Eating in London: Some Favorite Restaurants

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One of the delights of a being in a big city is choosing from a wide range of restaurants and cuisines.  London is one of the best places in the world in which to do this; there is everything from traditional British pub food to Indian and Chinese plus Lebanese, Thai, Mexican, Italian, French, and the list continues.  While here, we indulged in some special places, but also returned to old favorites from seven years ago.  Here’s my list of where we dined on good, and occasionally great, food.

Norfolk Arms (Russell Square)–This gastropub was just introducing Spanish tapas when we lived here and they were delicious! They still are and we made it a point of booking several lunches here.  Highlights were the choice of sherries to start, the mounded blue cheese and walnut brushetta with a drizzle of honey, the blistered Padron peppers, and the delectable meat platters—ham, chorizo and the like.  And if you simply must have your Sunday roast, that’s available too.

Benares (Mayfair)–This Michelin-starred Indian restaurant is superb!  The space is elegant, the service attentive, and the food Indian with a contemporary twist.

Hutong (LondonBridge)–Located on the 33rd floor of The Shard, the view from the window tables is spectacular.  This is London with the twisting Thames and the rippling rail yards splayed out before you and St. Paul’s looming on the horizon.  The food is similar to what you would find in Beijing and good, but not exceptional.

De Amicis (Notting Hill)–Small, family-run Italian restaurant that is most welcoming with good food.  We’ve enjoyed their veal preparations (one with fresh porcini) as well as the chicken cacciatore–so much so that we ate here several times this visit!

Mall Tavern (Notting Hill)–An upscale pub that gets very lively most every night (not for those desiring a quiet tete-a-tete), but which offers a sophisticated menu. Reserve ahead and you may be able to sit on the non-bar side which is somewhat quieter.  We liked the hake with fennel and the smoked salmon in particular.

Kettner’s (Soho)–Many years ago my grandfather gave me a copy of Kettner’s Book of the Table, published around 1880 with  recipes and tips supposedly from this renowned restaurant. We had walked by on a previous visit, but never eaten here.  This time we closed the loop and enjoyed a pre-theatre dinner.  Kettner’s is known for its selection of champagnes and has a pre-theatre menu. We chose neither preferring instead to order a la carte.  It was good and very acceptable as a pre-theatre meal. Kettner was the chef here, back in the day, and had cooked for Napoleon.  But he didn’t write the book–someone else did!

 

Produce at Borough Market
Produce at Borough Market

Borough Market (Southwark)–I don’t know how we missed out on discovering this marvelous maze of food stalls and produce and meat purveyors on past visits, but we did.  This 100-year old market complex is worth the price of the Tube ride with lots of options of ingredients to cook at home, international dishes to takeaway and several sit-down restaurants.  We opted for lunch at Fish! which offered a wide range of choices and an excellent fish soup with rouille.  We first tasted this smooth, perfect for a nippy day, comfort food in Ajaccio, Corsica in the late 1970’s.  It became a favorite then and still is.

Waitrose (everywhere, but especially The Brunswick in Bloomsbury)–I was amazed and impressed with the selection in this supermarket when I came here from Pennsylvania.  After having lived in San Francisco for some years, I remain impressed. Waitrose, and even the other food chains (Marks & Spenser and Tesco) do ready-to-heat prepared foods far better than their American counterparts.  These items occupy a significant amount of shelf space and the range of cuisines from which to choose is mouthwatering.   We purchased several curries this time, which didn’t happen to be from Waitrose, and they were very good!

Just a sampling of prepared foods offered at Waitrose
Just a sampling of prepared foods offered at Waitrose

 

 

Science Gallery London: Engaging Youth

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We spent the better part of the day in the London Bridge area of the city and learned about Science Gallery London from Daniel Glaser (pictured above.)  It is part of the Global Science Gallery Network begun in Dublin in 2008 to engage 15-25 year olds with science.  More specifically to engage them “where art and science collide” through a variety of media—film, theater, immersive and online experiences, art of all types, and the like.  London is the second location for Science Gallery and it will officially open in 2016.  In the meantime, it is in pre-season mode, as it were, before its new home is created.  Set in the shadow of the Shard and just steps from the London Bridge Tube and rail stations, Science Gallery is at a busy crossroads and the ideal spot for attracting an audience.  It is affiliated with King’s College and all of the future Science Gallery locations (goal is to have a global presence of eight of them by 2020) will be based at universities.  But part of their mission is to engage with the entire community and to be a bridge between academe and the city.  Future sites include New York, Bangalore, and Melbourne.  Why not San Francisco, I say?

