Restaurants – let’s eat chic – Page 8

Algiubagio in Venice

I’ve been reviewing a lot for Qype recently – a site where real people review what’s hot and what’s not in their hometown or in places they visit. I’m having a lot of fun remembering some of my best (and worst) meals, and learning a lot more about what’s going on in this hectic city; don’t…

Brasserie van Baerle in Amsterdam

We found Brasserie van Baerle in our DK Eyewitness guide to Amsterdam and trekked there on trams in the pouring rain for Sunday lunch. The effort was rewarded as we entered a foyer in a stairwell that could have been in someone’s home, where dripping coats and brollies were taken as we were ushered into…

Casa di David, Amsterdam

Casa di David, Singel 426, 1017 AV Amsterdam, http://www.casadidavid.com Monsieur and I went to Casa di David on the recommendation of a Swissotel receptionist, who goes there frequently and couldn’t rate it highly enough. What a disappointment. We had an 8pm reservation on a Saturday night and because there was a crush of people trying…

Epic and the curious Vietnamese “spice”.

Monsieur and I were floating about on a junk in Ha Long Bay, the Unesco wonder site that is a maze of jagged islands and floating fishermen’s villages, when we encountered a tasty condiment on the lunch table. It appeared with a plate of cucumber slices with floral edging, an indicator of Vietnamese cuisine’s obsession with…

The Blue Elephant, Bangkok – and the orchid travels…

Following on from our ‘date’ at Sirocco, high above the bustle of Bangkok, Monsieur and I descended the sixty-something floors with ears popping in the express elevator and jumped in a cab to The Blue Elephant. Our driver looked more like a cutting edge DJ than a taxi driver (perhaps he was both?) with long…

Little Gordon

Here in the UK we’ve been somewhat immunised against swearing celebrity chefs, ever since Gordon Ramsay hit our TV screens with shows like The F Word. He’s everywhere: on terrestrial TV, on Sky, on our bookshelves, taking over our pubs (see my Warrington Pub poem here), building a transatlantic restaurant empire and teaching his kids…

Monkeys at work

You may recently have read my post about the Blue Monkey that Planetross sent me from Japan. Well, here’s a link that all monkey lovers out there should truly appreciate. This is a Japanese restaurant with a different sort of staff, and it’s already on the Epicurienne list of Must Eat There One Day. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7654267.stm

Yoshi Sushi Bento

I love having Bento for lunch. It’s a great way to eat Japanese – a partitioned lunchbox contains a balanced offering of salad, tempura and/or some sort of meat or fish, rice and some palate-cleansing fruit to finish. I used to work near a place where you could have a Bento lunch box for £5.00. Apparently…

Wahaca

For quite some time I’ve been dying to try Wahaca, a real Mexican restaurant in London’s Covent Garden. Not only has it been voted the winner of London’s Best Cheap Eats by the Observer Food Monthly Awards 2008, but a Californian foodie friend has been recommending it to all her pals for ages. “It’s not…

Bangkok se-date

If you ever find yourself in Bangkok, even if it’s just cooling your heels on a stopover like Monsieur and me, you should go on a Bangkok date. In our typically conservative style, there were no lady-boys or she-hes involved in our Big Night Out in Bangkok recently. Nor did we see the need to…

Vietnam – if you can catch it, you can eat it – More Bizarre Foods

Here’s part two of Andrew Zimmern’s jaunt through Vietnam, sampling some of the more palatable options of Vietnamese cuisine (beef salad, Pho, civet coffee). Part three involves grilled fish (come on! how tame can you get?), sparrows and scorpions, and ‘tender’ bull’s penis: Part four sees Andrew Zimmern tucking into silk worms and snails at…

Vietnam: if you can catch it, you can eat it, but I might pass.

All I wanted to do was find out how to eat Pho properly. So I went onto You Tube and searched for Pho. I watched and learned, then I thought I’d have a quick look at Vietnamese food on You Tube. Almost immediately, a clip of a dog being roasted on a spit came up….