Bar du Musee, Greenwich, London

Most museums have coffee houses attached to them, sort of like a revenue generator and a place for bored, non-cultural types to have a chat, a coffee and a nap. There is a Maritime museum in Greenwich, but this doesn’t quite explain why Bar du Musee is French.

The only thing French about Greenwich is the fries from McDonald’s (not sure if Cafe Rouge counts as French?).

If you’ve never been to Greenwich, I suggest you make a trip here. Obviously, if you’re not from around the same region, district, country, continent, ignore that suggestion. Some people describe it as a mini-Bath or a medium-York.

If you don’t know what Bath or York looks like, then, possibly the entire paragraph above was pretty much useless to you.

When it’s bright and warm in Greenwich, there are tourists about everywhere. Students from Europe come for school trips, chic types hang out at the chic type boutiques (all one-off chic non-mass produced type attire) and poodles come out in full force.

One sunny day, we decided to check this place out. Having had gone past it many times previously, peering in curiously wondering what on earth was in there, we decided that enough was enough. French or English, croissant or iced-buns, we’d try it out.

Inviting until you try to figure out which of the doors went to the cafe, the restaurant of the tea room.

The first thing you see when you are in the cafe is this chandelier. There are 3 of them in there, confirming the fact that you will be paying more for your tea here than you pay for an average meal elsewhere. Nevertheless, let’s not be biased before we’ve even looked below the chandelier.

Below the chandelier is the price board, confirming for a fact that you will be paying more for your tea here than for an average meal elsewhere (because I am a cheapskate and eat at cheap places).

Once in the restaurant, you look around at what the other tables are having, and immediately wonder why you just couldn’t be generous enough to fork out that little bit more for a nice meal here.

Instead, we just ordered a cup of tea and a lemonade, and because it looked so good, a piece of raspberry cheesecake. This just goes to show that standards are ever still so low, and the pocket strings are possible tighter than before (freebies?).

Look, wouldn’t we have had liked to enjoy a meal here? Indeed we would have. Instead, we sipped our tea and Coke slowly, savouring the lovely ambience.

I’m not sure if this was actually the raspberry cheesecake we ordered but it sure didn’t look like any cheesecake I’d had before. It sure smelled like raspberry, but texture-wise, it was more like a mousse-y spongey cake.

Would I come back to this restaurant? Well, considering the fact that we didn’t actually have a meal in here, I wouldn’t say I’d eaten here, but I’d sure like to try the restaurant out. Great ambience for sure.

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Viet Grill (Part 2), 58 Kingsland Road, London, E2 8DP

Though there are many Vietnamese restaurants in London (of which more than half are found in the Old Street part of town), Viet Grill is at the top of my favourite list. The second place position belongs to Cafe East, although both places specialise in very different types of Vietnamese food.

The last time we went there, we went with the aim of trying out Tay Do (which is next door to Viet Grill, and which we have previously tried, but haven’t had the chance to explore much of its menu). With a bit of a queue at the door (2 people), we used the feeble excuse of not wanting to wait, and scooted next door, back to the comforting dim-litted interior of Viet Grill.

Note: This place is NOT great for food photography, it’s kinda like eating in the dark, but the food is great so you’ll have to make do.

Goi cuon £3.50 (Fresh, soft summer rolls filled with king prawn, herbs and salad wrapped in rice paper)

For those of you who don’t know, I like chewy food. The chewier the food, the better it is to me – unless it’s meat or something like fruit juice (high standards). This means that I like things like har gau wrappers, the skin on custard and jellies, and of course, the chewy transparent goodness that is the summer roll skin. In Viet Grill, the summer rolls are not only fresh and chewy, but full of fresh herbs (you can actually taste the green zingy taste of the herbs), fresh prawns balanced by the fruity, sweet and sour dip provided.

