Bar review: ORIOLE BAR (Farringdon)

My favourite TV show of all time, Sex and the City, has a lot to answer for. Of the four lead females, the one I recognise myself in the most is definitely Carrie Bradshaw (played by Sarah Jessica Parker with considerable wit and flair). Carrie doesn’t take break-ups well, tends to fall hard in love with men who are no good for her, and is a writer. (Admittedly, I write for a blog, she writes for a state-wide newspaper, but still).

Furthermore, it was only because Carrie loved Cosmopolitans so much that I began drinking Cosmopolitans, and if I am ever in a cocktail bar, that’s my go-to drink. At Oriole bar, ordering a Cosmo would be failing to make the most of your opulent surroundings. The bar offers weird and wonderful concoctions featuring the most out there ingredients, including egg yolk, tobacco liquor and, er… dust.

The menu, which is divided by parts of the world (which inspired the various cocktails), is in itself, longer than most children’s books. I’m not being funny, but at 8pm when you just wanna get drunk with your girlfriends so you can trash-talk the clown men in your life (couldfillabook.jpg), who’s got time to read a whole MSc project-length??

That’s not to say that the drinks, and the food, sparse in quality as it was, wasn’t well presented.  Looks-wise, it certainly turned my head:-

That being said, the ostentatious presentation comes at a cost in terms of practicality. As the night progressed and I lost control of my motor neurones, I tipped over my awkwardly-shaped glass. Thankfully this was at the end and only ice cube spilt, but some of them went on the poor lady sat next to me. Hardly ideal.

The barfood was equally impractical. The chorizo, photographed below, whilst delicious, was I wolfed it up in about three bites. I've been curious about what exactly quinoa is since I saw Gone Girl  two months ago and Ben Affleck was mocked for thinking it was kind of fish. Turns out that what it actually is is some bland-ass flavourless pseudo-cereal concoction. Boring, and the pittance of salsa sauce put on it hardly merited the £7.50 price. That's £2.50 per fritter. Would you pay £2.50 for something you can barely see?!

Overall, I found Oriole too pretentious, and if I’m complaining about something being too pretentious, you know you’ve got problems. I guess I’m just too direct a person. I love cocktails, but I like to have two or three different alcoholic ingredients, a few mixers, and boom. And I’d rather my mixer didn’t include something that could give me an allergy!

Oriole bar is more of a status symbol than it is a viable drinking hole. People would bring guests here just to show that they can; that they can afford to throw away £14 on a cocktail with about 3 alcohol units in, tops.

I’d rather have Cosmopolitan, thanks.

Grade: C

Bar review: BAR AMÉRICAIN (Soho)

Tying in with the 1920s, prohibition era of the bar, Bar Américain is one of those ‘you have to know it’s there to go there’ places, tucked in neatly behind Brassiere Zedel and with no discernible clues from the outside that it exists at all. Sights of women in flapper dresses and men in black and white suits suggests this is a popular go-to place for hosting Great Gatsby-style parties.

The cocktails taste delicious, and are very intricately crafted, thus almost justifying the extortionate rates. My personal favourite is the Chrysler, which will get you drunk and satisfy the tastebuds – a truly rare commodity amongst cocktails these days (the cocktails in Slug and Lettuce taste nice but have barely any alcohol, whereas cocktails that are overloaded with booze end up tasting like horrible, cough medicinesque concoctions). The waiters are very attentive and bring you a small amount of popcorn to chomp on whilst you’re enjoying your drinks.

The lighting in Bar Américain is dark, too dark for my liking, and the décor a little out there for me. The seating was certainly extremely comfortable – plush, American-style furniture. 

All in all, it’s one of the more elegant places I’ve gotten inebriated in, but also by far one of the most expensive. Just so you know what I’m talking about, a cocktail you can drink in about 5 minutes clocks in at £12 (cheaper options are the classic cocktails for £9, but why shell out for something you’ve tasted before if you’re here for the adventure?). 

Don’t act like I never told you.

Grade: B

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

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

Restaurant review: OLIVELLI (Southwark)

Now, call me a cleanliness nut, but, if I see any restaurant with a food hygiene score of anything other than 5, I judge them internally straight away. Harsh, perhaps, but I just don’t think it’s so much for ask, given the extortionate London prices restaurants charge these days, for meals that more often than not turn out to be disappointing, that the sanitation around the ingredients is nothing less than perfect. Olivelli had a grading of 4 for its food hygiene, yet I’d heard good things about it, including that celebrities of Hollywood’s golden era liked dining here. Something, clearly, had to give.

For starter, we ordered antipasto all’italiana, which had some flat notes (the rectangular blob was a bit tasteless), but the assortments of meats completed each other. I would have seen more in the way of dips for £16.95, and it could perhaps have been presented a little more artistically, but overall, it both served to treat the customer to a little taste of Italy, and whet one’s appetite tantalisingly.

For my main, I opted for spigola all’acqua pazza, or for the non-Italian speaking amongst you (don't worry, I just lifted it from the restaurant's website ;) ), seabass. It was priced at £16.45, but honestly, I have had much better seafood dishes in my work canteen for £3.30 (especially this fisherman's pie which I still dream about). The potatos that came with them were stodgy and there weren't enough of them to make up my dinnertime requirement of carbs, the cherry tomatos were Tesco produce at best, and the fact that there was bone in the fish, and we weren’t alerted it, was a huge problem as I’d already had two glasses of wine and a large beer by this point. I had to draw on every fibre of my drunken concentration to check that I wasn’t ingesting any bones. Extremely poor form from the restaurant.




All in all, I’m at a loss to explain why such esteemed actors liked to frequent this place, which definitely likes to package itself as better than it is. It almost fooled me with the starters, but after the mains, I realised this place was all namedrop and no bite. The fact that it scored 4/5 on food hygiene, I realised, oversold it; that’s by far the highest rating it’ll ever be getting.

Grade: D

Selfie with bae.

 

 Hat: Chelsea football club

Hoodie: University of Bath

Earrings: China

Glasses: Red or Dead

Restaurant review: NIZUNI JAPANESE RESTAURANT (Charlotte Street)

Situated on Charlotte Street, a road that is both close to my University and boasting some great restaurants (the previously reviewed BiBimBap being one of them), Nizuni is an elegant, dimly lit Japanese restaurant which serves a range of Japanese dishes, with sushi being its main draw.

We ordered two different sets of sushi, a nizuni set (in honour of the name of the restaurant, I thought it would be rude not to) as well as a 10-piece sushi selection. Both were utterly delicious (great quantities of fish and the sauces were tantilising), but frightfully overpriced. The 22-piece nizuni set came to £39, which averages to almost £2 per individual small piece, which, just by a visual inspection of below, you can see, are accomplishedly cooked and presented, but certainly not the gold that such a price tag would imply.

Although the waiters were extremely helpful and obliging, there was a trainee member of staff working that day who got our orders confused, and thus, delayed us getting dinner. I’ll be generous and not dock the restaurant too many points for that as I could see her intentions were good, but her mind was jumbled. For her sake, I hope her memory has improved since our visit.

The alcohol selection wasn’t as expensive as the food, and we had a whole bottle of Japanese rice win between us and a beer apiece. Both tasted great.

Aside from the marvellous Hi Sushi, I am yet to visit a sushi place in London that offers good value for money. This certainly hasn’t changed having visited Nizuni. That said, the food was certainly high quality, and if you have the time, do check out their website, which is one of the coolest I've seen of a London restaurant so far! (If only they'd saved the money on their web designer and spent it on lowering prices of their food, I would have an even more favourable view of the place).

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