June 27, 2008: London

On Friday morning we had intended to get going early and breakfast at the Borough Market. However, events conspired against us. First, we discovered that on Fridays the markets don't open until noon. No problem; instead we shared a still-warm baguette breakfast (fresh from the bakery, smothered in butter and Vegemite) with Emily and Sam, also savouring a final chat before we moved on. Plan B was to stop by the Tate Modern before lunching at the market. Heavy traffic and subway construction ensured that instead we would spend almost 2 hours travelling little more than 3 kilometres. I surprised both of us by feeling neither anxiety nor annoyance - truly, I'd shaken off my recent work pressures and embraced the holiday!

So it was straight to the markets for browsing and grazing. The Borough Markets are kind of posh, from the produce to the small goods, cakes, pies and olives - everything is organic or free-range or biodynamic and often comes with a slick logo. It's difficult to imagine that I'd embrace such a market for my regular shopping but it was ideal for our holidaying purposes.

I stopped almost immediately for some dried fruit and nuts to pack away for later.

Michael was similarly drawn to the olives.

Out first on-the-spot eat was from this vege burger stand - we chose the heavenly haloumi patty, which was as full of juicy shredded veges as it was cheese.

Michael was as shocked as you must be that I didn't buy chocolate.

I wished that I could take some of the produce home to a kitchen to prepare for myself, especially the asparagus and wide array of wild mushrooms.

Some nearby organic ice cream served as a worthy distraction - orange and mascarpone for me, strawberry for Michael.

There was a little rain and so we made our way to the tube. Our next stop was Hampstead, a fancy part of town that's apparently rather good for celebrity spotting. However, we were actually there for a wander around Hampstead Heath. It's a large and lovely park, with a slight elevation that's sufficient to offer views across the very flat city. If anyone famous or successful was walking their dog, we didn't notice.

Naturally our market snacks had their moment in the sun, too.

These salt and pepper cashews were nice, but not nearly as nice as the recipe that is now known as cashew crack

I had to have these razcherries from the moment I saw them - I remembered Buttons recommending them. I think I involuntarily swore the first moment I tasted one, they are so darn good. Like those raspberry jube lollies but actually fruit! How can such a wondrous thing exist? How are they bred? What does a fresh one look like? Where can I get some more right NOW?!

And there was fresh fruit too - nashi pears and nectarines.

Later on our walk Michael broke out the olives, which were packed with parsley, tarragon, garlic and lemon juice. The cheese is unpasteurised and therefore illegal in Australia. I was indifferent to his savoury feast and ate more razcherries.

Back in Hampstead we stopped at the Holly Bush, a cute pub tucked away and recommended by Emily.

The next couple of hours passed without anything photo-worthy happening. We returned to the subway and travelled to Hammersmith, wandering along the Thames a while. We needed to build some anticipation and appetite for dinner. We were returning to what was the highlight of our last visit to London - the Gate Vegetarian Restaurant. Even better, we were meeting Krusty and Jason there! They were our regular dining companions in our first 6 months of living in Melbourne, introducing us to the likes of Polly, the Vegie Bar and Shakahari. Since then they've been living and working in Colchester, the next stop on our UK tour.

The Gate is pricey, though it may simply be the exchange rate that puts it beyond Shakahari for us. It offers a similar level of carefully composed meals with a seasonal rotation in a sophisticated but not over-the-top environment.

Usually only one or two items will jump out at me from a list of starters (i.e. whatever's deep fried) but here I was really stumped - how could I pick between, say, the courgette flower and the three onion tart? What about the haloumi kibi or the Indo-Iraqi potato cake? We were all able to sample most of the starter menu when we agreed to share a large mezze platter. Clockwise from the top, we had:

• Caesar salad, with capers, olives, garlic croutons, avocado and cherry tomatoes, parmesan and a Caesar dressing;
• broadbean falafel with babaganoush, red schoog, pickled vegetables and pita bread;
• a mustard seed potato cake filled with Indian spiced vegetables, pan-fried and served with mango yoghurt and a sweet and sour tamarind sauce;
• leeks and shallots baked with creme fraiche in a parmesan pastry, topped with caramelised red onions and basil oil;
• char-grilled haloumi in a tikka marinade skewered with red onions, capsicum and zucchini, served with a pomegranate, herb and cous-cous salad; and
• a salad of caramelised quince, roasted walnuts and crumbled stilton tossed with mixed salad leaves in a walnut vinigarette.
  

