warm calves head terrine/picallili/speck/watercress.


This was not bad but not as good as my entree, the lamb neck / olive mash / sweetbreads / pepper. The lamb neck was super tender and delicious, and the glazed sweetbreads were like little bits of happiness.


My mom had Mackerel/Escabeche/Aubergine/Parsley, which was a surprisingly mackerel fishy I thought, but the little onion rings on top - phenomenal!

For dessert, I did the Stilton/Port/Poached Pears/Honey Jelly. Very good as well.
and my mom had the Chocolate Fondant/Amaretto Parfait/Pearl Barley Sorbet

Wild Honey

Wild Honey is Arbutus's sister restaurant, and this time we learned to do the pre-theatre menu to give us ample time to enjoy the meal and make the theatre on time. So we had dinner on Friday, and with tickets for Madame de Sade on Saturday. The pre-theatre menu was also very affordable at 18.95 for three courses, though my mom decided to spring for the regular menu. In general the food was tasty (the butter was particularly good), but it did feel a bit heavier than the other restaurants. This might be because I ate most of my mom's appetizer and her dessert, but it left me feeling a little heavier than the other guys.

My mom's organic belly of pork, English snails, parsley and garlic, was great, especially the snails and the garlic cloves, which I love.
My thinly sliced pork with poached egg vinaigrette was tasty, but awfully familiar... (see Arbutus). It was not as good as the sliced lamb from Arbutus, but still tasty.
I did the slow cooked Elwy valley lamb breast, which I thought was surprisingly fatty. It kind of had the texture of the like end of the shwarma at a street stand in Istanbul, which they shred up and serve to American tourists. This might have contributed to the heaviness. It was no Foliage lamb neck, but the vegetables on the side were really good.

My mom's grilled sea bass, leeks, and boulangere potatoes was not bad. The potatoes were especially good, I thought. The sea bass skin was interestingly anisey, but the taste I had was pretty good.

My 'Floating Island' pink pralines was the highlight of my meal. Delicious.My mom had a Sicilian lemon tart, which was also very good.

Lindsay House

As of the time of this writing, my mom and I have decided this is the tastiest restaurant we've been to in London. The flavors were great - better than Foliage, which we had gone to the night before, and altogether delicious. The bread was also better. yum. Lindsay House was in this little house in Soho, and we had to walk three flights up into this little room with four tables. Very charming, though we felt bad for the wait staff walking up and down the stairs, since I tripped walking up them without a giant tray of food. I unfortunately didn't take a picture of the menu this time, so we're doing this by memory and notes:

Amuse Bouche: Chestnut VelouteStarted with a Grilled Mackerel with artichoke lasagna and horseradish milk. Very good, and definitely not as fishy-mackerely as Foliage's yesterday.

My mom had a ham hock croquette with picalilli and mustard aioli. This was incredible.
Entree I had a Braised rib of beef, snail and garlic, and parmesan gnocchi. I must say the beef was not quite tender enough for my tastes - It wasn't really tough, but it wasn't like mouth-wateringly tender. Not like my lamb at Foliage. It did have a very nice flavor though.
My mom had a very tasty Pollock with lemongrass puree and sauteed shrimp.


Dessert was delicious as well - a rice pudding with spiced figs and mascarpone

or a Yoghurt panna cotta

Lindsay House is our London favorite thus far...

Rhodes W1

Ahh, Restaurant Week. 3 courses for 25 pounds. It's very reminiscent of being back in the States, but instead of cross-listing the restaurant week restaurants with the Zagat guide, I did it with the Michelin guide. So we pulled down 4 Michelin starred restaurants at great prices. Our first was Rhodes W1, who I went with some Wharton friends. I was pretty impressed to begin with, as one of them is vegan and asked them to make a vegan restaurant week menu for her... and they did!

Quite a posh French restaurant with a pehaps overly ornate chandelier at every table, Rhodes W1 is tucked in the Great Cumberland Hotel by Marble Arch.

Here's what I had:

Amuse Bouche: Pumpkin Soup with Almond and Lemon Veloute. I thought this was delightful.


Cured Salmon, crisp quail's egg, shaved fennel. The quail's egg was particularly neat and tasty, I thought.

Braised pork cheeks, butternut squash, and hazelnut. Tender pork cheeks and quite tasty. They even put the sauce on the side. Big fan of the squash.

Biscuit glace, mango sorbet and milk emulsion. This was way tastier than I thought it was going to be. It sounded a little boring, but I ended up not at all regretting not ordering the chocolate brownie.

Kiwi Kitchen

So my friend Marika was in town and we decided to do a little Sunday brunch. It's nice that the Kiwi Kitchen in Fulham is actually open at brunch hours (11, as opposed to noon). I haven't actually been to a New Zealand restaurant, so this was going to be exciting. And it was!

To start we had some NZ green-lipped mussels. Half-dozen lightly pickled with ti-toki, lindauer and kawakawa, and the other half with coconut, chilli, coriander, and lime leaf. Really delicious.

