Monday 8th August

Meze Mangal, Lewisham Way

So London's burning outside; amid the mindless riots our fridge is empty so off we go looking for something to eat.  It was weird on the street, eerily quiet, hardly any traffic and lots of the shops were either closed or half closed.  Initially we were just going to get something from the corner shop, but then remembered about the Turkish restaurant up the road that we used to go to a lot but haven't eaten in in ages.  So, not sure if it would be open or not we nervously trundled up.  Happily it was open - and quite packed.  We decided on a takeaway rather then sitting in and were told it would take 15mins so we sat by the charcoal pit which the different meat skewers were being cooked on.  As we got hotter and hotter beside this, we wondered if we hadn't made a mistake and just sat in to eat so it was a relief to get back out in the cooler outside air once the food was ready.  

This is what we ordered:

Me, I got Imam Baylidi,  delicious classic Turkish cold aubergine dish.  Really silky half of an aubergine, covered in softly cooked tomatoes and soft onion.  You can really taste the olive oil, really fruity and rich.  I also got a pide which is a soft of Turkish pizza.  I went for the Ispanakli-Peynirli pide, which was spinach, onions, cheese and seasoning.  It was lovely, really soft, spongy, light bread, topped with gooey, oozy cheese, finely chopped spinach (long big leaves wouldn't work here) and again soft onions, really nice.

The boy, he went for Karisik-Tarak, which was grilled lamb's ribs served with salad.  The salad was a nice fresh mix of red cabbage, carrot, cucumber and lettuce with a good wedge of lemon to squeeze over.  I stole most of this.  The boy said his ribs were really nice and juicy and whilst waiting for our food by the charcoal pit he commented on how the cook took care with the individual seasoning of the different types of meats.  

We shared a not so Turkish portion of chips with the meal and it also came with a free Turkish bread, which was lovely soft and spongy.  Altogether our meal was £16 between the two of us.

Imam baylidi

Salad, chips & ribs

My tasty pide

The free bread
 (apologies for the dodgy photo, the batteries were running out)

Meze Mangal Restaurant

245 Lewisham Way

London

SE4 1 XF

www.meze-mangal.co.uk

Thursday 4th August 2011
Everest Curry King




My third or fourth visit to this Sri Lankan restaurant/cafe.  It's located on Loampit Hill, just on your way into Lewisham.  There's a little strip of shops, all Sri Lankan or south Indian it seems and on it you'll find Indian groceries,  Everest Curry King and a second Sri Lankan restaurant, Vinisha on the corner.  The boy originally found this place as he lives just down the road in New Cross and was looking for good places to eat.  Everest Curry King is a really old fashioned cafe, wood and Formica tables, no menu, just a few pictures of the types of meals they offer on plastic image boards on the wall like you find in a fried chicken shop.  They look like they used to be back-lit, but not any more, there are even some missing.

You order at the counter, where you see what the have on offer that day.  The lower level has a section with about 10 veggie curries, then on the other side there's fish and meat dishes.  We ordered a masala dosa and a veggie curry selection where you get 3 curries and rice all for £3.95!!!  We chose the beetroot, chickpea and aubergine, but there was also runner bean, spinach, potato, a daal and another green curry which I was unsure what was the main ingredient.

Once we ordered we sat down.  Unfortunately the table we were sitting at was was extremely sticky, so much so that the boy's Evening Standard kept sticking when he has turning the pages, but we didn't let that bother us as the food has been so good every time we have eaten there (and the tables not normally sticky).  We were brought some poppadoms with a nice riata while we were waiting for the dosa to be made in the kitchen in the back and the curry to be heated up (in a microwave but don't let that put you off), unfortunately the poppadums were a bit soft, but this was the only disappointing part of the meal.

