OOTD: You promised me Kate Spade, but that was last year

Ever since I heard 'No More (Baby I'ma Do Right)' from 3LW when I was ten, I've wanted my own Kate Spade handbag, because it gets name-dropped in the song (I'm very easily influenced when it comes to rap songs mentioning brands, ha). Now, some 18 years on, I've finally been able to treat myself to that very thing. Baby I'ma do right!

Dress: Ted Baker

Handbag: Kate Spade

Earrings: Christmas market stall (Leicester Square)

Cardigan (under handbag): H&M

Glasses: Red or Dead
Nail polish: Essie

Restaurant review: EAT TOKYO (Covent Garden)

Over the past few months, I’ve been to Eat Tokyo twice, and if I’m ever in Covent Garden and struggling to decide on somewhere to eat, this restaurant will be at the forefront of my mind.

Just with Dishoom and On the Bab, it doesn’t take reservations and you have to queue. This suggests the restaurant cares more about profits than comfort of its customers. However, the fact that there are always droves of people queuing outside the Covent Garden branch of Eat Tokyo means that these people deem the food is worth queuing for.

The first time I dined there, I had a salmon teriyaki bento box. There are a variety of bento boxes at Eat Tokyo, ranging from sashimi, chicken katsu and vegetarian. They range in price, but the most expensive bento box is £18. These two are both less than that (~£16 and £8.50, if I remember correctly):

Authentic Japanese food at its best!

Restaurant review: GOGI KOREAN BAR AND GRILL (Warwick Avenue)

Having done my Masters (part-time, over two years) very close to Tottenham Court Road, I was able to indulge in all the Korean restaurants in TCR’s vicinity, which certainly gave me an appetite for the cuisine. This fondness was cemented by On the Bab, one of the best restaurants I’ve been to, by far, and recipient of a coveted A-grade on this blog.

One part of my Korean dining experience that was sadly lacking, however, was that of the Korean barbeque. This is where Gogi, situated about a ten minute walk from Warwick Avenue underground station, came in.

Cooking: salmon and pomegranate salad

I made a salmon and pomegranate salad today. It was easy to cook and tasted so delicious, so I shall share my recipe!

Step 1: Buy a few fillets of salmon from your local high street. Before putting them in the oven for the time allocated, chop a few fine chillis (as shown in the first photo) and evenly distribute these on the salmon:

Step 2: While the salmon is cooking in the oven, cut open a pomegranate. Break all the individual pieces into a salad bowl and throw in a healthy quantity of greens. Use a spoon to spread the two fruit/veg out, before drizzling delicious balsamic vinegar over the combination.

Once the salmon is ready, boom! There's your dinner! Including preparation time, this took less than 20 minutes to make, and the end result is delicious and nutritious. Am definitely going to follow this recipe again (I may make amendments) - watch this space!

The Pizza Express Master-post.

I've dined at Pizza Express a few times in the last month (pro tip: if you attend Pizza Express using Nectar or Tesco points, one point can earn you 4 times what the point would get you in store, so it makes sense to trade your points in for Pizza Express credits!), and I thought I'd share my thoughts on each of the individual pizzas/pastas/meals I tasted there!

Sloppy Giuseppe: the green pepper is super-spicy, and complements the beef well.  The pizza could have stood to have more cheese. 7/10.

Restaurant review: CHAPTER ONE (Orpington)

Chapter One is basically the only restaurant in Orpington to carry any kind of distinction. It used to possess one Michelin star (was sadly stripped of it in 2014), but for Bromley, that's enough to make it stand out. I’d never been there before, but for my 27th birthday, my friend Joy kindly treated me to a three course meal on the lunchtime menu there.

Restaurant review: EL GAUCHO (South Kensington)

Restaurant review: HISAR MEZE BAR (Orpington)

I took my friend Joy here last month for her 26th as a birthday present, before we watched La La Land together. I'm glad to say the restaurant was significantly better than the movie, which epitomises the song, 'Is that all there is?'

