Restaurant review: CHA CHA MOON (Soho)

The first impression I got when setting foot in Cha Cha Moon was that it reminded me a bit of Busaba Eathai, in that tables for each individual party weren’t segregated, and instead, you were seated as part of a long table. 

Whilst the restaurants favour this seating arrangement because it means they’ll get more customers, and thus, revenue, as with the Thai restaurant, it makes the place have a bit of an impersonal vibe, which doesn’t put it in my best books to begin with.

Redemption came almost immediately, however. I visited this place using a voucher I bought off Groupon, which entitled me to £40 worth of food there. The deal cost £20, so it was the same as using Tastecard (which I don’t have). However, I was pleasantly surprised when the waiter told me that the deal didn’t just extend to food, but encompassed drink too. This worked out fantastically, because after getting drinks, we had exactly enough for a starter and main each, and thus, didn’t have to over-stuff ourselves just to meet the quota of forty quid.

The cocktails, though not remotely alcoholic, tasted very nice. I had a lime concoction in honour of my e-mail address, and Jake had this cool dragon drink. It’s also a testament to the strength of the cooking at Cha Cha Moon, and the chefs not relying heavily on sauces, that aside from the cocktails, I didn’t require any liquids throughout my meal. I say this because from my experience of dining at Asian restaurants, I usually a fair bit of water just to hydrate my body from the high quantity of soy sauce they bung into the meals.

For starters, we had steamed broccoli (nothing special in my opinion, and if you were paying full-price for that, it was literally £4.50 for a couple of veg, there’s your rip off), and chicken-and-prawn dumplings, which I loved but there was barely any of, and thus only left one for the other guy :p 

I also enjoyed my main – seafood ho fun. Ho fun is my go-to dish in Chinese restaurants, and it was cooked passably at Cha Cha Moon, without being the finest of the dish I’ve ever had. The scallops went down a treat but the prawns could have done with being de-scaled, and my other main gripe was that there wasn’t enough seafood, and a bit too much ho fun and peppers, the latter of which I would have been happy to see none.

Fortunately, due to Cha Cha Moon’s generosity in letting my voucher include drinks in it meant that I left the place feeling merrily tipsy, and thus I will return the favour by artificially bumping their grade up a few notches, given that my extensive experience with Chinese restaurants rendered this place really quite unremarkable.

Grade: B

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

Restaurant review: ASADAL (Holborn)

Prided on the authenticity of its Korean dishes, Asadal is blessed with the prime location of being literally just next to Holborn tube station, so prospective diners really can’t miss it. From the interiors, it quite clearly has delusions of grandeur, with its plush seats and royal-looking décor, and all this clashes with the outside appearance, which is actually quite shabby.

The food is edible, but not fantastic, and certainly not value for money considering that our bill came to an excess of £60. We ordered spicy chicken appetisers (very nice), cod fishcakes (instantly forgettable and horrendously overpriced), beef tofu (the beef wasn’t very well-cooked, but the vegetables accompanying the meal were, so very much a mixed bag), and pork belly. 

I was most excited about the latter, as it actually employed the hot plate at the centre of the table, but unfortunately, turned out to be a monumental disappointment. The pork belly slices weren’t good, and the vegetables that we’d ordered to eat it with (on the waiters’ recommendations) didn’t complement the meat well.

 
 

A further word about the waiters. They weren’t great. I asked them if we should have plum wine or rice wine, and they rolled their eyes as if I’d asked something utterly asinine. Sorry for having questions! All throughout the meal they were surly, and whilst they should have cooked the pork belly for us, they buggered off, meaning we had to do it ourselves. 

Suffice to say, I didn’t tip.

Grade: C

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

Album review: SALUTE (Little Mix)

Little Mix’s second album is as bright and bold as their previous, with the girl group having newfound swag from their globe-trotting exploits to add to their music-making. As with DNA, Little Mix take co-writing credentials on the majority of their album, meaning that Salute is truly the concoction of fierce foursome Perrie Edwards, Jesy Nelson, Leigh-Anne Pinnock and Jade Thirlwall, as opposed to the bland music industry play-by-numbers girlband that many would expect from the product of a Simon Cowell TV show.

Romantic Towers exhibits their growing emotional maturity, a moving ballad about doomed love, a theme that I am personally feeling too strongly too much right now. “Once we were made like towers / Everything could've been ours / But you left it too late now my heart feels nothing, nothing at all” they croon forlornly, to a swelling, majestic string orchestra overlayed with RnB beats. It helps that all four of them are all talented performers, so the delivery of the lyrics sound heartfelt, when the song could have turned out mawkish in lesser vocal talents.

