OOTD: Once you go Hobbs, you don't go back

I always thought there was a certain élan that came with Hobbs dresses, perhaps, in part, because 'Hobbes' happens to be the surname of Miranda from Sex and the City, the high-powered, successful career lady of the show. So it was like, in wearing Hobbs dresses, I would, by extension, be having a bit of Miranda in me!

Dress: Hobbs

Necklace: a gift

Earrings: Christmas market stall

Glasses: Red or Dead

Jacket (to the side): United Colours of Benetton

Hopefully, in the future, I'll build up more supplies of gorgeous Hobbs dresses, so I can emulate the most intelligent Sex and the City character more!

Speaking of film/TV characters' influences on my sartorial choices, when I now go clothes shopping, I seek to emulate the styles of certain sharply-dressed women. Alicia Florrick from The Good Wife and Rachel Zane from Suits are the two at the top of my list.

And, having recently watched the enjoyably soapy A Simple Favour, I am absolutely living for Blake Lively in menswear...

Work wardrobe goals!!

Restaurant review: PREZZO (New Oxford Street)

Now that there’s a post-Oscar lull, my blog feels weirdly directionless. I’m currently consuming any black and white films I can get my hands on, so expect random review of classic movies! I shall also attempt to make my way through the huge backlog of restaurants and bars I’ve frequented (although the rate I dine out far outstrips the rate at which I review places!).

I attended Prezzo with a BuyAGift voucher, where the deal on the website was £30 for a three-course-meal with a glass of wine.

Restaurant review: GALVIN AT WINDOWS (Mayfair)

Back in February, I had the pleasure of being able to try the five-course tasting menu at Galvin at Windows, at the Park Lane Hilton. With the exception of Yuauatcha and Sticks’n’Sushi, I rarely dine at expensive places, so when I got the opportunity to, it always feels like a special occasion!

Restaurant review: LA TROMPETTE (Chiswick)

Pre-La Trompette, the closest I’ve come to dining at a restaurant with a Michelin star was at Chapter One in Orpington. Chapter One used to have a Michelin star, until it was stripped of it (bit of a kick in the teeth). So I was both excited and curious about my foray into experiencing how the other 1% do live!

Unsurprisingly, given the level of prestige surrounding La Trompette, the service is second to none. The moment our water jug was anywhere below a third full, it would be topped up, and the waiters were always offering us more bread (it was too delicious to turn down!). The bread, fresh from the oven, was complemented with deliciously salted butter. 

Everything about the venue was pristine, which meant it fitted in well in the salubrious part of Chiswick.

In part because the bar is so low for me, because I’m used to the attentiveness-levels of central London waiters that can most politely be described as ‘laconic’, and in part because I’m too self-conscious, but the elevated customer service in La Trompette made me a tad uncomfortable. But I don’t begrudge the waiters and waitresses that; they were doing their jobs exactly as they should have. This one’s on me.

The food was far more ornately made and lovingly crafted than Theo Randall, another restaurant of comparable price to La Trompette. For my main, I had the loin of Cornish cod, gnocchetti, chanterelles, cavolo nero and hazelnut pesto.

Bathing the cod in foam was an inspired touch; it meant the seafood felt more textured, despite not actually having much fat on it. My only gripe was that the portion was too small, but people who can afford to dine at places like La Trompette on the regular will understand that it’s the quality of the cuisine, not the quantity. And the quality of the fish was spectacular; succulent, and brimming with flavour. The fact that there was so little of it made me cherish the meal more!

Despite it not being cheap, I can definitely understand the ‘You get what you pay for’ adage about La Trompette, which I most certainly did not feel about Ladurée and Theo Randall, two other expensive London restaurants which charged handsome prices for ugly food. If you feel like treating yourself, you could do much worse than this Michelin starred venue.

Grade: A-

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For more of my restaurant reviews, click here.

Restaurant review: MASALA DABBAS (Orpington)

Having just opened earlier this month, Masala Dabbas aims to bring authentic Indian dining to Orpington, on a High Street that is filled to the brim with 'Indian' dishes that have actually been liberally doctored to appease western palates.

Restaurant review: BARRAFINA (Covent Garden)

On my birthday (18^th April), I ventured out of my cheap and cheerful and/or Groupon-bought dining comfort zone and celebrated in style with an altogether more upmarket dinner at Barrafina.

The restaurant specialises in Spanish tapas, and after the nightmare that was Salvador and Amanda with all their short-cut taking, I was naturally, a little hesitant.

I needn't have worried; Barrafina has restored my faith in Spanish tapas in London.

Here are some pictures:

Restaurant review: EL GAUCHO (South Kensington)

Restaurant review: AZZURRO (Waterloo)

My friend Kieran and I had lunch here on Christmas Eve (here's a picture of us) when we'd both had very little for breakfast and were starving, once again proving the rule that you shouldn't decide where to eat when you're hungry.

Restaurant review: PIZZA PILGRIMS (Soho)

The servings at this much (over)-hyped pizza parlour didn’t taste anything out of the ordinary compared to a bog-standard oven pizza you can buy at Sainsbury’s, and compared to Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference, the meals completely paled in every department. 

Portion-wise, they left a lot to be desired; the cooks scrimped on the components of the meal that actually cost money (aka, the meat and veg, as demonstrated by the photo below), choosing to swamp you with dough instead. Big mistake: I prefer thin bases. And, ironically, they couldn’t even get the dough right; look how charred that is!