The beautiful masala dosa

Veggie curries - aubergine, chickpea and beetroot

When our food came, it was delicious.  I love south Indian food and a masala dosa is one of my favourite things in the whole world and this one is great.  Really crisp dosa and a gorgeous dry potato curry spiced with coriander, cumin & mustard seed and curry leaf,  the accompanying daal was suitably watery, highly spiced and hot with chili, and a hint of sweetness.  The daal had small chunks of squash and aubergine which made for a lovely texture.  I always love the coconut sambal that comes with a dosa and this one was lovely, tinged green in colour with intense spiced coconut flavour.  The veggie curries were great too.  The beetroot was amazing, really hot in terms of chili, little matchsticks of beetroot cooked and spiced to perfection.  The aubergine curry was soft, silky and velvety in texture, again highly spiced and hot enough to put the boy into a sweat (not a hard job, he's not great with heat).  The chana was lovely as well and probably the mildest of the three, but had a fabulously dense texture.

This is a great place for a cheap eat.  For both meals (which we had shared) it was £9.50!!!  We drank tap water that they had brought to the table so a really cheap meal.  On the counter above the curries is a shelf with lots of snacks, vadai and bahji's but also these amazing Sri Lankan snacks, pan rolls which I'd never seen before.  They come in meat, fish or veggie forms and are a bread, possibly a roti, folded around a curry.  They come wrapped in either square, rectangular or triangular form and are cheap and delicious here.  It's a great wee street - Vinisha, the other Sri Lankan restaurant here is also very tasty and cheap  albeit a bit more formal.  Unfortunately I forgot to photograph the outside (I really need a smart phone, I hate having to get the camera out to take the photos) and there is no website, but here's the address:

Everest Curry King

24 Loampit Hill

SE13 7SW  

Monday 1st August

Spuntino, Soho

This was our second visit to Spuntino.  It's a small bar and food joint on Rupert Street in Soho.  It's not long opened - about 4 months I think - and is decorated as if they rediscovered the original decor when they were stripping the place back (which I think may be what actually happened although I'm not sure).  Butcher's style tiles, metal panelling on the roof and old style appliances etc.  It looks really good.  The staff are very nice, and there seems to be a requirement of having many tattoos and a slight rockabilly look in order to work there. 

Everyone sits on high bar stools around the bar and the menus are on the tables as your place setting.  The moment you walk in you're offered a big bottle of tap water as you decide what to have, and a tin cup of chili popcorn.  The last time we were here we couldn't get enough of this stuff, but it was disappointing on our return, being both cold and overly oily.  A shame and we were worried that everything was going to be different.  We needn't have worried, it was all lovely.  I had the Mac & Cheese and the boy had the Soft shell crab.  My mac & cheese was  huge, really enough for two and you're probably supposed to share, but I ended up eating most of it (I tried to get the boy to eat more of it but he said I was being a feeder).  It was really nice.  The cheese sauce could have been cheesier and the pasta was a little over cooked but very satisfying none the less.  I particularly loved the breadcrumb top.  The soft shell crab was really nice, says the  boy and came with a Tabasco aioli and shaved fennel salad.  We shared the egg-plant chips which were as nice as last time.  I'm not sure how they do these, as the aubergine really keeps the shape of a chip but is really soft inside.  They come with a fennel yogurt.  Gorgeous, get these if you go! 

The peanut butter and jelly sandwich, plus our 2 cocktails, the amazing 'Dark & Stormy' and the light and floral 'Clover Club'.

Mac & Cheese

We finished off with a cocktail each, I had the 'Dark & Stormy' a rum and ginger ale drink which is really moreish and reminded me of those cola bottle sweets I used to love as a kid.  The boy had the Clover Club which he was disappointed with, as it was bright pink, in a small glass and quite girly (see pic above).  It was quite nice, but mine was definitely the winner.  We shared the peanut butter and jelly sandwich for dessert, which we also ordered last time (along with the strawberry and coconut mess which was excellent).  It was just as good.  It's two slices of peanut butter parfait with a raspberry jam/coulis in the middle and some beautiful crunch pieces of what seem to be crushed caramel, although reminds me of popping candy a bit.  This dessert's a winner.  I'd love to try the cheese cake on the menu next time.

