Restaurant Review: Viet Grill

I suffer from a very difficult and compulsive gastronomic affliction.  It's commonly referred to as food envy.  Its one of my main reasons for over-ordering, if I see nice food going past I want it.  You can, therefore, imagine my dismay when I couldn't go with some friends to Viet Grill on Kingsland Road because I was working.  It got even worse when I saw one of them for lunch at the Charles Lamb a few days later.  'Oh it was AMAAAAZING!  We had this delicious fish in dill and then a great beef...' and so on.  Thankfully after a couple of days of pacing around and waking up in cold sweats muttering to myself about pho I was in area and in need of dinner. 

Restaurant Review: The Charles Lamb Pub

Sunday's are difficult.  You have to work the next morning.  You're hung over from the night before.  You're tired and irritable.  You wanted a lie in and some idiotic birds woke you up with their tuneless warbling.  All a bit rubbish really.  But, there is one thing that makes Sunday's great and that's Sunday lunch.  Given the aforementioned problems, however, not everyone feels up to making one.  The promise of going out instead is tempting, but often disappointing.  Not so the Charles Lamb in Angel!  This lovely pub has a great selection of Meantime beers on tap, good cider and great hangover smiting Bloody Marys at only £4.50 (only in London prices, overpriced in the rest of the world).  Most importantly they have board-games!  No that's not right, sorry. I meant to say most importantly they do a brilliant roasts lunch.

Restaurant Review: Antepliler

A Friday night kebab is completely delicious... at the time... because if you're having one you're drunk!  Sober they are disgusting as you can imagine.  That's probably all you can do, but I know from experience, because of the cold winter's day in 6th Form when I decided to get one for lunch.  By the time I'd got back the grease had solidified into something that looked like (if I'm being generous) candle wax and covered the grey quite scary looking meat.  This is a sad and completely unfair representation of Turkish food, but is what most people eat most regularly.  But, seeing as I now live near Manor House I'm completely spoilt for choice for incredible Turkish food and delicious char grilled kebab and Antepliler is definitely the pick of the bunch so far.

Restaurant Review: Viajante

Finally after a long exam forced absence where I just about had time to eat, but certainly not to write, I'm back and I thought I'd kick-start my return with something special.  You may remember that some time ago I wrote about Nuno Mendes' supper-club The Loft.  I was taken there as a birthday present and to return the favour I took my girlfriend for dinner at his new venture Viajante for hers.  Thankfully it was very good.

Restaurant Review: Asmara

Me and a friend came across this place after a trip to the perennially brilliant Ritzy cinema in Brixton.  We were looking for some dinner and the Time Out review in the window promised good things, so we thought we'd give it a go.  The inside is far nicer than the standard looking store front would suggest, clean lined, pale wood furniture, paintings and weavings of Eritrean scenes cover the walls, of what is a pleasantly small place.  Never having eaten Eritrean food before we decided to go for the royal banquet so we could try a lot of different dishes.  I remember being impressed.  So when I was looking for somewhere to eat dinner in Brixton the other evening I suggested Asmara.

Restaurant Review: The Victoria

Children in restaurants should be nicely behaved, they should have it explained to them that the other guests have paid for their lunch and want to enjoy it, and if they can't manage to behave then don't take them out.  Sadly not one single parent in the Victoria had observed this perfectly sensible and quite obvious bit of advice.  Chaos abounded!  Some kind of wind up propellor was fired across our table, something climbed across my girlfriends chair and of course there was shouting, and crying... sometimes separately, sometimes at once.  Nor was it just one set of kids, literally everyone else in the whole place had some in tow.  Oh and the food is pretty average too.  You have been warned!

Le Baratin

Le Baratin has had a lot of hype and has become a bit of a destination apparently.  We read about it in what is a very reliable Time Out guide to the city that said people from all over town were coming to this far flung part of North-West Paris.  The journey was certainly not helped by deciding to take a cab to avoid being late, the traffic was terrible, something I would have known if I had paid more attention to all the jokes about Parisian traffic-jams in the Asterix comics I used to read.  When we arrived we were a bit frazzled and wet after having got out in slightly the wrong place finding our way in the rain.  Thankfully El Baratin is instantly comforting.  The interior is simple and worn in a well-used way that looks immediately welcoming.  The service is friendly and the bistro is busy, relaxed and chatty.