Restaurant review: CAFÉ RICHOUX (Mayfair)

A brief walk away from Bond Street Tube station is this delightful French patisserie and café, which I cannot recommend enough. Whether it’s breakfast, brunch, dinner or lunch you’re after, you’d do well to give this place a visit.

As it was early afternoon that I went there, I figured it wasn’t too late for an eggs benedict. The last time I had an eggs benedict in a restaurant was in Smollensky’s back in September 2012. I’d thought that was pretty fantastic, but the Richoux one just blew it out of the water. 

I’d requested to have the eggs soft, as runny eggs with the yolk all yellow is one of my favourite things to consume. They’d cooked it to that level, and better. And the salmon that was served with it was brilliant as well – no Sainsbury’s salmon there. At £12.95, the dish wasn’t cheap, but you definitely get what you pay for here, and that is quality, quality, quality. Even the salad on the side was perfect; the little sprinkle of balsamic on top elevated it above the usual bog standard out-of-the-pack rabbit food.

For dessert, I had three macaroons, chocolate, vanilla and lavendar. Pretty much a given considering we were in a French café. However, since my nightmare experience in the unbelievably pretentious and up-its-own-arse Ladurée, I’ve approached macaroons with some trepidation. Fortunately, the macaroons here actually tasted good. So light I felt like I was floating, yet conversely, deliciously creamy. The lavender in particular, was a delight, both because of the rarity of the flavour, and also the blend of biscuit and filling.

As you may have noticed, I am generally quite a difficult to please food-blogger. If I’ve shelled out for a meal and the slightest thing goes wrong, I’ll remember it and jot it down so I can bitch about the restaurant’s shortcomings on my blog with the venom of the deadliest snake. That's just how this Chinalady rolls. However, I genuinely do not have a single gripe with Café Richoux. 

Tasty, elegant dishes, and a great vibe, this is exactly how French dining in London should be. Simply put, everything Ladurée aspires to, and fails to be.

Grade: A

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

Two buffet meals this week.

Diwana, Euston. £6.95 for vegetarian all you can eat.

 

There was a seriously excellent selection of food on offer, and the majority of it was cooked better than you standard bargain basement Chinese buffet. Such was the usage of quorn supplements that, like Kailash Parbat, you didn't notice the lack of meat in your meal. And the fact that it's a buffet means you can stuff your face to your heart's content, for a modest price :)

 

However, what let this place down was the horrendous, horrendous service. Abrupt waiters who didn't register a request and had to be prodded into reminding, and when you did remind them they glared at you like, gee, I don't know, it wasn't their job to serve us or something. One was in my way and didn't even have the manners to step aside. Charming.

 

So, for that, I'll have to give this place a B-. Shame as the food was lovely, but the waiters there really need to be schooled in etiquette, just truthing.

 

Pizza Hut, Oxford Circus. £7.50 for all you can eat.

 

 

I went to Pizza Hut's lunchtime buffet out of nostalgia for when I did it as a kid, but was disappointed to discover that both the quality of the food, and the quantity, is nothing like what I was used to all those year's ago. There was one flavour of pizza that came out consistently: margherita. Also known as the most boring pizza flavour. The pepperoni one tasted flat and flavourless, and the less said about ham and tuna the better. Only the veggie pizza have anything going for it. The salad bar was also extremely paint-by-numbers and dull.

 

Factor in awful service (we ordered bottomless cokes and they seemed extremely reluctant to top them up, knowing that they weren't going to get any extra money for it) and the fact that every time I tried to make eye contact with a waiter, they purposely looked away, and I can safely say I will not be going back to this dive in a hurry.

 

Grade: D

Restaurant review: SEATON RESTAURANT (Weston-super-Mare)

Just off the pier in a vibrant seaside town is Seaton Restaurant, an extremely hospitable and charming restaurant that I would recommend to all who visit Weston.