Beef vinh £7 (rolled chunk of five-spiced beef fillet, charcoal grilled, served with fermented soy dipping sauce)

One of the must have items in this restaurant is this beef dish. Obviously, my first thought when the dish was placed in front of me was:

‘Is that all the meat I get?’ and then
‘This looks like a shish kebab’

When I bit into one piece of the beef, all reservations flew out the window. Despite the small (to me anyway) portion of beef served, all the flavour and goodness of a fat, juicy, meaty cow was filled into these 2 little rolls of perfectly grilled, fantastically marinated, excellent tasting beef.

I didn’t even know it was possible to make beef this tasty. The dip was made from some ginger mixed with fermented bean (or so it says, though I couldn’t quite tell) which went very well with the salty beef.

Com suon £7 (Pan seared pork filet mignon with house pickle over steamed rice)

Oooooo now this was lovely, each piece of pork was tender and so well marinated, with flavours blending on the tastebuds. Each bite was soft, salty, and slightly sweet; balanced by the fresh plain rice, and then tangy again with some sweet and sour pickles. I like those pickles, they were crunchy and so fresh, I wanted more.

If we didn’t like the other dishes so much, this would have easily been the winner, but then again, they all were.

Pho, My Xao £8 (Egg noodles wokked over a high flame and laden with fresh vegetables, Chef’s special)

With most restaurants, we order a noodle dish as a filler of sorts, so that we can have the freedom of trying out various little dishes, but still be full after the meal. This was what we set out to do here, assuming that the noodle would just be there as a source of carbohydrate.

Thing is, this noodle was so so good. Although you got a choice of getting either egg noodles or pho with the dish, we just let the waiter decide for us, as I couldn’t make a choice and I’m sure he knew which was better. He chose the egg noodle option.

The noodles are cooked in some rice-win mixture, I’m convinced of this as when I bit into a mushroom, the taste of rice-wine was very fragrant, thus although I couldn’t taste it specifically in the dish, it must have been used in the sauce mixture. The egg noodles complemented the dish very well, as they retained some element of chewiness and crispness instead of getting all soggy (although the pho might have done equally as well), but unlike with pho, the egg noodle has the ability to absorb its sauce, which probably was the reason why it was so tasty.

With probably half a farm’s worth of vegetables on the plate, I really enjoyed this dish, every bite of it.

Would I recommend this place? So much so that I count it as one of my favourite Vietnamese restaurants in London.

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Fish ‘n’ Chips, Harry Ramsden’s, Brighton

I have watched you on the shore
Standing by the oceans roar
Do you love me do you surfer girl
Surfer girl surfer girl (Beach Boys)

No, I’ve not taken the lazy route of just posting lyrics with my pictures (actually I have). But the lyrics quite fit the picture, so it’s OK.

Trying to decide where to eat after a lovely day at the Brighton beach, we had shortlisted a few places and went from one to the other, just looking in to see what the dining possibilities were.

Option 1 – fish and chips at the local chippy (greasy breezy)
Option 2 – fish and chips by the beach in the shack (microwave ping)
Option 3 – fish and chips at Harry Ramsden’s

Seeing as we had all these varied and international choices to choose from, we decided on Harry Ramsden’s, purely based on the fact that it was (surprise) the cheapest. The dining-in prices were not cheap, but the takeaway (ie going to the counter, buying it in a takeaway box, and sitting outside) prices were cheap.

Divided by the restaurant wall, this option saved us about £10.

Looking good, like the counter at KFC.

If you’ve never had fish and chips before, you’re missing out. Although the chips don’t look great here (they actually look quite bad), they were surprisingly crispy on the outside, soft on the inside. The fish was slightly more crispy than how I usually like it to be (soft batter is the way to go), and it felt as though the fish had been overcooked as it didn’t flake. Rather, it was kinda chewy, and if you can make cod and haddock chewy, you know you need more training with the fryer.

With fish and chips, you gotta have mushy peas. Made of peas, and mushed, lovely.

To conclude, it was a reasonable meal, not the best (hey, cheap options usually aren’t) but good enough to please these non-discerning diners.

