london restaurants

If Porchetta delivered pizzas I would be happy because I can't face the 100m walk to pick up from a restaurant that's inevitably filled with braying idiot post-work douchebags.

the food at sichuan-folk in spitalfields looked lovely, i cannot comment on taste as we were doing their hot-pot (steamboat) at the time.

haven't tried the chilli cool steamboat yet but then yeah, with a £18 for a fish "hotpot" (not steamboat) that is the size of the entire table why would you eat anything else?

and the service was great at that sichuan folk place btw, if you can get the guy who speaks english.

had some seriously disappointing pizza delivery from il bacio in stoke newington last night, which i'd previously repped for. dough which was practically stale and almost no sauce at all.

matt it's not rocket i object to (well, it is; "authenticity" be damned) it's the prospect of prawns AND rocket. well, prawns and anything, really.

do you dislike prawns? or you just want them unadulterated and on their own?

I am allergic to prawns so I consider their presence anywhere to be disgusting savagery of the highest order.

Prawn haters, just hand them over to me but not on my pizza. Sometimes there's nothing more satisfying than a supermarket prawn cocktail sandwich, but I don't know why.

I have to admit that I don't order much pizza in because I'm really lucky with finding high-end Waitrose ones priced to clear. I'll also tart them up once I get them home.

love prawns and can tolerate them on a pizza, i like the seafood pizza but partly because it's often served with no cheese, stretching the limits of what a pizza is but meaning i can eat it without having to worry about the consequences.

i actually tarted up my il bacio delivery with some feta. 100% improvement!

prawns are the shitty album tracks of the food world.

! prawns are delicious

(unless yr allergic)

that doesn't make any sense. if you're allergic to prawns, it doesn't mean you dislike the taste of them. i know a guy who's allergic to gluten but every now and again he has a beer, knowing the consequences, because he just can't resist.

well yes that is true. altho i was allergic to peanuts when i was younger + due to this i dont find them delicious

I actually find the taste, texture and even the thought of what prawns are to be kinda disgusting.

that is lucky.

xpost me too, jesus it's horrible.

anyway, it's not just a matter of taste with prawns, it's that they're politically/environmentally horrible. google prawns and vietnam some time, or prawns and mangrove destruction. even if the prawns are farmed in the UK, very often they're sent all the way to vietnam for processing, then BACK to the UK for packaging. that's how little the vietnamese get paid to clean them.

if i went down that road i'd probably stop eating lots of things.

yeah when i'm buying my own ingredients i try to be pretty ethical but when yr eating at places like gourmet san....

if i went down that road i'd probably stop eating lots of things.

everything is always compromised i agree, but we can still make distinctions. prawns are especially bad. of course that's easy for me to say, i hate them.

prawns are great but not sure about putting them on pizzas, waste of a prawn really.

best ones are the ones that are fried with the shells with like garlic or whatev and you can eat the shells.

prawns stu

Haha, beat me to it. :D

Cosign on Il Bacio's deliveries being poor - esp. weird because their sit-in Pizzas are great. What's that place that does pizza by the yard or whatever? I know lots of people who swear by them (although I think they're only alright).

Anyway as a lurker I'm popping my head above the parapet to say this has become my favourite thread over the last few months. In the last fortnight I've been to Franco Manca and the Banh Mi joint on old street specifically because of recommendations here, and they were both brilliant. Thanks guys!

this is easily my favourite thread

(welcome)

i took some friends to have the all you can eat hotpot at szechuan folk and they hated it. i thought it was ok though but nowhere near as good as when i've had it in china / chinese restaurants in japan. a lot of the seafood was frozen and it was a bit hard to know how long to cook everything. i went there once before and had the non-hotpot stuff and was pretty decent. definitely prefer my old place (middlesex st) for szechuan, the food maybe isn't quite as good as gourmet san but it's v. similar (same owners) and it's a bit more spacious and chilled out. staff still rude as ever but that's part of the fun no?

tried to go to keu a few weekends ago but it was shut and so we went across the road and had lunch at cay tre. huge bowl of pho sate for £6. so fresh + delicious and so much i couldn't even finish it!

i would kill for a good pizza delivery in east london. friends who live near finsbury park rave about some place but i can't remember the name. in my darkest hour sometimes i will get a dominos but immediately regret it afterwards bleurgh. pizza east is quite nice i reckon.

what are ppls favourite thai restaurants? east, central, wherever

oh i went to tayyabs for the first time recently too. those lambs chops oh god those lamb chops

x-post thai garden on globe road, about 2 mins from my flat, is really nice. mentioned loads on this very thread already. i was actually there for first time in a long time on friday night, it's always excellent. and won't break the bank either. only fish and vegetables tho, no meat. would be curious about where else people go for thai where there's meat on the menu.

hated il bacio ever since i went with a taste london card, confirmed before we sat down that i could use said taste london card, ordered plenty of tasty food, waitress was rude the whole time, food was rubbish, then they told us they didn't accept taste london cards nor did they take debit cards (???)

pizza by the meter is firezza right? really good takeaway pizza!

am going to try spitjack's tomorrow. it's a new rotisserie place at the lauriston road roundabout, run by the same people in charge of fish house. b-day dinner! (tomorrow is my birthday. it is also the birthday of a certain mark s, a certain i love everything, and a certain martin skidmore. certainly.)

tpp, not sure if this is the one your friends mean, but Pizza Organica is my takeaway of choice around this area (I live in Highbury but it's down towards Finsbury Park). Their spicy sausage and broccoli pizza is so so good. Also I was inspired by Local Garda to try the new Bahn Mi place on Upper street (Ca Phe) and it was great. Their coffee is really superb too.