King's College Guy's Campus
King’s College Guy’s Campus

According to Dan, their enthusiastic and well-qualified director, the plan is to have 3-4 seasons each year around a common theme.  This fall (September and October 2014) is a time of experimentation and a prototype of what is to come.  The SG folks worked with youth in the community as well as with staff and researchers at King’s College to find out what topics and concepts interested them and then have commissioned professional artists and producers to create works.  This is a facilitated approach to content development, but one that gets at what the young people want to know about, not what the adults or program staff think they should.  Dan and his staff did six months of engagement work ahead of any programming.  One novel aspect is that the media team is comprised entirely of youth and led by two sisters, aged 17 and 19, who have 16,000 You Tube subscribers.

Theme for the fall is FREQUENCIES:  Tune into Life and it relates to the sounds of life, to the rhythms and cycles of our body.  Involvement in FREQUENCIES includes:  a juggler interacting with children, a cellist at the cancer center, a DJ with a market trader, looking at the physiology of sleep, and the participation of a hospital porter and a lung pollution expert.  The emphasis in program development is on rapid prototyping with nine collaborators having just one week in which to create a new sound, and a sound that would be open source!

Science Gallery will have no permanent collections and will focus to some extent, but not exclusively, on issues of health and medicine, given its location on the Guy’s campus.  This campus is home to the medical school and Guy’s Hospital.  There will be several pre-seasons prior to the official opening of Science Gallery in 2016. Future themes are likely to be: “Spare Parts” (transplantation), “Teeth,” and in 2016, “Addictive.”  For this last theme, they will do engagement work with addicts, pushers, specialists, and others in order to generate ideas for the works themselves.

Beginning in 2015, the building they are now in will be renovated to include a theater, a wide open gallery-like space, production facilities, and a cafe.  Project cost is 12 million pounds which is a combination of funds from the university, from individual donors, and the Guy’s Hospital charity.  Ongoing operating costs will come from the university budget.

Current home of Science Gallery to be renovated in 2015
Current home of Science Gallery to be renovated in 2015

Students involved in the project were recruited through the Youth Media Agency and are paid for their time.  For those familiar with the California Academy of Sciences, Science Gallery has elements of NightLife, Brilliant!Science, Careers in Science, and Teen Advocates for Science Communication (TASC) with its flash mobs.  One significant difference is that all events are free; some revenue will be realized from the cafe and a shop. The current staff is quite small, around a dozen individuals, plus three working on commission for this season, and the students. Attendance goal for the first year is 350,000.

We had the privilege of attending one of the FREQUENCIES events, a performance by Bishi, a Bengali British musician and singer based in London, which featured images from a lab recording of her sleep patterns juxtaposed with haunting music and singing.  It was different and certainly combined science with art.  It will be informative to watch how Science Gallery London evolves, how they define success and what outcomes they achieve.  And it would be fun to return in 2016 when they are up and fully operational in their new space.

 

London: First Impressions upon Returning

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It’s been about 5 years since I was last in London and now we are back.  My observations on this return:  cell phones are in use everywhere on the street, even more so than New York. Many, many restaurants now have outside seating, cafe style.  On some days that means lap blankets are provided in addition to exterior heaters.

The Tube is cleaner, faster, and even better.  We have not yet had to wait more than a minute or two for a train, and there are ready announcements if there is even the slightest delay (“we are stopped for a red signal and should be moving again in a moment.”)  Many stations have been upgraded and made attractive.  Happily, our Oyster cards of yore still work and we’ve been topping them up frequently!  Mass transit here is expensive which, I guess, is providing the fuel for the upgrades.

British food has gone trendy; the farm to table movement is in evidence on numerous menus–think California and San Francisco, but with a British twist!  We had a small lunch at a hot newish restaurant called The Shed (rustic inside and out like a garden shed) and sampled carrot hummus and lamb chips (as in shaped like fries and fried) with a harissa dipping sauce.  The hummus was tasty and the lamb chips delectable.  Among the more usual offerings on their menu, we nibbled a couple of delicious cheeses. Overall, though, I’m still struck by how much meat is on the menus, probably no more than before, but my response to living midst California’s bounteous produce.