The Princess of Wales, 1 Montpelier Row, Blackheath, London, SE3 0RL

After doing much research on restaurants in the Greenwich / South East London area, I have come to the conclusion that there is really not that much choice when it comes to wanting good food in the area. Of course, the research came in the form of (oh the stuff I endure) eating at these places, and reading other blogs which were specifically for this part of London.

One sunny weekend, we decided to expand that research to the Blackheath area. This is a heath, which, on a sunny day looks better than it does in the photo above, I’m sure.

When I did some research on this pub (as you do), quite a few of the people who recommended it said that there was nothing better than a big roast diner after a lovely stroll on the heath. Taking on that recommendation, we decided to do the same, and saw these ducks.

From the outside, this pub looks like one of those favoured by the locals, ie let’s not go in there unless you know someone. Stepping into the pub, however, everyone is friendly, and there is a huge, lovely, airy area at the back of the pub where lots of people looked like they were having a great relaxing time, having their Sunday dinner and reading the papers.

As that lovely area was full, we ventured towards the not so bright, but all the same, lovely area round the front of the pub. Sitting ourselves down at one of the larger tables (lighting is all important when you take pictures of your food), we noticed that the table next to us had 2 women, with a table full of leftover food.

The cheapo in me almost wanted to call off ordering, and just eat from them, but then again, one has to maintain some sort of social decorum, and eating leftover food from a stranger’s table, no matter how appealing that sounds, might not be considered acceptable social behaviour. To some.

Roast beef dinner, with Yorkshire pudding, mash potato, horseradish sauce, and vegetables £8.90

Very often, food looks better than it tastes. This was not one of those occasions, as no matter how lovely it looks in the picture, it tasted better. Much better.

Though the beef was ever so slightly chewy, it tasted fabulous. The roasting process must have taken some hard work, as the flavour of the meat shone through like a rainbow from a Care Bear’s tummy.

Together with the beefy gravy, the cheesy mash, and the crispy yet wonderfully soft Yorkshire pudding, this one plate of food settled us into Sunday, and the week after.

Possibly the best roast dinner I’ve had from a restaurant.

Roast chicken, roast potatoes, mash potatoes, bread sauce and vegetables £8.90

Until I had a bite of this, which was my bit of the meal. Chicken is so often overcooked (tough and stringy) or undercooked (uh oh).

This chicken, however, was perfectly done. If I had to set a benchmark for which chicken could be cooked to (ie 1 = cluck, 10 = perfect), this would be the benchmark. The meat was perfectly soft, fell off with the slightest touch yet was tender and soft to the bite. It tasted really good too, which is a surprise. The chef must have flavoured the meat before cooking it.

One downside though were the bits of feathers sticking out from the wing of the chicken, though it didn’t take more than a slight finger-flick to get them off. See, even the feathers were cooked to perfection.

Would I recommend this place? If you haven’t already found it, you have now.

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Papaya (Sri Lankan and South Indian cuisine), 161 Northfield Avenue London W13 9QT

One warm Saturday, after helping our friends move their lock stock into their new flat, they were lovely enough to treat us to a brilliant meal at this fabulous restaurant, now firmly a new favourite at the top of my list.

Not being too familiar with this part of town, I can't quite tell you where it is in the scheme of things, but from what I saw, this restaurant is located on a street with a few other restaurants, Maxim's being one of them (this is a place which I will get around to trying out soon).

Hunger in place, greed firmly tucked down, we let our friends do the ordering, seeing as they'd been there before, and thus, knew best. Letting me do any form of ordering while in a hungry state is surely one way to end up with takeaway, but also not seen as socially acceptable in polite company.

While our friends chose the nicest and best(est) items on the menu, I tried to calm my greed down by taking pictures of the menu and other people's tables. Service was good in this place, with one particularly friendly waiter popping up (literally) now and again to ask us if we needed anything.

The only downside to this meal was the one waiter who took our order, who, when asked if he could serve us some poppadum with the main course (so that we could eat it crushed into the rice), he looked hesitantly at us for a bit, and then said, 'It's something to have with beer, nicer with beer. I'll bring it as a starter?'

We then said, 'Erm, no, could we please have it with our main course, as that's the way we like to eat it'.

