london restaurants

Anyone else been to the newly raved about Meze Mangal on Lewisham Way? Shits rad.

Hardly newly raved about, the place is a stalwart, although it looks like parts of the media have only just taken notice. I'm usually pretty wary of Turkish restaurants due the high probability of dry, nasty meat, but this place is always excellent. Probably the best Turkish food I've had in London.

I agree that Petrus is better than Meze Mangal though.

sichuan folk had nice food as i remembered.. more comfortable than eating at chilli cool, definitely. can't remember if price is similar or not.

was going to go down to M&T but then it was bloody freezing and the last leg of open house was a 5 min bus ride away from home so never made it. was the bar all dry by the end?

I'm delighted to say I didn't stay to the end. I feel ropey enough as it is.

Curious what you all do when you need to eat in a hurry or on the move, especially in the evenings?

Lately I've got a few evenings a week when I have about an hour after work before a rehearsal to relax or get something to eat, around the Blackfriars/Chancery Lane area, but options are few and far between. Leon is nice and relaxing but fairly expensive for what it is. Other than that there's hardly anything.

Feel free to use this to talk about how you deal with getting lunch at work too. I bring my own as much as possible but otherwise it's a grim trudge to Pret.

The White Swan on Fetter Lane is pretty good, it's a gastropub but they manage to turn food around pretty quickly. Cafes that actually open in the evening are really few and far between.

yeah it's really annoying, it's a cafe i'd want really. as i say, leon on ludgate street was really nice and it's not criminally expensive, but if it's going to be 2/3 times a week it would add up.

had really good indian food at zaza's in whitechapel next to the mosque, would go again, cheap cheap cheap, good service, good alternative to tayyabs if you can't be bothered with all that

It's a happy skip to Eat for me.

(or Itsu, but that shit costs a fortune)

If I turn left out of my office it's 104 paces to an Eat. If I turn right it's 104 paces to a Pret. They do well enough for me four days out of five (fifth is usually the pub).

Pret is great.

no Eat near me. I like Pret, sort of, but not a big fan of any of the sandwiches and avoid baguettes, so it tends to be soup on a daily basis, which I'm sure has more salt than the sea.

Having to rely on Pret and Eat for lunch strikes me as incredibly depressing, there are at least six standard deli/sandwich shops within a 5min walk of my office. They're not exactly much cheaper but at least you're not subject to the tyranny of gloopy mayonnaise and red onion in everything.

there's a noncorporate sandwich shop right next door to me and their plastic tubs filled with chicken and mayonnaise and mystery vegetables make me sad.

I think there is like one non-corporate shop near me, I might hunt for one today.

had a GREAT meat and potato pie from Co-Op the other day, washed down with a can of Pepsi Max - you can't beat that.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-It3ECdVZyXc/UH1IoS5hm6I/AAAAAAAAB7g/1xB8btS45Sk/s640/DSC_4626.JPG

... in Hendon??

http://www.hamburger-me.com/2012/10/pop-up-day-in-n-out-burger-came-to.html

so weird. why would anyone bother?

I think that's kind of awesome. Why not?

I've heard a lot about in-n-out, I'd like to try one.

Why not?

absolutely, although "for four hours only" and "in hendon" is a bit o_O

That's what awesome about it really, that it wasn't somewhere on-trend.

I like the idea of pop-ups which are blink-and-you'll miss it.

I really like the idea of pop ups which are blink-and-you'll-miss-it AND the press aren't told but that really would be so perfectly pointlessly potlatchy that there's no point in hoping.

we are still not over burgers, it seems

can the next food trend be something vaguely INTERESTING please?

(it's going to be fried chicken ;_; ;_; )

I did see something elsewhere about an effort to crowd-source an In-N-Out in London. Not sure if that's related.

the fried chicken thing is just a part of the same thing as burgers/fast food etc. there seem to be a lot of dedicated blogs etc but who cares really? it's not as if you can't read about other things or indeed eat them.

I agree with both the Lex and with LG. I am not excited abpout burgers but I like them. I do not find the trendiness of poshified street food to be especially troublesome because there's so much else to explore and be excited about, food-wise.

