Entries tagged with 'London'
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Photographs from Phillie Casablanca on Flickr I’ve been a waitress on and off for the last eight years of my life. Waiting tables has taught me a lot, especially about how to deal with people. I learned very quickly how to read my tables and give them the kind of service they were looking for: super friendly and bubbly, quiet and removed, a bit mocking, or something in between. It's a difficult job, and that's why it's so hard for me to imagine a computer doing it. The Chicago Tribune reports on Inamo, a restaurant in central London which has replaced its wait staff with a computer system where diners "can order from an illustrated menu, pay their bill, summon...
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This week, our correspondent Brian Yarvin writes to us from London instead of his normal bureau in New Jersey. Thanks for the transatlantic update, Brian! As a long-term observer of the British hot drink scene, I've noticed how mechanized the experience has become. Places that used to sell loose tea twenty years ago, now serve it from a bag and get the hot water from an espresso machine. The ubiquity of espresso machines in Britain is disturbing, especially when sheep farmers and pickup cricket players are drinking double mochachinos. While thinking about this and walking through London's Borough Market, I spotted a jam-packed, tiny shop called Monmouth Coffee making filter coffee. Yes, there was an espresso machine in the back—for...
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Got a cool link from Serious Eatser 2qrs this morning: In the issue of The Cool Hunter newsletter I got this morning, one of the features was this deli in London: http://www.pierluigipiu.it/web/projects_olivino.htm. It is what I would imagine a delicatessen inside the MoMA would look like. You know, 2qrs, it is somewhat similar to what the Museum of Modern Art has going on in its Cafe 2 eatery, which is, as you'd imagine, über-designy. Thanks for the link!...
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Where do you eat in London for fish-and-chips made only from nonthreatened species from small-scale farmers, or for a meal where 85% of the ingredients are sourced from within the limits of the London Tube system? Check out Portfolio.com's report on London's environmentally-conscious restaurants....
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Photograph from drewleavy on Flickr We have no shortage of delicious bagels here in New York City. (Is there a better bagel city in the world?) We also have no shortage of fat laden, drool inducing corned beef. (Is there a better corned beef city in the world?) Yet, explain to me how London is the city that has combined the two into what looks like a pretty outstanding sandwich. It's called a hot salt beef bagel, and it leaves me wondering, "How on earth did we got scooped on this?"...
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As we noted earlier on Serious Eats, a London chef is opening a fish and chips shop selling only sustainably caught seafood. A basket of fish and chips is going to cost about $20. This reminded me of the age-old question facing all of us: Are we willing to pay more for food that is sustainably grown, raised, or caught? Food in the U.S. is still, relatively speaking, incredibly cheap, mostly because of a combination of government policy and the laws of supply and demand. Our food supply is created too efficiently. So people who can pay more should. And I don't think it's an either-or proposition. We produce enough food in this country to feed every man, woman, and...
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British restaurateur Tom Aikens is working on a sustainable fish and chips shop in London: "He has consulted half a dozen environmental groups to decide 'which fish I shouldn’t be using' and to make sure the rest are sustainably fished. He will get most of his fish from 30 British fishermen whose practices he has studied." A typical basket of fish and chips will cost £10 (about US$20)....
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When one talks about food, the word decadent is usually reserved for things like rich chocolaty desserts and expensive ingredients like truffles or foie gras. It isn't usually used to describe dishes like ox heart or pig's head—and yet after a recent meal at Fergus Henderson's St. John Restaurant in London that included both of those things, I can't think of another word to use. If you are going to consume a meal entirely of pork fat and offal (pronounced "awful" by those who both love it and hate it), there is really only one place to do it. Opened in 1994 by Henderson, St. John Restaurant has become a mecca for eaters looking for a bit of "nose to...
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Whole Foods is opening in London next month. The store will be Whole Foods' first in the U.K. In recent years, all the top chains have relaunched their organic lines in response to consumer demand. It'll be interesting to see how the store is received by Londoners, and if the nickname "Whole Paycheck" will make the Atlantic crossing....
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Remember all the drama that ensued from Frank Bruni of the New York Times giving restauranteur Jeffrey Chodorow's steakhouse Kobe Club a zero-star, start-to-finish smackdown back in February? Well, Chodorow's latest venture is in London—Suka, which serves Malaysian fusion cuisine created by the New York-based Zak Pelaccio of 5 Ninth and Fatty Crab—and this Sunday it received a review from the Observer's Jay Rayner that begins thusly: "It takes a special kind of incompetence to create a restaurant with dysfunctional tables. At Suka, a new hipper-than-thou joint in London's Sanderson Hotel, which does to the noble culinary traditions of Malaysia what the Romans did to the Sabine women, they have managed it." Ouch. Still no response on chod-o-blog, but maybe...
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