More shaking of the head, and looks of disagreement.

Hey, if I want to eat poppadum standing upside down with peppermint and strawberry ice-cream, let me.

Anyhow, that aside, everything else was lovely, absolutely lovely; the place, the food, the (other) waiters. I couldn't fault it one bit.

Egg rotti £3.50 (eggs, onions, green chillies, curry leaves and herb mixture cooked in folded rotti)

This was similar to the roti paratha with egg (or roti telur) that is found in Malaysia, which is why we ordered it. Knowing we were sharing our dishes, this was sliced into 4 for us, and my piece was absolutely delicious.

Flaky, buttery pastry enveloping an eggy mixture, sometimes surprising you with a fiery green chilli bit, and hints of onion throughout the bread. We had this as just something to be tried on the side, but it would have been excellent dipped into any of the curry sauces that came after it.

Mutton biriyani £8.50 (rice mixed with mutton and spices, served with boiled egg)

Of all the biriyanis I’ve eaten, this was one of the best. With each grain of rice perfectly cooked (al dante, with just enough bite), and with just enough spice coating the grains, I would have happily eaten the rice alone, without the meat.

Thing is, the meat was also just as perfectly cooked, each piece being so so so tender, and oh so very flavourful. Lamb has its unique taste, which makes some people not like it, but I love the taste of lamb, and this unique taste shone through loud and proud in this dish.

Best of all, it had a whole hard boiled egg in the middle of the rice, like a little treasure waiting to be found. Oh how we scarfed it down.

Chicken biriyani £8.50

We also had the chicken version of this dish, just to try it out. Conclusion? While this is good, the mutton was way better. The chicken pieces let the dish down as they were quite dry, and each piece felt like it had been cooked, and cooked again. The rice was good though.

Fish curry (Sri Lankan style) £7.50

One of the things we like to order when we’re having curry is fish, because not many places cook fish curry well so we kinda use it as a benchmark to see how good a place is. Using the same checklist that we use for other fish curries, this has to be one of the best. Soft, almost like cotton candy in texture pieces of fish came in a bowl of velvety, rich, spicy and excellently flavoured curry sauce. Try as I might have, I couldn’t make out what mixture of herbs and spices were in it, and how they managed to make the flavour blend so well into the fish.

The sauce alone kept us entertained for a fair bit of the meal, and if that had been served to us without the fish, we would have been (almost) just as pleased. It was that good.

Devilled wild boar £8

The name refers to the specific way in which this dish is cooked. While I have had many versions of this dish elsewhere, I’ve never had the wild boar version before. After tasting this dish, I can probably conclude that this is the best version you’ll find in London.

(If anyone is yelling indignantly at this point, eager to prove that they’ve had better elsewhere, please prove your point by buying me dinner.)

With big chunks of wild boar meat (not enough of it!) cooked to perfection (not too tough, not too dry, just perfect), the combination of slightly dry-ish curry sauce, fragrant fried herbs and spices really set the meat off, to a league of its own.

The onions and pepper slices used in the dish were also crunchy, probably thrown in just at the last minute to retain its texture.

Would I recommend this place? Can’t sing higher praises than I’ve already done, and for now, this sits firmly as one of the tastiest curry places in town. Wait till I find the next contender.

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Jerk City, 189 Wardour Street, London, W1F 8ZD

The other day, I tried to make a list of all the types of cuisine I’d not tried, and the list was quite long. Thing is, going through the list, I realised that the reason I’d not tried these types of cuisine is because it’s not readily available (not in town anyway). If it’s some exotic, off-the-beaten-track type thing, I’m not gonna know to try it unless it’s in the middle of town or something.

That said, Caribbean food has always been one of the types of food I’ve been wanting to try. I just never really got around to trying it because whenever we tried to decide on places for food, the easiest option would be to stick with what you know.

So, when some friends mentioned that they wanted to try it out too, we said let’s go.