(one of the things about in-in-out is that apparently they are very high quality but cheap)

(ie not poshified, fwiw)

That sums it up for me, if the burger thing means the standard of burger is forever greater then all the better. I'd feel the same about any other type of food, or trend. EG craft beer bars is now at saturation, but if this means I can drink better beer, generally, then all the better. there are lots of micro-trends anyway, at a given time, that improve the basic accepted level of things across different cuisines, I think.

I try not to be annoyed by other people's enthusiasm for things I don't like, difficult and all as it can be.

xpost to your first post

Yeah - I remain much more excited at the prospect of getting a train to New Malden and continuing to try the various Korean places there, or keeping going to the Ethiopian in Camberwell which I totally LOVE than I would be to get a train to Hendon for the best burger in the world. But some random place in Hendon serving a burger for a fiver which duffs up all the £10 fancified numbers available across London now is all good as well.

My main reaction to the tweets about it today is that I am generally jealous of people who can just drive off and go for lunch anywhere they feel the need to on a weekday.

Even then though - sod lining up for gawd knows how long, even for the sake of a really good burger. It's probably nice to know you're doing a thing which is being talked about on twitter, and here.

I dunno, there's a load of pubs that have jumped on the post-Lucky Chip/Meatwagon, erm, bandwagon and whacked their burger prices up by several quid without making them any better. I am very pro-burger but I've had a couple of 'gourmet' £10+ burger and chips of late where the burger is too big to physically eat properly, it drips grease everywhere and the bun falls apart in your hand.

I also quite like that they've stuck it in Hendon. It shows imagination.

I've had a couple of 'gourmet' £10+ burger and chips of late where the burger is too big to physically eat properly, it drips grease everywhere and the bun falls apart in your hand.

isn't this the standard that pre-dates the fad?

xpost

Talking of trendified street food, friend of mine went to bubble dogs the other day, pitched up at 6pm, they looked at the list and said they would have a table at 8.30.

Also he said he tried Honest Burger in Soho, and they also had a 90 minute wait, even though there were tables empty, waiting for people who'd dropped in earlier and put their names down.

This is SUCH nonsense - these places are taking bookings, they're just not taking them until the day itself, maximising the inconvenience to the customer. Of the current restaurant trends, the no-bookings one is far more annoying to me than the streetfood one, although of course they overlap something terrible.

I wouldn't mind the no-bookings thing if it did what it said, i.e. if there's a table it's yours, if you are prepared to queue that's cool.

isn't this the standard that pre-dates the fad?

In quality yes, but the prices have gone up. You can usually tell from the language on the menus that they're the sort of place that's capitalising on the fad without bothering to improve the quality of the food itself.

I was going to start a 'Most annoying restaurant trend 2012' poll but no-bookings policies would comfortably win AND DESERVEDLY SO.

xxpost that is so weird

otm so so much

Anyone else eaten at Giant Robot?

no-bookings is the absolute worst of anything, ever

When I first read about Bubbledogs I assumed it was the tipping point for this sort of thing simply because it was such a ridiculous concept.

The meatballs at Giant Robot are pretty nice but a) not any better than you'd get at a reasonable quality local Italian anywhere in London, and b) the bar space itself isn't actually that nice and has really bad acoustics, so you have to shout at whoever is sitting opposite you. I probably wouldn't have gone at all if it hadn't been called 'Giant Robot' and I am far from alone in this regard, I suspect.

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum we went to Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester the other week (celebrating a couple of good months at work mainly) and the whole experience was just... wow. I'm not sure my unrefined palette can really tell the difference between food worth three Michelin stars and one, though.

Anyone else eaten at Giant Robot?

no... heard mixed reports, mostly.

i've been skint for ages paying college fee so my eating out is severely curtailed.

xpost i don't think you can upgrade a hotdog that much to be honest. any of the pop-ups i've been to it really wasn't that much better than your standard crap hot dog. like it was obviously better but not to the point of getting excited.

hawskmoor an exception, just about.

xpost I quite like it, but as a poor postgrad student it's my idea of a flashy meal out, when in reality it's just nicely done meatballs and cocktails. They do a Lucky Chip burger now and it's...pretty average.

the new friday night market up at hackney downs studio has good street food, btw. though i didn't think it had come to life as a place to hang out it's worth popping in if you're walking by. xpost.