Being unafraid to borrow from their hip-hop sisters is another thing I really rate about Little Mix. They channel both Amerie and Lady Gaga in standout track, About the Boy, a feisty, sexy track about a fella who’s just got that one thing. Fabulous harmonisations, an extremely catchy beat, good blend of singing/spoken word and another topic that I have a personal experience or ten of makes for a wonderful song. And the crème de la crème comes at the jazzy refrain, where soon-to-be Mrs. Zayn Malik, Perrie Edwards gets to exhibit her fantastic pipes in her high note, which has to be heard to be believed. And then heard over and over again, because it is just that good.

Like the sass in DNA’s How Ya Doin’, the four girls strut their stuff proudly here too, with lyrics like “Boys will be boys, I got plenty knocking on my door / but none of them compare, you’re the one I’m waiting for” in Nothing Feels Like You. For some reason, Little Mix have the likeability to carry off lyrics like this, whereas in lesser talents, such as Pussycat Dolls’ Don’tcha, they could have simply come across as vain.

As with most albums, there are a few duds. These Four Walls didn’t affect me in the same way as Towers, despite it going for the same thematic field, and the frailty that the producers were going for in the girls’ voices comes across as just weak vocals, which definitely undersells them. Similarly, in Good Enough, the girls demanding “Am I still not good enough? / Am I still not worth that much?” simply comes across as needy, and jars with the girl power vibe of the rest of the album, however well-sung.

Thankfully, the rest of the album is all about unabashedly celebrating girls and how terrific we are. Boy has serious Destiny’s Child-esque vibes, in both the beat, singing style and the Say My Name-type themes. Their single, Move, which they performed recently on X-Factor with gusto, is a hugely enjoyable dance track that is pure pop, with some cool rapping to boot. Perrie is my favourite singer of the four, and she belts out the bridge tremendously, showing an enviable opera-esque quality to her voice that complements her band members well.

In the void left by Girls Aloud, there hasn’t really been a girl band that have reached the heights of them. The Saturdays made a fair crack of it, but they lack a certain je ne sais quoi. Little Mix may have been considered as a cynical money-making ploy to fill that gap by some critics, but the make some damn good music. From the military-style Beyonce-esque drumming, messages of not allowing men to play us and cheap and cheerful RnB components, there is nothing in Salute that you won’t have heard before in millions of other songs, but such is Little Mix’s energy, that it all comes off into a pretty decent end product. I salute their second album.

Grade: A-

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Review: BlackBerry Curve 8520

Having trolled many a football journalist relentlessly with my trusted BlackBerry Bold, I got a taste of my own troll medicine when the damn thing died on me, and stopped working, with nothing but an error message. I followed the instructions on online, but to no avail, the old BlackBerry was well and truly busted. As such, I had to revert back to my pink Samsung Tocco, which had most certainly seen better days, and with it, couldn’t access the internet. I found myself texting my tweets, and come on, that is just so two thousand and late.

Deciding I could cope no longer without a Smartphone, I took my dad’s BlackBerry and got it unlocked for a tenner in Chinatown. It was contracted solely to Orange, but now I can use it, and, whilst it is inferior to the BlackBerry I had previously in pretty much every way, anything beats the three months of torture when I had to survive with a phone that… didn’t have internet on it.

Having used both a BlackBerry Bold and Curve, then, I feel myself to be somewhat of an authority in comparing and contrasting the two, like they’re two romantic era poems and I’m sitting an English literature exam. Well, my previous BlackBerry was definitely more stylish. It was more streamlined, weighed less, and just looked sexier in its case, whereas the Curve looks like a brick compared to modern smartphones.

Furthermore, whereas the keys on my BlackBerry Bold were linked together seamlessly and made practically no sound when I touch-typed on them, I have no such luck with the BlackBerry Curve, where the keys protrude, and each time you touch one of the plastic keys it makes an audible sound. Not good, especially at work when I’m trying to surreptitiously send a text without the bosses knowing.

The fact that the Bold was introduced later than the Curve is also apparent in the Curve’s deficiencies in functionality. On my Bold, I was used to going to sleep, being awoken by various alerts from Twitter/email/Facebook/WhatsApp/texts, and just hitting one bar to see them all listed together. We do not get this with the Curve, where instead I have to manually check each individual thing. It’s fractionally more time consuming, but it’s just the psychological element of being ~in control of mai social networks~~~; I miss being able to see everything, on one page, and deciding which I’ll choose to reply to first. Other downsides of the Curve? I can't download songs, I can't load webpages with too many graphics, and there's no such thing as a Favourites bar, meaning I have to keep wasting time selecting an icon when I need it. Grr.