The menu is extremely varied, featuring famous Greek dishes, homemade burgers, as well as seaside must-haves such as fish and chips and knickerbocker glories. 

Restaurant review: SMOLLENSKY's (Strand)

Such is the bustling, crowded nature of the Strand, that blink and you’ll miss Smollensky’s Bar and Grill, which is wedged in a small space just next to Boots. It’s quite unfortunate for them, yet fortunate, in some ways, because, on the day of paying this place a visit with the girls from work, their grill was broken, meaning I couldn’t choose a steak or a burger that I had my eye on. This is at the same time fortunate, because I love fish, and tend to mark seafood and grade dishes more leniently. So, that little setback was good and bad.

Restaurant review: SARASTRO (Strand)

Just off Covent Garden, next to the theatre playing Woman in Black is Sarastro, a truly unique little restaurant with a wonderful kooky vibe and some delicious plates to boot.

Cute little alcoves (reminiscent of the boxes one sits in to listen to the opera) make up the restaurant, and eating your dinner in a box, slightly detached from the rest of the room, really gives your meal a cosy feel, making Sarastro a great place to bring potential dates. The menu didn’t offer a huge range of dishes, but what it did offer was creative, with each dish offering something distinctive. 

Restaurant review: CACCIARI'S (South Kensington)

In a cosy cafe-alike in Old Brompton road sits Cacciari's, a cosy and utterly likeable Italian restaurant. The waitress serving us was lovely; and such was their hospitality that we were gifted a free Bellini by the end of the night; always a welcome treat. I sampled almost half the cocktail menu, having the mojito, the Bloody Mary, the margherita and the Bellini, and each cocktail was loving prepared and tasted great, in particular the margherita, which was a lot more peppery than how I'm used to, but it was all the better for it.

Food-wise, I was almost knocked out of my seat with how reasonable the prices were, not least as we were in Kensington, one of the most wealthiest parts of London (and trust me, plenty of other restaurants in Chelsea & Ken are more than happy to ride on that SW-postcode and use it as an excuse to churn out crap food). 

For starters, much like at Theo Randall, I had mozerella and tomato, but unlike at Theo Randall (£12 for a tiny plate meant that it was essentially charging its customers £6 a bite), the £9 price tag at Cacciari's was justified, a generous-helping was given of the cheese and tomato, with cute little pans holding it all together. So far, so excellent.

For the main course, I had Lasagna alla Bolognese. Lasagne's always a tricky one in restaurants because it can turn out either too starchy, or not full enough. In Cacciari's, it was the perfect balance between the two, and the parmesan cheese given to us in a little pot was a more-than-perfect supplement to it. The fusion of meat, cheese and all the other flavours in my lasagne rendered it absolutely delicious, and, with a cold Peroni beer to drink with it, it was a near-on flawless meal. 

Having been on holiday in Italy last year, the meal I had in Cacciari's last Friday was genuinely the closest thing I've tasted to proper Italian cooking since then.

There was a little beer garden behind the restaurant as well as chairs in front of it, meaning that customers get their choice of places to sit to suit their mood. Whilst lacking the grandeur that many of the other South Kensington restaurants parade about, Cacciari's humble surroundings worked to its advantage; it was a thoroughly unpretentious, value-for-money place to eat in.

The greatest thing about Cacciari's is that it fully goes by the merit of its food and drink, rather than any frilly ornaments. If you remember Theo Randall, which went out of its way to show off how great it was even though the food was less-than-brilliant, Cacciari's is a delightful counterpart; the chairs and glasses in the restaurant are all from Ikea. The setting is cheap and cheerful, and as such, allows the restaurant to focus its attention on the thing that actually matters in a restaurant - the quality of the food. 

Cacciari's is the closest thing you're going to get to finding a bargain in Kensington; SW7 heaven.

Grade: A

For more of my restaurant reviews, click here.