london & winchester

  
In the middle of June I visited Lucy in London, right around the same time as last year, and did a surprisingly restrained bit of shopping, ate excellent breakfast outside (!) in Clapham while it was briefly warm and sunny, had a mid-afternoon trip to the pub to beat the rain, saw Mose Kasher and Aziz Ansari perform standup (amazinggg), hopped on a train and had lovely brunch and went on a walk through brilliant green Winchester, and came back to London for fantastic Thai food at KaoSarn in Clapham. Definitely go to KaoSarn -- that bowl of all-brown soup was one of the tastier things I've eaten in recent memory.

london in the summer

It's only been a little over a month since I visited Lucy in London, so I'm right on time for writing about it! From a Friday night to an (early, early) Monday morning, we packed in a pretty good amount of stuff: a brief visit with my friend Cecilia, brunch at The Breakfast Club in Hoxton (the SoHo one having been without electricity that day (!)), a visit to Radley (naturally), dinner and drinks at The Boater's Inn (which is in Richmond and right on the Thames, and is lovely), rather hungover Sunday lunch at Moro, lazy afternoon watching 27 Dresses, and a Sunday evening trip down the block to watch "the football" (England vs. Italy in the Euro Cup) at Lucy's local pub, The Normanby, which is lovely. I haven't done a truly touristy thing in London in either of the past two visits, and in the visit before that Megan and I only rode the London Eye because our lovely hostess Lucy was working. Visiting cities with (or like!) a local is such fun.

night of the near-death experience

A short guide to Bonfire Night festivities at Wimbledon:

1. Consume gross hot chocolate from a Cadbury truck in the middle of a field.

2. Watch Guy Fawkes burn in effigy. Feel slightly uncomfortable at the realization that watching live people burn probably used to be a whole family kinda event, too.

3. Watch fireworks set off to the rhythm of Glee covers and Disney hits. Try to avoid being set on fire by burning bits of paper falling from the sky.

4. Decide it is a totally great idea to go on the spinny thing, you know, that one over there at the carnival. Realize only once you are strapped in to the twirling wheel of doom that the spinny thing is exactly as sketchy you would expect out of a ride called "Body Count" that is pumping dance music and oh my God it's flipping you upside down you did not know it would do this otherwise you never would have gotten on in the first place why is this ride lasting forever we are going to die.

5. Survive ride, and realize that the spinny thing you rode is not even the actual spinny thing you had intended to ride. This is okay, because the spinny thing you had intended to ride looks even worse.

6. Go on another ride anyway, in spite of your recent near-death experience, because obviously you never learn. Bruise the crap out of your friend's right side as you slam into her with your full body weight every time the car swings outwards. Also, whack her in the face with your hair repeatedly. By the end of the ride, your hair looks like this, which is to say, super hot.

7. Walk from Wimbledon to Wandsworth. Acquire glowing neon bracelets along the way from a guy who is selling them for 50 pence each, or £2 for six just for you (the "Recession special"). You'll need these to torment your cab driver with later.

8. Go to Chez Bruce and overeat like a champion to comfort yourself, post-carnival trauma.

9. Take a cab home, and be terrible to your cab driver. "That was your iPhone that just got a text message, wasn't it? I'm just saying, it wasn't one of ours. Did you get a good message? Was it from your girlfriend? Oooh, I bet it was. Do you want some glowing neon bracelets? That's all right. We're giving them to you anyway. Here, I am putting them on the gear shift. Oh, they fell on the floor. Here's a really big tip, byyye!"

Obviously, England loved us.

london eats

     

Megan and I visited Lucy in London again last weekend, for Lucy's birthday. If there's any question as to whether we ate a whole bunch of delicious things, you don't know me (or this blog) at all.

1-7. Ottolenghi, Belgravia: I'd been seeing Yotam Ottolenghi's name on food blogs for a while, and figured on good things at one of his four restaurants, but oh boy. This food was AMAZING. I got a lunch plate of four salads (£13.70) and all were phenomenal, particularly the green beans (front and center on the dark blue plate). I was glad to see that that recipe is also in Ottolenghi's cookbook, Plenty, with which I am obsessed. The Belgravia location only has one large table in the restaurant, but there was also an adorable bit of outdoor seating out back -- perfect for a surprisingly mild November day.

8-9. Chez Bruce, Wandsworth: Megan, Lucy, and I are beginning to collect Michelin-starred restaurants as we travel now, which sounds like a bad idea for the wallet (though as Michelin-starred restaurants go, Chez Bruce is hardly a bank-breaker: £45 for a three-course meal) and maybe also a bad idea for the stomach. We were so full after this dinner that the cab ride home was torture. (In the sense that we tortured the cab driver. We were fine, ourselves.) Megan left some chocolate on the table, uneaten, for the first time in her life. Worth it. We get why it's Lucy's favorite restaurant now.

10-11. Byron Hamburgers, Putney: Fresh, delicious ingredients for burgers that they actually cook rare upon request without looking at you like you have two heads? Oh Byron, be mine. Frankfurt's burger scene may have worn me down a little, but even apart from that Byron has great food: jacket-on potato wedges, crunchy, peppery coleslaw, homemade milkshakes, and all kinds of excellent burger options.

12-13. Bluebird, Chelsea: After multiple days of overeating terribly, a latte, a fresh-squeezed orange juice, and an order of eggs florentine were exactly what I needed in my life. I did not, however, need to know that the London Anthro is just down the street, nor that the shopping on the King's Road is all-over glorious.

moro

I'd already had a crush on Moro for a while because of their second cookbook -- I mean, this roasted squash salad is ridiculously good -- but I still didn't expect our Saturday lunch to be so insanely delicious. I was least enamored of the crab appetizer and most enamored of the vegetable mezze main, but truly it was all excellent, and a three-hour stay at our table in the corner on a rainy Saturday afternoon was the perfect way to enjoy it.

eating our way through londontown

  



  





A week ago Megan and I spent five days visiting Lucy in London and ate our way through the whole city, from Pakistani at Lahore Kebab House (beware of sound on the link) in Whitechapel to a three-hour Mediterranean fusion lunch at Moro on Saturday to Sunday lunch at The Jolly Gardeners in Putney to afternoon tea at The Wolseley on Monday. We also walked around Portobello Road, rode the London Eye, visited the nigh-overwhelming Oxford Circus Topshop, danced the night away in SoHo, and saw a production of Billy Elliot, but don't let that fool you -- all these things were really just to keep us from falling into a permanent food coma. After living in Frankfurt for a while, the sheer urban sprawl of a place like London seemed a little overwhelming, but good-overwhelming, a nice reminder that you can't walk from one end of downtown to the other in 20 minutes in every city. And if there are whole large neighborhoods of the city we didn't explore, well, darn, I guess I'll have to go back. What a hardship.