london restaurants

Ive had similar experiences in berlin, most eating i did was a means to an end. Lots of surprisingly good sushi though

Ive just come back from my first week in new york and I have to say london needs to pull its socks up grub wise. Fette Sau in brooklyn wiped the floor with all of the dumb overpriced junk food that hackneys dripping with. I can recommend Vinn Goute though, thyere based in the Acklam rd market but do the streetgrub circuit as well. Their seychelles octopus curry is amazing and also sell their own mindbending scotch bonnet sauce

Not too late for Berlin, gonna try the bird at the weekend, read about it. In hamburg till Friday, any hamburg places? Having a great time btw.

Btw is hackney dripping with overpriced junk food? Not in my experience of hackney.

I can tell I'm paying more attention to London food these days because my reaction to the opening of a new craft beer and burger place is roughly the same as my reaction to an overhyped indie band.

haha ditto

xxpost i have a friend who lives in hamburg! he always complains abt the food, except for some super authentic thai place - interested?

Ive just come back from my first week in new york and I have to say london needs to pull its socks up grub wise. Fette Sau in brooklyn wiped the floor with all of the dumb overpriced junk food that hackneys dripping with

truth bomb

yes, london food is "getting better" but it's like OK, let's get beyond "traditional british food with a modern twist" .. oh look, a roast bird, a burger, how amazing

i was in new york last week too and i have to admit that the general friendliness and competence of restaurant staff may be biasing me here

there's tons of great london food, it's just the biggest fad right now is deeply unimpressive

and it's gone from being unimpressive to unimpressive AND a boring cliché

xpost kind of agreeing with Lex and Tracer

London is / has been pulling its socks up, though - even ten years ago the quality gap between London and NYC was much wider than it is now.

Having said that I'll be pleased when there's a new trend to replace the US street food thing: not that I don't like that stuff but it rarely blows my socks off. I think we've a while for this one to run, though, the margins are pretty good and there are still things to come (e.g. I hope someone sets up a Korean taco truck sometime - I've read about such things and they sound amazing).

London's high end is surely as good or better than New York's by now, it's the mid-market and cheap end of the spectrum where the gap is.

yeah totally agree, + thats definitely improved a lot in the last couple of years

london's cheap end is amazing imo if you stick to restaurants in immigrant communities

Yeah that's true, I was kind of restricting my thinking to traditional and modern British cooking which obviously is a tiny proportion of what's actually served in this city. Not that there aren't a load of mediocre Indian/Italian/French places as well.

Once again it's all down to having a relatively young and maturing eating out culture as opposed to the full blown one you have in New York or Paris or wherever.

there's a weird thing where some places have really ridden the coattails of the gastropub "revolution" and are like, cool, we can charge people £11 for a burger and potato wedges now and then forget to actually make it any fucking good

and then stay in business!!

It's the captive audience thing, unless you're talking full-blown gastropubs then Londoners don't go to a pub for the food alone, but equally once they get hungry they don't leave the pub unless they absolutely have to.

the amount of utterly fucking ordinary dishes sold at ridic prices under some sort of faux "back to basics" aesthetic is extraordinary. as tracer says it's unfortunate that the execution is usually utterly fucking ordinary as well.

my french housemate always giggles at the idea of gastropubs as "gastro" in french = gastroenteritis

Is Meatliqour still really busy? might take my girlfriend there for a treat later.

you'll probably be alright london is empty these days with the olympics

probably more to do with summer in general.. but last friday while looking for lunch all the restaurants i walked past were empty except KFC

The cheap ethnic restaurants are hugely overrated in my view, not that there aren't exceptions but easy to get sick of them being a default option.

Are there actually any new fast food/diner places in hackney tho? That was what I questioned. I think there are in fact none and "hackney" was used as a catchall.

'Cheap ethnic restaurants' is not the same as 'you do best eating cheaply in areas with a strong immigrant community' tho? The former is usually to be avoided, the latter is good advice. I'm specifically thinking of when I used to live on Green Lanes. Aside from quality, which was generally very good to perfectly adequate, the main factor that appealed was that, if I didn't want to cook, I could go out and have lentil or lamb soup, with plenty of turkish bread and a lahmacun, or a meat stew, + a glass of ayran and a glass of mint tea, with an extraordinarily generous array of salads, olives and dips, for under a fiver.

It was the same with the toss up between chai roti and ragam the other day. The food at chai roti was very good, but it was slightly too expensive and too tightly portioned, and not quite good enough to get it to win out over pepper soup, a dosai and a beer at Ragam. The whole street food thing gestures at cheap and dirty ampleness, but you can really taste the margins.

Ragam has been a constant for the 20+ years I've lived in London, but is somehow under the radar for most people, so *always has a table*.

I'm excited to try Ruby's but as with all Americana/burger places, I'm very picky. Ruby's owner used to work with me on a magazine project so I've been trolling him on FB with tales of drugstore soda fountains and short-order cooking therein.

xxpost i have a friend who lives in hamburg! he always complains abt the food, except for some super authentic thai place - interested?

My mate just moved back from Hamburg and this must be the same place she was raving about. She's veggie and found it quite hard to find good veggie food there for cheap.

Dunno fizzles, maybe in terms of quantity I agree with you about the margins, but lots of the street stuff uses higher quality ingredients.

