Thu
04-Jan-2007

mosob

Leonardo is over from Italy staying at our flat at the moment, and we went with him and his Eritrean friend Salamawit (or Salam or Sally) to Mosob, a friendly Eritrean restaurant in Westbourne Park run by the brothers of one of her friends.

We've had Ethiopian food before, but not Eritrean, though the cuisines are very similar, based around picking up spicy food with pieces of spongy injera bread from a communal dish. We had Eritrean tea to finish, and spent much of the dinner discussing the history of Eritrea, Italy and Ethiopia and looking through a big book about Eritrea which they have in the restaurant.

It had a lovely relaxed atmosphere, with people wandering in and out chatting, lots of helpful advice and chat from the staff, and the exotic smells of the Eritrean coffee ceremony wafting in from the room next door as a jovial birthday party took place there to the strains of Stevie Wonder.

Sat
25-Nov-2006

kastoori

Matt and I went down to Tooting Bec last night to stay over at Charles and Miranda's and to sample the delights of Kastoori, one of the many Indian restaurants in the area. I hadn't seen anything of Tooting apart from Charles and Miranda's house, so it was a real surprise how very Indian it all is. Walking up and down the high street feels a lot like Edgware Road, but with a much less inner city feel to it, it's all really lovely.

Kastoori is a vegetarian restaurant, run by a friendly Gujerati family who have lived in Uganda, so lots of the dishes have some African influences too. Everything we had was gloriously excellent - delicious and interesting. The only other restaurant I've been to with authentic, non-generic Indian food like this is New Tayyab at Whitechapel. We had hot and tasty green leaf curry, lovely little puris, fried cassava balls, warming mung bean curry and probably the star dish, a rich tomato curry. There was that feeling as with the best vegetarian food where you just don't notice that there is no meat - the culinary tradition just doesn't need it.

Afterwards, we dropped in on one of the shops nearby and bought ourselves "pan", where they take a betel pepper leaf and wrap within it lots of little things - coconut? tamarind sauce? fennel? fruit? lots of spices though very hard to tell what anything is! They wrap it all up in the leaf, and you put the whole thing in your mouth at once and start chewing. It's not like eating food, more like chomping on a spicy, lemony, crunchy breath freshener. It takes a while to chew and then swallow, but it freshens the breath, really wakes you up, and is supposed to aid digestion too. I loved it!

Afterwards we headed back to Charles and Miranda's house to carry on drinking, play "pass the bomb" and the "first line of the book" game, and have a go on Charles' cool ukelele and banjolele!

Sat
19-Mar-2005

cafe espana

Last night Anders came over from Sweden for the weekend, and he joined me and Matt after work to meet up with Michal, Kornelia and Paul in Friendly Society in Soho, before we headed on to the marvellous Cafe Espana on Old Compton Street. I hadn't been here before, and I love it. The weather had just turned hot and sunny after all these weeks of cold, so it was ideal timing. We got ourselves a 10pm table up in the packed upstairs room. All the tiny tables were heaving with tapas and paella, and conversation. We had lots of meat for the Poles - chorizo, pork, chicken - some prawns for our Swedish friend, a couple of tortillas, and lots of garlic all over everything. We started out on pink cava, and then moved on to red wine. Very jolly - and so cheap! £10 each at the end. My sort of place.

Mon
22-Mar-2004

hotel barcelona

Me and Alex mostly slept on the train on the way to Devon and arrived at Taunton a bit shellshocked by it all, but we perked up by the time we were at Tiverton. Rachel picked us up from the station and we headed back to the house. There was Alice - shorn of her hair and looking very silly! It all felted up after too many baths without combing or using dog shampoo, or something like that. At any rate, it all had to come off. She looks more like a terrier now, than a ball of cute fur, and her head looks more bat-like, and you can see her teeth and mouth more easily. She's still totally psycho though, so you can tell it's Alice.

Anyway, we said hello to Chas, lay around chatting for a bit, then Alex opened some presents and we ate a Winnie the Pooh birthday cake. Later on, Josh got back from school, and we all headed off to Exeter for dinner at the marvellous Hotel Barcelona.

Hotel Barcelona was pretty cool. From the outside it's a large, converted, former Victorian eye hospital in nice red Devon stone. Inside it is all extremely funky, with 1950s decor, lots of brown, cool lights, old posters, luxuriant sofas, dark wood, and an atmospheric club and cocktail bar. The restaurant, Café Paradiso, goes for the Mediterranean-style wood-burned oven fare. We ate pizzas, soups and heavy chocolate puddings. It was marvellous!

Thu
02-Oct-2003

josh's birthday

Well, Josh H joined me in the bleak lands of 26 yesterday, and various people gathered on Lamb's Conduit Street for a meal in a restaurant called Ciao Bella. Italian, obviously. Very nice. I'm enjoyable my getting drunk on house red and eating pizza meals at the moment. The staff were a bit boring and anxious to get rid of us, probably because we were all wandering up and down the table chatting to people like it was a party and not ordering any food till very late!

Fri
11-Jul-2003

shamsudeen's restaurant

I got home after a long day yesterday and a rather snotty cold had come upon me. Matt took me out to a spicy meal partly to fight the bunged up nose, partly to prolong our holiday vibes. We wandered up Stoke Newington Church Street a little way, to Shamsudeen's Restaurant, a Tamil restaurant specialising in Malaysian, Singaporean and South Indian food. We went for a Malaysian set meal, and it was very exciting. Lots of satay sauce and things I haven't tried before, like tofu. Matt and I talked animatedly about toys, the games we play when we're young, pebble dash, science experiments of the add bicarb to vinegar variety, lego, jigsaw puzzles and art materials shops!

Mon
23-Jun-2003

rainy morning

Chucking it down this morning. Very Monday weather. Warm summer rain though. We were walking home in it last night when we ate up at La Porchetta on Stroud Green Road. Michal, Andy, Mats, Matt and me all ate olives, enormous pizzas and ice cream as the restaurant rioted around us in its typically raucous fashion. There were no less than five people with birthdays there that evening, so every half an hour the waitresses started banging metal trays together and Happy Birthday To You came on over the sound system at high volumes. Lovely meal, and Andy, Michal and I quoted bits of The Meaning of Life all the way home, while fat blobs of warm rain sploshed on us intermittantly.