London restaurants

Bistro Pierre Victoire, Soho

No Comments

We had waited until the very last minute this year to book something for Valentine’s Day dinner, because it had been unclear if we were both going to be in the country. We were then at first thinking about doing dinner at one of London’s top restaurants, but after further reflection we decided not to re-mortgage the flat and chose cheap, chirpy, and cheerful Pierre Victoire Bistro in Soho’s Dean Street, just off Soho Square and Tottenham Court Road tube station, ranking an impressive #250 out of 20,000 London restaurants on Tripadvisor, one of the very few restaurants that would still take bookings. The restaurant has been well-established as pre-theatre dinner venue for nearly 20 years and, we hear, is rarely seen with any significant number of empty seats. There certainly weren’t any (except for ours) when we arrived. The atmosphere in the tube-like, busy, crammed, traditionally decorated dining room […]

Continue Reading

You may also like

Art and Culture, Fun, London

Magical Lantern Festival, Chiswick

1 Comment

We visited the Magical Lantern Festival in Chiswick, West London, yesterday evening, and it was an incredible experience. Hundreds of lanterns, the biggest ones several storeys high and several dozen meters long! It took us more than two hours to walk to follow the path through the park and stop every other minute to take photos. This year’s show is themed “Explore the Silk Road”, so you’ve got plenty of camels and Aladdins, but also a gigantic Chinese palace, the center piece of the festival, that can be seen from nearly everywhere else in the park. Considering how cold it was it was a blessing that they serve hot chocolate (and mulled wine, hot whiskey, and spiced hot cider) on three or four locations. We also had a lovely pulled-pork sandwich for £5.50 right behind the 2nd entrance (the one where they check your tickets). The festival is taking place […]

Continue Reading

You may also like

Food, Fun, London

Bloomsbury Club Bar hosts BlackTail Residency

1 Comment

We checked out the BlackTail Residency at the Bloomsbury Club Bar (BCB, 16-22 Great Russell Street, London) today and were very impressed. New York’s BlackTail has been created by the team behind the Dead Rabbit, which regularly gets ranked as the best or one of the best cocktail bars in the world. BlackTail itself is generally considered to have been the most anticipated and successful bar opening in the U.S. during the past year (it opened a few months ago). It emulates the American bars that sprang up in Havana during the 1920s Prohibition (not sure why some reviewers call the bar a speakeasy, which would be the improvised U.S. underground bootlegging version of the time, and quite the opposite in some ways, ultimate luxury versus greasy, badly-lit basements). The Irish duo behind the BlackTail, Dead Rabit’s co-founders Sean Muldoon and Jack McGarry, were inspired by the distinctive black tail […]

Continue Reading

You may also like

London restaurants

Pisqu, recent Peruvian Opening, Fitzrovia

1 Comment

[Pisco Sour feature photo by Pisco Trail piscotrail.com] We recently visited Pisqu (23 Rathbone Place), named after the eponymous birthplace of the national drink, for a quick Pisco Sour with a Peruvian friend of ours, who recommended the place as his favourite Peruvian restaurant and bar in London, in particular because – he says – the cuisine prepared by the Peruvian-Japanese team is authentic, not watered down for the Western palate. He might be slightly biased, because the bar manager is from his home town and the first twenty minutes were spent on our friend talking with his buddy about their village and what had changed in recent years, who left and who returned. It is only four months since the restaurant was opened (and is now run) by chef William Ortiz, the younger brother of the chef at Michelin-starred Lima, literally just across the street, which is why Pisqu […]

Continue Reading

You may also like

Art and Culture, London, Plays

‘Wish List’, Zero Hour Contract Play

3 Comments

We’ve just watched Katherine Soper’s debut play at the Royal Court (it premiered in Manchester and won the Bruntwood Prize). Absolutely fabulous! It adds to the intimacy of the experience that the Jerwood Upstairs seats just 85 people and the acting takes place between two sets of rows, with the remaining two ends of the room being set up as the work place and the home of Tamsin (Erin Doherty). She is a 19-year old woman, who works full-time in a soul-destroying zero-hour contract job as a packer in a warehouse, packing boxes with goods from customers’ twist-of-the-moment wish lists, while caring for her 17-year old mentally unwell, housebound brother Dean (Jonathan Quinn) since the death of their mother. He can already be seen while the audience gets seated, engaging in his obsessive compulsive rituals of putting gel into his hair behind the transparent walls of the bathroom, tapping rhythmically […]

Continue Reading

You may also like