Bar/restaurant review: HARRY'S BAR (Moorgate)

A classy venue with some superb cocktails, Harry's Bar is the kind of place I'd go when celebrating a happy occasion.

My main meal, steak, was succulent and meaty, without reaching the realms of the excellence offered at Hawksmoor. However, they were aided by the thick ridge cut chips which were rendered even more delicious with the generous portion of Hollandaise sauce they came with.

The cocktail menu featured all of the classics (Negroni, Pornstar, etc) as well as a few individual creations, all made with pretty generic ingredients. As the first picture illustrates, they were presented with style and professionalism, without quite reaching the je ne sais quoi that Reverend JW Simpson's cocktails boasted.

Still, the fact they they were drank greedily exposes the folly of places like others and their fixation with trying to dazzle the client with wacky ingredients such as dust, when the end product doesn't do anything for the drinker other than make a considerable dent in their bank balance.  

The decor at Harry's Bar was low-key but elegant and the waiters were attentive, obliging to any request you gave them.

The bill came to a sum more than I could make a habit of spending on a regular basis, but I left the place with a smile on my face, meaning I didn't think the money I parted with was poorly spent.

Grade: B+

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For more restaurant and bar reviews I've written, click here.

Bar review: REVEREND J W SIMPSON (Goodge Street)

Tucked away behind one solitary door, Reverend J W Simpson juggles clandestine positioning yet popular location to give the visitor of the bar a distinctly 1920s, Prohibition-era vibe. Such an enterprising display means that you can find somewhere to go drinking on a weekend evening in central London, and still benefit from an intimate, unobtrusive ambiance.

The service in Reverent J W Simpson is impeccable, with waiters and waitresses topping up your water level without needing to be prompted. Booking in advance means they'll find a decent amount of space for you to sit (on comfortable sofa-type lounging), rather than shove you on a bar stool, which was very much appreciated. Evening badinage is always so much more fun when your bum's well-placed on plush seating!

There were an abundance of interesting-looking cocktails; particularly loved the Aphrodite (pictured above), which was a must for people who like fruity drinks! The decor was quirky yet elegant.

The only downside of Reverent J W Simpson is that the toilets, which consisted of a door in the wall, would have been very easy to miss after you've had a few drinks. The gents and ladies were all in one room as well, which I didn't love.

But overall, I thoroughly enjoyed my experience at this drinking hole. An ideal spot for a date!

Grade: A-

Review: AMORINO (Islington, Camden Town)

Over the past few months, I've visited Amorino ice cream parlour twice, so thought I'd share some photos, and my thoughts on the experiences.

Trip 1: Islington

£3.50 for three scoops, including mango sorbet, raspberry sorbet and the dulce de leche. All delicious, albeit a bit too fruity for my tasting. Hence, I learnt my lesson and stockpiled my cup with sweeter tastes on...

Trip 2: Camden Town

Four £4.50, you get four scoops! This was much more sweet in flavour, with only lime sorbet acting as the fruit component, and every scoop was absolutely wonderful. If you're going to go here, what I recommend that you know in advance whether you want sweet or fruity, then make sure one scoop in your cup is something else, just to counterbalance the rest of the sweetness, for example.

There were many other enticing flavours which I look forward to trying out. The place was clean and the staff polite. My only foible, and it's a small one, is that for £3.50 and £4.50, respectively, I expected a fraction more, for example, what you get for that amount at Cream's.

Grade: A-

On point quotes in Manhattan.

It's no surprise that I was so taken with Woody Allen's Manhattan: it tells the story of a neurotic, unlucky in love bloke in a gorgeous city and is peppered with film references. You could basically take the film, set it in London and bung me in Allen's role, and that would pretty accurately capture my many romance-related failures. I adored it, and the writing was faultless.

Here are some lines in it that I thought were particularly relevant.

Restaurant review: ARBINA (Warren Street)

During the summer, one may be more inclined to eat lunch outside. Arbina has the facilities for this,  with its outdoor seating in snug little tables.

The paella was a little phoned in. It really didn’t taste that different from the oven-bake ones you get from Tesco. It could definitely have done with having more seafood.

Below are the croquettes and potatoes:

If you compare these to the way the food was enticingly presented in Barrafina, there’s absolutely no comparison. The preparation and presentation of Arbina’s meals were utterly perfunctory.

Portion sizes are a bit on the meagre side, too. Given the croquettes cost £5 for a plate, one would hope for a bit more than what was given. Four paltry meatballs is also a bit of a cheap excuse for a dish, in my opinion.

Arbina is a prime example of one of those restaurants which coast by one its central London location. I daresay those who don’t have much dining experience may be reasonably satisfied dining here. But as someone who has experience the highs of Barrafina, which actually does authentic Spanish tapas dishes, as opposed to dumbed-down dishes that I daresay have been cynically designed to swindled as much money from British punters as possible, Arbina really doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Overall, for good Spanish tapas, I’d recommend Iberica or Barrafina. They make authentic Spanish dishes. The food here was edible, certainly, but lacked invention and thus, wasn’t very inspiring. 