Wow. If you're after evidence of the strength of our friendship with Krusty and Jason, it's that we all faithfully restricted ourselves to a quarter of each item before rotating the plate and continuing. But it was hard.

The other three were all taken by the tortillas for their main course. The wheat tortillas are filled with sweet potato, sweet corn, goat's cheese, coriander and chilli, then served with guacamole, sour cream and a black bean and red capsicum salsa.

In a bid to be different, Michael changed his order to the risotto, with roasted butternut squash, dolcelatte and thyme, finished with walnuts and fresh parmesan.

I reckon I got the best deal of the lot. This is the Rotolo - mushroom duxelles and goat's cheese rolled in a thyme-infused potato, served on a bed of French beans with a white wine, cream and cep reduction, topped with deep-fried leeks. Rich French food is not beyond the grasp of the vegetarian (nor the vegan, by the looks of this!). I will dream about that sauce for years to come, I'm sure of it.

For dessert, we had the opportunity to share and sample again with the mezze of desserts. Sadly the light was waning and my photograph doesn't do this justice. Hopefully you can make out (clockwise from top):

• hazelnut creme brulee,
• pressed chocolate and chestnut torte,
• cappuccino and vanilla cheesecake
• rhubarb, pear and ginger crumble (centre), and
• apple pie.

I have never really 'got' creme brulee, but dang, now I do. With so much rich food in our stomachs, I don't know how we managed to reduce it to this:

But we did.

June 26, 2008: London

On Thursday morning I visited Imperial College's South Kensington campus, and we lingered in the neighbourhood afterwards. In particular, Emily had recommended the Victoria and Albert museum for lunch. We wandered through some of the exhibits (I was most taken by the South Asian items) before seeking out the tea rooms.

The Morris Room

The Poynter Room

The Gamble Room

These grand spaces form the first museum restaurant in the world (the Morris Room opened in 1868). Off to the side is the cafeteria - Emily astutely observed that while it offers only pre-made food, it's evidence that pre-made food can be done well.

My delicious parmesan, rocket and avocado roll was all that came between me and some serious order envy - Michael had a chickpea and roast pepper pie with cauliflower, carrots, and caramelised potatoes on the side.

As at every other museum or gallery cafe I've visited, the prices are inflated. Yet the quality here is far better than most. The dessert cabinet is most decadent and tempting, but with full bellies we continued on to the Science Museum.

In the Science Museum we initially focused on the health and medicine exhibits on the higher floors, yet it was an art installation that most impressed us. The Listening Post is a stark arrangement of small monochrome screens that transmit live fragments of text from the internet. Usernames, keywords, conversations - they're presented in imaginative ways to provide a fascinating insight into identity, thought and communication in the digital age.

In the gift shop, I couldn't go past a couple of items pertinent to a food blogger. The first is a new notebook for transporting our scrawled ideas from table to blog - it's covered in a durable and nerdy recycled circuit board!

The second is a freeze-dried ice cream sandwich, as eaten by NASA astronauts! I didn't sample this until quite a few days later and it made for an intriguing snack. Looking like a chalk model, it thankfully had a lot more taste. The chocolate biscuits seemed merely like a drier, more brittle version of the standard sandwich; the ice cream melted and fizzed slightly on the tongue in the most peculiar way!

We took on a few more English landmarks - Leicester Square, Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus - but failed to draw much pleasure from the crowded streets and gaudy shops. Our sampling of an English pub, the Princess Louise, was far more successful. While there seems little to recommend about English breakfasts, their potato crisps are another matter - thick cut and less oily than their Australian counterparts, I'll no doubt be scoffing a few more packets before we return home. As far as I'm concerned, Michael's ale and my cider were incidental props to the crisps.

For dinner we headed to Drummond St, near Euston Station. It's lined with a number of vegetarian Indian restaurants and we previously visited it two years ago. Recognising the restaurant we ate at last time, we deliberately continued to Chutney's just to try something different.