It's cheap enough, but the half pints of Meantime pale ale is quite expensive at £2.50 a pop.  So in total the bill came to £50.62 including service charge for the two of us, so not too bad at all!

http://spuntino.co.uk/

Sunday 31st July

Frank's Cafe & Campari Bar, Peckham

The boy and I decided to pop in here for a quick drink after our meal in Wuli Wuli on Friday night.  We had only discovered it by accident the previous week when we were trying to get to a mate's house via a short cut.  It's been on the go for three summers and is a real gem of a place.  They do drinks - especially lots of campari cocktails as the name suggests and they have an interesting menu.  We had a negroni each (very heavy on the alcohol, hard to drink, but nice) and checked out the amazing view.  It's better then from the viewing points at Hampstead Heath and Greenwich as you seem to be a lot closer.  Amazing views all the way from Westminister, Elephant & Castle past the Shard and Gherkin all the way over to Canary Wharf and the Dome. 

One of the fabulous pieces of sculpture one level down for the bar.  I love this, at night time, with the spot light trained on it, it looks like something from Star Wars.  It's only on closer inspection that you notice that's its the handle bar of a Lidl trolley.

The installation from a distance

A glimpse of the amazing view of London

More light and digger sculptures

Canary Wharf





A light sculpture

The covered bar.  It was so packed, so it too ages to get served.

It's a bit like walking up to a squat party when going up there in the dark. There's a young Hoxton style crowd mainly but quite a mixed bunch in the day.  I really like all the sculpture and installation happening, although the two inflatable rats scared me a bit in the dark!  The even have Del boy's motor on the roof, really good, so we wanted to come back in the day time to try out the food.  On Sunday, some friends poped round so we all hobbled over there to get a bite and a drink.  Actually hobbling because the boy and one of our friends both have dodgy knees at the moment, so getting to level 10 of the car park took a while.  We all - apart from the boy - had a really nice French Cidre to drink and he had a bicyclette - a white wine and Campari drink.  For food, our friends share the baked beans on toast which I had also.  These were home baked hariot beans, they were baked in a dense, smoky tomato sauce, and then had a fried egg on top.  I'm not a fan of eggs that haven't been mixed together so I gave mine away.  I also got some Patatas a la Pobre, which we all shared.  These didn't look too appealing, but were lovely.  Served cold, they were boiled and dressed in lovely olive oil and mushed around a bit.  Unfortunately no pics of the food we had asI didn't bring the camera.  The boy had the chicken wings, coated in chilli and lemon, which he said were amazing and finger lickin' good - high praise indeed!

After one or two more drinks we watched the sun slowly go down over the amazing skyline.

http://www.frankscafe.org.uk/

Friday 29th July 2011

Wuli Wuli, Camberwell

I've been threatening to start writing this blog for quite some time now, so tonight I finally remembered to bring my camera with me for a night on the town in south London where me and the boy decided to try out the food and ambiance in 'Wuli Wuli' in Camberwell.  This restaurant was pointed out to me (whilst waiting on the 436) by the boy as somewhere he'd like to try.  As a rule, I'm not particularly fond of Chinese food but Wuli Wuli has a whole section of the menu dedicated to Sichuan food which is supposedly very good (as opposed to the standard Chinese restaurant fare on offer in the rest of the menu), so after grabbing a take-away menu and perusing it at home for a while we decided to try it out this evening.  