On the craft beer thing i suppose largely I don't understand how a tiny trend can be irritating, but personally I've made a strong effort to eradicate the part of me that reacts to thing I read on the internet.

Ideally there wouldn't be a need for craft beer pubs cos all pubs would sell decent beer, but until that day. That said there are no "craft beer and burger" bars, like, none exist.

What's the hamburg thai restaurant btw? Just had schnitzel in some place a German pal suggested. It was... big.

Anyone know their German beers? I'm pleasantly surprised by how much I'm enjoying some of the helles stuff.

almost: http://www.beerdbristol.com/

my french housemate always giggles at the idea of gastropubs as "gastro" in french = gastroenteritis

in Australian too

though it hasn't stopped "good living" newspaper section writers from feebly trying to make gastropub happen

What's the hamburg thai restaurant btw?

lol this is what my friend said - the thai place is in the old star club on grosse freiheit in the reeperbahn. its down an alleyway and it is in an unmarked door - its not officially a restaurant. the door is next to the old star club sign on the window... open thurs, fri, sat evenings

also if you want advice on ordering... most of the classic stuff is best. pad thai is the best ive had outside of thailand, the som tam is excellent and you can get isaan som tam as well, the laab is good, the yum woon sen is good, they do whole fried fish in curry sauce which is very good - all the curries are excellent actually, also the best ive had out of thailand - very strong rich and oily homemade paste.

That said there are no "craft beer and burger" bars, like, none exist.

Three Compasses / Sebright Arms / Shacklewell Arms?

It's mostly either burger places that mostly sell craft beer or pubs whose menu is largely burger-based, I can't think of many places who are actively promoting themselves as "craft beer and burgers".

Ideally there wouldn't be a need for craft beer pubs cos all pubs would sell decent beer, but until that day

Dunno, there's loads of good beer available in London that doesn't sit in the craft beer camp. Also while a lot of craft beer is delicious an increasing amount of the stuff on the market is overhopped and not that nice. "Craft beer" isn't an automatic marker of quality.

It's obviously better than the tedious "three lagers, Guinness and an ale" uniformity of 10 years ago though, don't get me wrong.

matt i believe what you call "overhopped" i call "starting to get there"

having been in america for a couple of weeks, the scales have fallen from my eyes re: the endlessly debated microvariations in british "sweaty gym sock" light-sweet ale styles (yes this is technical terminology)

i mean not everything has to be as mouth-puckeringly chewy as heady topper (brewed in waterbury, VT) but give me something to fucking taste, please

Too many of those super-hoppy US beers sure taste strong but are really badly balanced IMO. Garrett Oliver's line about it being the equivalent of a chef going "you know how salt makes food taste better? Well I am going to put SO MUCH SALT in this beer that you can barely eat it" is apposite here. Please note I drink quite a lot of delicious American beer.

It's mostly either burger places that mostly sell craft beer or pubs whose menu is largely burger-based, I can't think of many places who are actively promoting themselves as "craft beer and burgers".

Are you saying that places which sell craft beer + burgers are not to be considered "craft beer and burger" places because they don't mnarket themselves by saying "we sell craft beer + burgers"? Or are you drawing a distinction between pubs and 'craft beer bars' as being different kinds of places?

I'm drawing a distinction between places that are first and foremost eateries and places that are drinking establishments that happen to serve food. It's not really a pub/bar thing.

There aren't many (currently) but they do exist! There will be more, too, trust me.

It's obviously better than the tedious "three lagers, Guinness and an ale" uniformity of 10 years ago though, don't get me wrong.

― Matt DC, Wednesday, 1 August 2012 10:49 (22 minutes ago) Bookmark

'To be honest I don't get that,' adds Carragher. 'I mean, what do you expect from a World Cup? Are you expecting the fair every afternoon?'

Haha so many points to discuss bit first should say I am going to try that Thai place tonight, thanks for the tip! I've been cooking loads of Thai food lately so it's timely.

(BTW had a burger here last night - it was late - and it had coleslaw in it! And a big bread roll bun, and cheddar, FFS.)

I agree with you Matt, largely, on the beer thing. But even tho I like lots of British ales it is v v rare for a pub to stock a nice one, rarer still for it to be well kept. And a bad ale is just truly rotten.

Actually I also think some of the British craft beers are among the best, kernel, thornbridge, magic rock, and brewdog in particular.

it is v v rare for a pub to stock a nice one, rarer still for it to be well kept. And a bad ale is just truly rotten.

are you saying most beer in most pubs is truly rotten?

has a craft kebab van been opened yet? if not i'm so doing it.

kebabs made from locally sourced rats

Think it has, Ken!

Ledge no that's not what I'm saying, at all. But thanks for attempting to imply it is, really classy and genial stuff there.

This is a bit two years ago, but I went to Hix earlier in the week, it was a really good meal and a cool room but I struggled to equate the actual food I was eating with the prices. Like their steaks were more expensive than the Hawksmoor. The cocktail bar downstairs is amazing though.

TBH I'm seeing craft beer or at the very least some interesting independently brewed beer in more and more pubs but a big part of that may be the Antic pub group and its ongoing takeover of South London.

yeah i'm not really keen on hix's places