Jerk City is located in Soho, which surprised me a little as despite having been to Soho many times, I have never actually noticed this place before. Though it looks more like a takeaway than a restaurant, there is a surprisingly large amount of space inside the restaurant. Brown tables and chairs fill the bit towards the back of the restaurant, while the front of the place consists of a counter manned (or woman-ed) by a rather stern looking lady, who takes orders while staring sternly at you.

Fear makes one hungry, as they say.

As the five of us snuggled into a table by the wall (table for four, which made for cosy dining), we made a point to order as many things as possible from the menu, but one of each item only, so as to maximise the number of things we could try. Every one of us there were Caribbean novices, so this was exciting stuff.

Going to the counter (nervous glances as we waited for the lady to stare at us), we rattled on.

From the long list we had of things to try, 30% of it was sold out. In these situations, hungry people do what hungry people do.

We then order 2 of everything. Out goes the trying-everything-out mission, in comes the eat-everything-in-sight task.

Jerk chicken wings £4

Four (or was it three) big pieces of chicken wings, drenched in a sauce which very much resembled spicy BBQ sauce (which I now think is Jerk sauce?). Tasty it was indeed, though the chicken wings were slightly dry, in the kind of way which makes you think they had been left too long in the oven perhaps. Still, nothing a good dose of sauce can’t fix. Fun finger food which satisfied us (for a while) while waiting for the other bits to arrive.

Beef patty £1.50 (all the other patties were sold out, and we didn’t feel like having the vegetable patty, so it was 3 patties to go)

I’ve always wondered how good these would be compared to the Malaysian curry puff. The pastry looks slightly yellow, and seems too flat to contain any interesting things in it (or so I thought). Taking my first bite, I was instantly interested.

The pastry is made from … something good. It’s not flaky, neither is it shortcrust, so I really don’t know what it is. It’s dense, it’s slightly salty, and doesn’t get soft from the filling inside as that is quite dry also. Really tasty pastry.

Filling-wise, not much to say about that. Bits of chicken and some potato took up the space within the pastry, but they were definitely not in the league of the awe-inspiring curry puff.

Ackee with saltfish, served with rice and peas £7 (salted cod fish with onions, sweet peppers and ackee)

The menu described ‘ackee’ as a type of fruit used as a vegetable. From what we had, I couldn’t tell which bit of the meal was the ‘ackee’, so can’t comment on it. We ordered it because we were interested to see if the salted cod fish was in any way similar to the Chinese version of the salted fish (ham yee).

The best description for the dish came from my fellow diner, who said that it looked like scrambled egg with spice, and tasted like scrambled egg with spice too. Don’t get us wrong, this is a good thing as we like scrambled egg with spice. The fish (presumably the white pieces of things) was soft and lovely, and the texture was a mixture of scrambled egg, fish, and tofu. Taste-wise, it was slightly salty, with a hint of spice, and went very well indeed with the rice and peas.

While we’re on this topic, rice and peas is not rice and peas at all! We were (stupidly) expecting rice and green peas but what came was coconut-flavoured rice with kidney beans. Admittedly, it tastes much better than what rice and green peas would taste like, so no complains there.

Curry mutton with plan rice (large portion) £8.50

*Favourite dish of the meal*
This was superb. The mutton was soft and fell off so easily from the bone, the spices had infused almost perfectly into the meat, and the dish was brilliant as it was. Plain rice made it shine even more, as it let the tastebuds rest a little between chomps of curry. If you’re here, this has to be one of the things you try.

Curry mutton with rice and peas £7

Same as the one above, but with rice and (not green) peas.

Jerk chicken with rice and peas £7.50

The chicken portion was huge, and cooked much better than the chicken wings were. Soft, tender meat accompanied by the same spicy BBQ sauce, and it went so well with the rice and peas.

The meal for 5 came out at less than £12 each, which is reasonable for this part of London.

Would I recommend this place? It depends, I guess, on whether you’ve had Caribbean food before or not. This was my first Caribbean dinner ever, so can’t say if it was the best of its kind or not, but it seemed tasty enough to me, so we’ll hopefully be returning to try more of its menu out.

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