The new double decker buses are very classy looking and still red, thank you.  Lots of construction going on—both new buildings and road works.

Hatchard’s on Piccadilly

Hatchard’s, that bastion of books, was doing a lively business the other day and remains one of my favorite hangouts for all things literary.  It is now owned by Waterstone’s, but retains its genteel character and other than Waterstone’s Kindle covers for sale, you almost wouldn’t know.

There are  branches of Waterstone’s all around the city and a number of other independent bookstores and mini-chains.  Other favorites of mine  include the original Daunt Books on Marylebone High Street and Heywood Hill in Mayfair.  The latter is a cluttered cozy set of two small rooms of both old and new books with a thriving mail order and gift collection business.  On the surface at least, London’s bookselling industry appears to be thriving.

As for what else is new, we stopped in at the gala reception for the opening of the new Sherlock Holmes exhibit.  Quite the bash!

Museum of London exhibit
Museum of London exhibit

And I absolutely love the blue rooster in Trafalgar Square!  It’s unmissable, whimsical and adds an element of informality to this public space.  The title of it is Hahn/Cock and the sculptor is Katharina Fritsch.

 

 

 

Memoirs & Biography: Jesmyn Ward, Michael Morton and Margaret Fuller

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My reading lately has tended toward nonfiction.  I especially enjoy personal memoirs and biographies of intriguing and somewhat lesser known individuals.  My husband recommended Michael Morton’s memoir and I found it riveting. Morton Called Getting Life: An Innocent Man’s 25-Year Journey from Prison to Peace, it is his account of his conviction for his wife’s murder and his long years in a Texas prison.  He is a white man who finds himself surrounded by blacks in a tough and bleak environment; he had naively assumed (numbed by her sudden and horrific death) that he would never be a suspect.  Due to politics, sloppy  handling of his case and some illegal case work, he found himself imprisoned.  How he deals with the endless tedium, loneliness, and inhumanity of the prison system speaks mightlily to his strong character.

Young black men in many parts of the U.S. face challenges and temptations that are beyond the ken of most of us.  Somehow, I missed Jesmyn Ward’s memoir when it came out last year and only just discovered it in paperback.  Men We Reaped is a haunting, painful and incisive portrait of five young men—poor and black with no real role models and few opportunities or support— all of whom died too young in the space of a few years.  They were cousins, friends, and a brother of Ward’s. The combination of grinding poverty, no full-time parents, the easy availability of drugs, and little sense of self-worth made for hard

JWardlives and early death.  In chapters alternating with accounts of each man, Ward chronicles the turmoil of her childhood, how her perspective on her parents, particularly her mother is revised over time, and her own struggle to value herself as a worthwhile person.  It’s amazing to me that Ward went on to success as a novelist (Salvage the Bones) and also returned to DeLisle to live.  She is now a professor of creative writing.

 

 

 

Retreating to an earlier time, I’m finishing up Megan Marshall’s evocative biography of Margaret Fuller.  Marshall previously wrote a biography of the Peabody sisters (19th century New England education reformers) which I read and enjoyed about 10 years ago.  Getting deep into Fuller’s life, I am re-appreciating what she was able to accomplish as a woman in a very male world.  She had been tutored and schooled  by her father, a harsh taskmaster. So it is not surprising that her primary  intellectual friends included the noted men of the day from Waldo Emerson to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thoreau, as well as others whose names are less know to us today.  She did have friendships with other women and she offered a series of Conversations in which they could enroll.  These get-togethers seem to be the precursors of the women’s clubs–with names like Fortnightly, Roundabout, Current Events–that flourished late in the 19th and early 20th century and provided stimulation and brain food, as it were, for smart women who weren’t allowed professional jobs.  Margaret with her coterie debated philosophy and other topics and she encouraged them to speak out and share their thoughts with one another.

MFullerWhat is also fascinating is how Fuller’s view of the plight of women (property of their husbands) and their potential for a greater place in society and a more equal role in marriage went so far beyond what any other American was proposing. The Dial and later the Herald Tribune, gave her platforms from which to expound; later the publication of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, an expansion of an earlier essay, increased her standing and brought her invitations to speak.  She was a woman of big ideas and both voluble and forceful in conversation and in advocating her views.  I imagine some of her female friends found her a bit too much “in your face.”  Tragically, she died in a shipwreck at the age of only 40.