There is, however, one aspect at which the Curve trumps the Bold, and it’s a pretty major one: battery life. When I had my 9790, I would have to carry the charger with me everywhere because the damn thing lasted about four hours, on a good day. It let to much faction with my parents, who like to know where I am EVERY SECOND OF THE DAY, despite the fact that I’m 23. With the 8520, I’m actually able to give them the façade of thinking they know where I am, as the battery is much more durable. So, for all my gripes about how uncool it is, when it comes to the basics, BlackBerry did good on the Curve.

My contract expires in March, and whilst the BlackBerry 8520 is perfectly functional, safe to say, I will be down the mobile phone at the crack of dawn to get an upgrade. It’s not so much that the phone is terrible, more, we are spoilt with the plethora of genius phones on the market. In 2013, something like the BlackBerry Curve simply doesn’t cut it anymore.

Grade: D

Restaurant review: BUSABA EATHAI (Goodge Street)

A cosy Thai restaurant, Busaba Eathai didn’t do anything totally wrong, but at the same time, didn’t get anything perfectly right either. On entering, we were directed to the corner of a table to sit (where there were already several parties dining). This set up, whilst probably economically efficient for the restaurant owners, severely detracts from the intimacy of a meal, and thus I wouldn’t recommend bringing someone here on a date, or even if you’re with mates and wish to have some proper alone time together. This all sorta jars with the Hollister-level low lighting, presumably put in there to create an ambience of closeness. 

As for the food, I was as impressed as could be given the unfriendly London price tags.

For starter, we had spring rolls, which is a hard one to mess up, and, unsurprisingly, they went down well (it helped that we were absolutely famished). For my main I ordered spicy prawns, then instantly regretted it (I like to think that I have the stomach for hot food, but I ain’t great). Gracefully, they weren’t that spicy – I could have taken it stronger, and I love prawns, so that plate constituted a gastronomical win. 

My friend had the chicken curry dish, which was pleasantly moreish, even if the chicken could have been cooked a lot better. The rice was a little on the stale side, but no doubt the cooks will try to palm that off is "oh that's how they cook it in Thailand". To drink, I had cranberry juice, and got a rude awakening on central London restaurant drink prices - £3 for about 250ml? C’mon now.

Busaba Eathai was an elegant enough venue, with edible dishes, classy toilets and noticeably high-end clientele. Perhaps that’s the problem – my palate is not quite that sophisticated yet, and there was something that all these people found so commendable in this place that went over my head. Charming, but not earth-shattering.

Grade: B

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

Restaurant Review: KAILASH PARBAT (Wembley)

After work a few Wednesdays ago, me and the girls went for a much-needed catch-up in Wembley. I didn’t actually realise that the place we were going to was purely vegetarian, but so well-cooked were the meals that by the time you pay the bill, you don’t even feel that meat was lacking in the dish at all. And, considering what an unadulterated carnivore I am, that’s some feat.

The starters dish, the chaat platter, was probably the most conventional of all the dishes we ordered, a well-balanced mix of carb and sauces, a bit like a more authentic version of poppadoms and their dips. I couldn't help making a mess when eating, but, in my defence, when the food's that good, I'm desperate to get it down me as soon as possible, at the cost of common decorum!

Our colleague ordered that was far too spicy for two of us, but as a compromise we picked the other two, of which one was Indian cottage cheese mix, which I adored. That said, even that was a bit spicy for me, and I had to indulge in a yoghurt drink, twice, to quench the thirst that eating the hot food bought. We were all thoroughly stuffed by the end (with rice to spare), and shelled just £15 each. I was thoroughly satisfied with both of the dishes pictured below - both were textured, appetising, well-cooked and moreish.

Kailash Parbat is, in my opinion, the best Indian restaurant in Wembley. Of course, that statement would be rendered somewhat redundant if you consider that it’s also the only Indian restaurant I’ve been to in Wembley. But despite the lack of competition, what cannot be denied is that this was a great place (terrific portions, unobtrusive service [ironically, this is one of the few places in London that I'd deem worthy of a tip, and paradoxically, one of the few that doesn't help itself to a tip] and delicious dishes), and will certainly take some beating.

 
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