Shefali and I spent four days vacationing in London on our way to Mumbai. Whenever we travel to a new place, we make it a goal to eat our way from one end of town to the other. This four-part series will highlight our experiences.
We had barely enough time (and money) to scratch the surface of London's restaurant scene, but we did find some great places. After four days of dining, we reached a few conclusions:
1. Ethnic food is always better in the big city. If you can't travel to the source, it's best to find the biggest city around, where there's a concentration of food lovers that know how to recreate dishes from home. In our few days, we ate drunken noodles, prawn toast, dim sum and curries worth the price of admission. While I'm proud of Durham's food scene, it's rare to blindly visit several restaurants featuring food from different parts of the world and walk out knowing you got what you paid for.
2. Dinner and dessert should be two separate adventures. With only a few days do explore, we ate dinner and dessert at different restaurants. This helped us see more of the city, read more menus, and separate dinner cravings from dessert cravings. For example, after we ate dim sum we said good-bye to our friends, headed north of Soho and found terrific creme brulee and red wine at Chez Gerarde on Charlotte Street.
3. The best meal we stumbled upon was lunch at Princi, a Milanese bistro that featured breads, salads and hot food a la carte. The servers were surprisingly friendly, which was a welcome change from our previous Italian experience (we were seated under the condition that we'd be done in an hour...as our time limit neared, servers hovered over our tiramisu as if it had legs). At Princi, I had a heaping plate of pasta salad with pesto and smoked salmon, roasted eggplant and an insalata caprese full of the best mozzarella we've ever had. Shefali ate roast pork with potatoes and salad. It was so good that we almost violated rule number two.
4. We found a dear friend in Patisserie Valerie. We started and finished our trip with tea and a strawberry tart near the theater district. Shefali is a conesseur of tarts, and is a harsh critic of the sugar-laden tarts she eats in the US. Val's (as one local called it) gets it right, she says, because the pastry crust and topping are sweet, but the custard filling is rich and smooth. Inbetween tarts, we also ate breakfasts at another location in Bloomsbury near our hotel. Everything we ate - eggs benedict, smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, porridge, coffee and chocolate croissants - was solid.
I asked for the strawberry tart recipe before we said our goodbyes, but our French waitress said the cafe's pastries and gelato are prepared daily at a large bakery, then shipped to the locations around the city.
"I tried making a tart once in France," she said, "but it was difficult and did not turn out."
"To make a tart, she explained, one must first make the pastry crust, then the custard from egg yolks, and finally the fruit."
I must have looked disappointed, because as she took my cash she reassured me that there are plenty of tart recipes available on the internet.
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