Chinese food, is the culinary genre which leaves me the most cold, my experience with it could however be said to be rather limited and not truly authentic.  Noodles or chips (or both in the same tray) in curry sauce were often what I ordered from the local Chinese take away in the early 90's, generally after a night out as a student. Other than this I've always thought it to be rather gloppy and msg-y. Over the years people have tried to persuade me to the delights of such and I did have one reasonably nice meal in a small Chinese restaurant, downstairs in one of the many Chinese restaurants somewhere on Parnell street in Dublin about 7 or 8 years ago during my stint working as an ESOL teacher.  This was at the midst of all the Celtic tiger nonsense and Parnell street was fast becoming a cultural melting pot.  The interesting thing about that meal was how there were completely different menus on offer to the group of Chinese students who were taking me out, rather than the standard grub for the uninitiated Irish punter, so what I ate that night was quite nice, it was, for instance the first time I ate sheet tofu; cut into tagliatelle-like strips and swimming in a sticky sweet and sour sauce.  

Anyway, I digress, back to 'Wuli Wuli'.  When we arrived the place was empty apart from ourselves and two extremely friendly and helpful waiting staff.  The menu is divided into 2 sections as I've mentioned, the standard Chinese food and the Sichuan section. For a starter I ordered the Smashed Cucumbers in Hot Garlic sauce.  This a cold dish so the 'hot' in the sauce refers to the chili heat.  It was the boy who got me interested in trying these.  He's a great one for reading reviews and the like so he had already read about these and ensured I was tempted by them so he could try them too.  It was a lovely dish, the review he had read had said that she thought them very sweet, but I didn't find that.  I thought it was a really clean refreshing dish.  The cucumbers had been de-seeded and in a sauce that was very like a sweet chili.  The boy opted for a plate of Duck's Tongues.  Not very pleasant to look at as they totally looked just like a plate of long curvy grey tongues. They weren't very nice apparently, they had a strip of gristle down the center that initially the boy thought was a bone.  He wasn't sure if you were supposed to eat that bit or not, so he just left a stack of them on the side of the plate (not very appetising).  Even though both these dishes these were advertised as starters, the concepts of starters and mains didn't seem to exist as every thing arrived to the table once it was cooked so my main arrived before the cucumber.  All the portion sizes were really large, meaning we ordered way too much food. 

For mains we decided to get 2 veggie dishes and one meat for him.  I had fancied trying one of the many aubergine dishes, but as he went for aubergine with minced pork, I decided not too (I'm too nice).   I went for a potato dish instead that we both liked the look of, namely fried potato slivers with a chili.  This was really nice, it was very finely chopped matchsticks of potato which had been cooked very lightly. They were extremely al dente.  Initially I wasn't sure if I wanted them to be cooked for a little longer but then I got to like them.  They were tossed in oil and millions of fresh and dried chillies.  The dominant sensation was of the heat of the chili but as I really like heat, I thought this was just right.  The second dish I ordered was the Mapo Tofu.  This was similar in taste to the potato, so I there wasn't enough variety in my dishes.  The tofu was of the silken variety which I'm not overly fond of, I prefer my tofu firm, but the sauce was lovely, again loaded with chillies and a hint of sweet and sour.  The boy like his aubergine and minced pork dish but didn't think it anything special.  We shared a steamed rice and had a tsingtao beer each.

I needn't have worried about us being the only customers of the night as about 5 minutes after we entered it stared to fill up.  The two waiting staff were also always on the phone taking delivery orders so they seem to be doing a really good trade.  Although the waiter and waitress were very efficient and friendly, once we had finished our meal it took a long time to get the table cleared and we weren't asked if we wanted dessert or coffee.  When we eventually got their attention to clear the table, they immediately asked if we wanted them to box up our leftovers.  It was nice that they asked rather than us having to and I took the end of my two mains home as we had rather a lot left over (not like me, usually there is nothing left and I'm in pain).  Once the table was cleared it, we had to ask  a few times before we got the bill, which was reasonably at £34.80 not including service charge.

My food, left to right:  smashed Cucumbers, Mapo tofu & the Potato slivers with chili

The horrible duck's tongues

The exterior of the restaurant



the aubergine and minced pork



Would I go back?  Yes definately.  Does it change my mind about Chinese food?  A little bit, yes, so a few more Chinese restaurants will have to be tried out.