Went to a thai place in Brixton the other day, Kaosan, and it was really great, their satay and massaman curry are better than any others I've had in London, and it was cheap too!

ah i saw spitjack as i walked past at the weekend and wondered what it was...now i know.

rewinding a bit, i find the entire pizza east "experience" fucking intolerable. it's like the worst aspects of new york dining combined with the worst aspects of london dining.

that's the place that says tea on the side, right? i take it it's not worth a visit then...

yeah it used to be a kind of weird oversized loft cafe where you could hang out on a beanbag all day with a laptop but it's since become an expensive, high-turnover pizza place with unaccountably enduring popularity

sad to hear your friends didn't like the hotpot tpp. may be difficult to compare london with china though (not that i've been to so many in london)

I have bought my own hotpot stove and pot now (the ying yang ones so you can have two soups :D) and am comtemplating going to like billingsgate or something one morning and then hot pot the hell out of everything all day!

Thought s-folk was alright though, they gave us a good selection of seafood (frozen) and ok variety of sauce to make your own dip plus the staff were nice.

the few really really good thai places i've been to have all been in west london, i think that maybe thats where the thai community is based? (cf the viet community being east)

Thought s-folk was alright though, they gave us a good selection of seafood (frozen) and ok variety of sauce to make your own dip plus the staff were nice.

yeah i agree with all this. ppl i was with were just being prissy really "what's the point of going out for dinner if i have to cook it myself?" smh smh

(numerous xposts) Firezza, yes!

Sometimes there's nothing more satisfying than a supermarket prawn cocktail sandwich, but I don't know why.

God yes. They're absolutely disgusting and yet, and yet, sometimes it's all that will do. That awful foam bread, that indeterminate texture and taste.

I've found Il Bacio, in its various forms along SN high street very variable. I've had some excellent food there, and other times had poor food. It's still not bad on a sunny evening to sit out, have a beer and a pizza, even if it's nothing special.

I remember having an unusually good meal in a Carluccio's once with an Italian friend. She was chatting to the waiter who firmly recommended Spaccanapoli in Soho, with the caveat that London kitchen staff change very frequently, and his friend who was working in the kitchens there at the time wasn't likely to stay much longer.

tried to get into pizza east yesterday, a fucking monday, and there was an hour's wait, even though the place was huge. fucking hipsters. went to hoxton furnace instead, suckling pig pizza was fantastic.

walked past hoxton furnace recently...is that new? it was absolutely packed on friday afternoon

suckling pig pizza!

"Furnace – at 10 years old - is one of Hoxton’s oldest restaurants" they say.

just saw that yeah...never noticed it before. i'm only on that street when i've had little to no sleep and want to go to the breakfast club, which is generally really great food imo despite the insufferable ultra-branding.

The oldest 'on-trend' restaurants in Shoreditch are Cantaloupe, Viet Hoa and the Great Eastern Dining Rooms. Furnace has great pizza and they will let you split one with your friend while you nurse a glass of wine, without chivvying you along. And if you're in a hurry, they don't disappear just as you're trying to pay and go.

It's not the hipsters' fault that a restaurant they go to can't manage its own floor - I think the management just might be... shit? Pizza East also sucks because if you reserve for 10 people for, say, a birthday party, they a) want the table turned in two hours and b) inflict a £30/head set menu on the group (which includes NO drinks and a lot of salads and cheapo appetizers you probably wouldn't order, given your own free will with your own money). Both a) and b) are unforgivably cynical IMO because I don't know anyone that wants (or expects) to spend more than about £15 on food at a pizza restaurant or to spend only two hours celebrating at a birthday dinner.

Oh and also Hoxton Bar and Grill, going roughly 15 years (!), which is still reliably good.

Nothing anyone is saying about Pizza East makes me want to even bother, but then I'm not sure I'd go to Shoreditch for pizza.

Has anyone tried that Saturday night food market yet? Seems like a genius idea but I'm rarely in the area at the right time.

Their pizza *is* good, but I've only ever had it in a catering/served at afterparty context. NB the Pizza East party was one I wound up not attending because THIS IS NOT HOW WE BEHAVE IN THE LATE CAPITALIST ERA, OK? I do think many of my current pizza issues would be solved if Malletti was open nights and actually delivered.

Seriously tempted by the hot dog cart on Old Street but I am suffering similar logistics issues to MDC.

i like the pizza at Story Deli (which has just moved up Brick Lane a bit to Sclater Street) but man it's kinda pricey.