My brunch was very tasty: roast lamb hash with kumara, onions, fried egg & watercress on flat bread. The only issue was that the maori flat bread on which it was served was a tad rock-hard in places and thus very hard to cut.

And of course, we couldn't skip some kiwi dessert.
Marika had the kiwi kitchen passionfruit pavlova with feijoa, kiwi and berries,
while I went with sautéed manuka honey vodka spiced bananas, thick ‘n’ fluffy pancake with hokey pokey ice cream.

Goring

There are only a few fancy places you can make reservations for afternoon tea three weeks before the date, which is a little ridiculous imo. The Goring was one of them, so we went. It's menu looked more exciting than most others anyhow, with a special Goring trifle after you've stuffed yourself silly.

The Amuse Bouche was a lobster crawfish cream soup type stuff. Yum!



The sandwich, scone and pastry tray was also quite tasty. There were two sandwiches I thought were particularly tasty, the coronation chicken and I think like pheasant and watercress or something. We didn't refill the egg salad or the smoked salmon sandwiches. The pastries included a lemon macaroon, an apple pie, an ice cream roll, apple jelly, chocolate cake, and a little berry cupcake. Tasty.

And then the "Not Quite a Trifle" trifle:
All in all a very nice afternoon tea. Better than Fortnum & Mason like what.

Arbutus

I heard about the extraordinarily affordable three course pre-theatre (<- look, that's me being British again) menu at Arbutus and Wild Honey for less than a twenty. A word of warning though. Pre-theatre implies a pre-dinner theatre. After rushing through our 6pm dinner at Arbutus and then jogging to Carousel for a 7:30 curtain, we decided our pre-theatre meals should take place a day before the actual show, which is what we did for Wild Honey. They were super nice about being speedy for us, but it just wasn't as relaxing and food-enjoyable as it should have been. I don't even remember what the food was, since I believe I said, "Just give us one of each... fast."

To start, some thinly sliced lamb with some vinaigrette. Warm, and really nice. This was probably the highlight of my meal.
I can't remember what the entree was, though I remember eating it...The dessert was crushed apples and vanilla ice cream or St. Nectaire cheese.
Three Michelin-starred courses for 17.50 - you can't really beat it.

St. John

So we went to St. John a while ago, excited since Restaurant Magazine had it ranked as the 17th best restaurant in the world in 2008. They do nose-to-tail eating, so you eat like all sorts of animal parts. It was very good, and also very affordable which is a plus.

My appetizer was little rolls of pig spleen, which were very different and quite tasty:

I had the special, which was a hare saddle and swede. I don't think I'd order hare again; it has an interesting taste to it. I guess you can call it really gamey, but I think a more accurate and more sophisticated term would be "poopy." But when it comes to eating, I'm all about trying everything at least twice, so maybe the next time will be a better experience. The swede however, was SPECtacular.


I did like the little bullets inside of the hare, althougha little warning would have been nice before I confusingly chomped on bits of metal...

Dessert was a very tasty and very British Eccles cake with a giant slab of Lancashire cheese. Giant, but not unmanageable. Quite good, really.


My mom got a half-dozen madeleines, which were very good warm, as well as the next morning for breakfast.


So St. John. Very tasty, yes. 17th in the world? I think we're going to attribute that to it's uniqueness and nose-to-tail eatingness of it all.

Yauatcha

So we've been to Yauatcha twice now, and it's quite tasty. The first time I went with my dad, and thus we ordered the cheapest things on the menu. My dim sum favorite, taro croquettes, were very good - perhaps slightly better than your standard dim sum taro croquette - but maybe not 2 pounds better. The same can be said of the chicken feet.

But they had some nice dumplings:

I think these were bamboo and something

and these were scallop and kumquat:Some other dim sum -

Sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaf:

baked venison puffs:
Some thai vegetable of sorts that was REALLY tasty:


And some great desserts, including a chestnut montblanc, a rose guy that was a bit liquerish for my tastes, a kiwi apple tiramisu, and a raspberry cheesecake of sorts. Quite tasty.
Quite good and not unaffordable. I'd go back (which I clearly did already). These posts will get better when I do them less than two months after I eat at the restaurant.

About this blog

So anyone knows me knows that I eat. A lot. They also know I'm a little crazy and that I take pictures of my food. Usually in really fancy places where it looks really weird to take pictures of your food. I've decided to put all that picture-taking to good use and have thus started this blog. I'll talk a little bit about what I eat, you can share your thoughts on the food or your experiences with the restaurants, and it will be just a gastronomically jolly time, um, for your eyes, I guess.

This blog won't record everything I eat (which, given the amount that I eat, would probably exceed blogger's storage allowances anyway..), but it will track most notable meals. These include: anything at a restaurant with a Michelin Star, anything that's terribly expensive and fancy, anything that's particularly unique or tasty, anything that is on some kind of top list, anything/everything I eat when I'm travelling, and basically anything that I happen to take a picture of. So yeah, basically a lot of food.

As of now, I'll start this blog with some recent meals. But since I don't eat fancy all that often, I'll intersperse them with past super meals when travelling, or when living in Las Vegas or New York. Enjoy!