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.