Advert vs the Real Thing: KFC Stacker burger.

I gotta say, the advert looked a lot different from the reality: the chicken strips were pouring out of the burger and cheese was dripping temptingly onto the meat, as opposed to the pitiful small slice of cheese pictured above. Finally, the bap in the advert was pert and full of volume. The top bap of my burger looked like it'd given up and died.

False advertising mark out of 10: 6. It did look very different, but still tasted delicious (I had two last week!), so at least it delivered on that front.

Restaurant review: THE CUBAN (Camden Town)

I went to The Cuban with my friend Joy a few weeks ago using a Groupon deal that cost £22, and it illustrated precisely why I’m hesitant to buy Too Good to Be True food deals from Groupon. This one definitely was.

On the Groupon page, it promised the holder to £88.45 worth of food. This is what you could get if you’d been given normal-sized dishes of the food (of which I was able to see on the tables of other diners around me). But this wasn’t what me and Joy (nor, having a peruse of Tripadvisor, anyone who went there using a Groupon voucher got). Instead, you get infinitesimal portions of the food. Blink and it’s gone! So it definitely wasn’t £88.45 worth of food, and if they were going to advertise such a deal, they should have scaled down the original price to represent the quantity of food you’d be getting, so that the buyer of the deal would have some indication of how much the food would really be worth.

I’m a fast eater at the best of times (pig.gif), but most of these portions photographed above wouldn’t even constitute half a bite. I was nowhere near full at the end of the ‘meal’.

On top of this, the restaurant was extremely understaffed. When we first arrived, there was one waitress manning the doors. She told us to sit down and she’d come to us, which we thought a little odd, as she didn’t ask where we were planning on sitting. Would she forget about us?

You bet your ass she did.

Yet, when I went up to her some 15 minutes later (we waited very patiently, deciding to give her the benefit of the doubt) to tell her where we were sat, she curtly gave me the brush off, telling me that she’d be with me. No smile, and faint flickers of an eyeroll, suggesting that if I tried to voice my discontent, she would bite my head off. An unhelpful dragon of a woman.

The cocktails were also uninspiring, both in flavour and presentation:

So yeah, pretty rotten food and service at this place, but I will shoulder some of the blame. I’d tried to get a delicious tapas experience on the cheap from Groupon and in the majority of the cases, they just don’t exist.

The Escapologist was an exception, rather than the rule, of when a Groupon deal actually delivers what it promises, but this relies on the vendor being honest and above board. The people who advertised The Cuban deal definitely weren’t that. I left feeling very short-changed.

In short, they lied.

Grade: F

BBQ Time.

Last Tuesday and Friday, I attended two BBQs (the second was immediately after the Sports Day).  Thought I'd post the foodporn from the two events!

Tuesday

I erroneously thought those two pieces of butter at the bottom of the plate were cheese, haha. Oops! The beef in this burger was insane, Five Guys, who? Hidden under all the vegetables is also some tomato/salsa-type dip, which really gave the vegetables an extra kick.

Friday

The filling in this burger was chicken, and the pieces had been pre-sliced, so they fit into the gap easier. The salad was very healthy, but I would have liked to have seen more in the way of sauces to give it a bit of flavour.

Restaurant review: THE TABLE (Southwark)

As with The Breakfast Club just a few streets down, The Table Café boasts a no-reservation policy and as such, has a queue of people waiting outside in the freezing cold. That, already, puts it in a realm with 10 Greek Street, which irritates me because it automatically signals that the restaurant cares more about their overall revenue than they do about the dining experience of the punters.

Restaurant review: LAL QILA (Goodge Street)

I had a cheeky peruse of TripAdvisor after I went to Lal Qila and prior to beginning my review. I was absolutely gobsmacked to see it was ranked 52nd of all the restaurants in London. Punters must have gone to a different restaurant to me.

Alarm bells rang as soon as I asked if the waiters could hang my coat up for me. Imagine my surprise (and chagrin) to learn that they didn’t have pegs to hang coats up on! What’s the point in having such lavish interiors (as Lal Qila certainly did), if you don’t even have a basic necessity such as coat hangers?

With my mac slung over the back of my chair, we turned to ordering drinks. I distinctly remember ordering a beer, because that's my modus operandi at restaurants, but the waiters seemed to decide to ignore me entirely, and serve me a Coca Cola, under the guise that that was what I asked for. I know damn well what I asked for, and that definitely wasn’t it. When I asked for the correct drink to be presented to me, the waiter went about a bout of trying to re-write history, and convince me that that was what I ordered. It was giving gaslighting.

Now, to the food. To its credit, it definitely wasn’t the worst Indian restaurant I’ve ever been to – that would be Tandoori Nights. But it sure as hell wasn’t close to coming to the best. I had a mellow cheese-infused dish, which was inoffensive but also unexciting. The rice was soft but tasteless and the Na’an bread utterly uninspiring. All in all, Bland with a capital B.

I have pored over the TripAdvisor page and it definitely links the same address of the Lal Qila I went to. Perhaps the 52nd best restaurant in London had to be accessed by walking into a wardrobe in the place I went to, Narnia-style. Because the place I went to definitely wasn’t it.

Grade: D

For more of my restaurant reviews, click here. If you would like me to review your restaurant, drop me an email at lemon_and_lime7@hotmail.com