Grade: C-

Diary of a Teenage Girl and the 18 Certificate

Yesterday, I watched Marielle Heller’s Diary of a Teenage Girl, which tells the story of 15-year-old Minnie Goetz’s sexual awakening after she loses her virginity to her mother’s boyfriend. It was a good film, sadly not quite as funny as I’d hyped it up to be in my mind, and there were tonal issues with it that didn’t quite sit right with me. Thankfully, it was elevated by a transcendent performance by British actress Bel Powley as the protagonist, without whom, the film would have completely sunk. Her fearless, honest performance truly captured what it’s like to be a teenage girl, even when parts of the screenplay didn’t quite ring true. Minnie makes poor decision upon poor decision and you find it increasingly difficult to get behind her, but Powley’s large grey-green eyes and childlike visage reinforce that at the end of the day, she is just a misguided kid trying to find her place in the world, and it is our mistakes which form us. I can’t think of another young actress who could have imbued Minnie with the realism that she did – Jennifer Lawrence would have overplayed it, Kristen Stewart would have underplayed it – and it’s for Powley’s acting that the movie is worth a watch.

In the build-up to the UK release of Diary of a Teenage Girl, director Heller, actress Powley and Twitter feminists across internet have been voicing their displeasure with the British Board of Film Classification’s decision to award the movie an 18. The director argues that by doing so, the all-male certification board are putting black box around female sexuality, in a way that male sexuality is never questioned. Naturally, feminists have jumped on this bandwagon, lambasting the BBFC as being backward and threatened by women who embrace sex. I can't help feeling their arguments would have more clout had they actually watched the film first before crying sexism.

Watching the film, I thought the 18 certificate was wholly merited. The sex scenes in it aren’t anywhere as lengthy as those in, say, Blue is the Warmest Colour, but there are a lot of them, in range of positions, featuring, in want of a better phrase, what the BBFC describe as ‘mechanical thrusting’, as well as Minnie’s ill-fated adventures, of which include her and her friend blowing two random guys in a bar toilet for some money. Minnie is an aspiring artist so there are also sketches of various parts of the male and female anatomy littered throughout the narrative, as well as strong verbal sex references in which Minnie and her promiscuous best friend casually discuss the next guy they’re gonna fuck. Film critics have remarked on the irony that teenagers (between 15-17) won’t get to watch a film titled ‘Diary of a Teenage Girl’, but if this is the life of a teenager being presented, I’d argue that that isn’t the worst thing.

In terms of precedent, the filmmakers of Diary of a Teenage Girl have pointed to Fish Tank, a similarly-themed movie about an Essex girl who sleeps with her mother’s boyfriend (played by the dishy Michael Fassbender), which got a 15. However, in that movie, there were only two sex scenes (one between the girl and Fassy, and another between her mum and Fassy), both of which, whilst featuring thrusting, are brief and do not match any of Diary of a Teenage Girl’s impact. Secondly, Fassbender’s characters actions are condemned pretty strongly and he is painted to be a sleazy shit. Minnie’s love interest, on the other hand, played by Alexander Skarsgård, is portrayed with more easygoing affability, even though his actions illustrate him to be quite the douche. I don’t think you can make a direct comparison between these two films at all, and if we’re going to be banding about bargain-basement arguments like ‘oh it’s about teenagers so teenagers should see it’, why not make Battle Royale and Kids a 15 as well then?

I wrote this blog in defence of the BBFC, because I feel they get a lot of misplaced slack these days. Last year, there was a media frenzy over Paddington getting classified a PG, because people couldn’t believe that a film about the friendly bear they grew up watching could be anything other than Universal. But, watching it, I thought PG was the correct decision – there were the odd curse words, and more pertinently, Nicole Kidman threatening to stuff a bear with a variety of threatening looking knives. It’s hardly Saw, but it was mildly unsettling, and it’s good that the BBFC acknowledged that, rather than pandering to public nostalgia. Similarly, when Gone Girl got an 18, lots of under-18s complained, with some poor sap with too much time on his hands even launching an online petition to try and get the rating changed (lol, because the rating of the film is the biggest problem in our lives). Cinemagoers need to understand that just because you’ve read the book and like David Fincher, doesn’t mean the BBFC have to dish out a 15 rating when the strength of the scenes in the film command something higher. The BBFC do not exist to make decisions just to appease you.

Part of my affection for the BBFC is that I don’t think British filmgoers realise how good they have it compared to the MPAA. The BBFC treat heterosexual and homosexual sex scenes the same, which the MPAA do not. Furthermore, despite what the crew of Diary of a Teenage Girl would have you believe, getting an 18 here is not that big a deal. It doesn’t kill off a film’s chances of succeeding at the box office. In the case of 50 Shades of Grey, I think we would have been surprised if it had gotten anything other than an 18. The MPAA’s ‘NC-17’, however, is extremely restrictive, and essentially kills of a film’s chance of getting advertised. And the way the NC-17 is dished out is, spurious, to say the least. (but that’s another essay for another day).

That’s not to say I agree unequivocally with every decision the BBFC make. I will never get over how the hyper-stylised violence of the two Kick-Ass movies didn’t earn them 18s, comedy as a mitigating factor or not. 2 Days 1 Night getting a 15 for a failed Xanax overdose also seemed a touch draconian (I maintain that if a 12 year old can take Heath Ledger’s shoving someone’s head into a pencil or, more disturbingly, Kate Winslet’s hand sliding down a sweat-steamed window then they’ll definitely be able to handle that, especially as the overdose wasn’t successful). Generally, some of the more adult 15s I watch I think could be 18s, so I would encourage the BBFC to err on the side of caution more. But that probably says more about my prudishness when it comes to cinema than anything.

In summary, I am delighted that the BBFC stuck to their guns about Diary of a Teenage Girl. To accuse the board of sexism and stifling female sexuality is a cheap, lazy tactic. In Diary of a Teenage Girl, Minnie goes on a destructive road of self-discovery before she truly understands into who she is, and what makes her. Perhaps the filmmakers could do something similar with their underage sex-riddled film before pointing fingers at the BBFC.