London Recap Part 2: The Restaurants

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.