Well, kind of different - actually, we both ordered what are typically our favourite Indian dishes. For Michael this meant beginning with a Kingfisher beer, while I had a mango lassi - the thickest and fruitiest I've encountered in a while, like drinking a melted Weiss bar. I helped Michael out with the first course of his deluxe thali, a huge pappadum with four spicy condiments.

Next up was a dahl, before the main event - a huge plate comprising onion bhaji, three breads, four curries, raita, rice and gulab jamun.

Meanwhile, I embarked on malai kofta and paratha. The kofta was pleasant, the sauce was aromatic though without the usual tang, and the paratha was incredible - fresh, hot, and super-flaky, probably the best I've ever had.

Fennel seeds and complimentary fresh fruit finished the meal, and the evening, perfectly.

June 25, 2008: London

Cindy was spending her first full day in London with Emily at Imperial College, so I was on my own sightseeing again. I’d hatched a vague plan to spend the day wandering around the Thames, from the Tower Bridge down to Battersea Park, with numerous stops in between. For some reason Cindy and I had failed to visit the Tower of London last time we were in London, so I was wowed by the mighty bridge and the ancient fortress.



A quick stroll along the Thames path and across London Bridge had me wandering past Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and into the Tate Modern, with its imposing turbine hall. Like Brisbane’s Powerhouse on steroids.


After spending a couple of hours going through the excellent Street and Studio exhibition and sitting for a few quiet minutes in the stunning Rothko room, it was back out into the crowds and across the Millennium Bridge towards St Paul’s.


The entry fee and queues discouraged me from actually going into the cathedral, instead wandering on towards my planned lunch venue. The Time Out vegetarian guide to London had intrigued me with its promise of vegetarian Japanese food at Saki. I started to wonder when I realised that the restaurant was located directly across from London’s meat markets, but it wasn’t until I sat down with the menu that I realised that ‘vegetarian’ actually meant ‘at least one vegetarian dish on the menu’. And that the food wasn’t cheap: 15 pounds by the time I’d had a beer and a set lunch. Still, the set lunch was pretty good: miso soup, udon noodles, assorted vego sushi pieces and some tempura. It was all fresh and tasty, but I left slightly disappointed having had high expectations of a menu filled with vegetarian Japanese delights.


A quick stroll along Fleet Street and through the old inns of court near Chancery Lane – all London barristers have to have their offices in these court, which are run on arcane 14th century traditions. Still, they have lovely gardens.


I continued down along the bank of the Thames past some of the ministry building and to the ridiculous splendour of Westminster and Westminster Abbey.



Then it was time for a break from the crowds and a rest on a park bench in St James’ Park, filled with more exotic waterfowl. London really does have a rich array of wonderful parks dotted amongst all the crowds and old buildings.



A bit more walking (I was really starting to run out of steam by the late afternoon) took me around through Chelsea towards Battersea Park and past the imposing (and derelict) Battersea Powerstation.

A quiet sit in the park and a brief flurry of enthusiastic bird-watching (which meant I could go back home bragging about the great tits I’d seen) and I was completely spent. After some confusing public transport wrangling it was back to Em and Sam’s place and then off to the local Eritrean and Italian restaurant Red Sea for dinner. We opted for the vegetarian special, which the menu suggested served 2 or 3. Perhaps because there were no other customers around, we ended up with enough food to feed a small army – a huge injera platter, artfully decorated with four different stews (the lemony-spinach one and the lentilly orange one were the clear stand outs) and a side salad. Throw in a seemingly endless supply of little personal injera rolls for dipping and the four of us were alarmingly full well before we’d got through it all. Our waiter briefly chastened us for leaving too much salad, before relenting and serving us up some traditional Eritrean coffee, which was at least 30% sugar. So good. We settled back with our coffees and watched the second half of the Turkey v Germany Euro semi-final with the restaurant owners, all of us cheering on the gutsy Turks. Despite their last-minute defeat, we left the restaurant happy, full and exhausted – all of us falling straight into our beds when we got back home.

Photo credit to Sam and his snazzy camera phone.