Offbeat Eats

You occasionally find some interesting hidden items in London, sometimes even hidden in plain sight. St Georges Square is a relatively modest Square in Pimlico, and contains the Pimlico Garden, which aside from a modest statue representing "Boredom rising from the bath", isn’t of much note itself. But on the North end of the garden lies one of the few remaining examples of an anachronism: a Cabmen’s Shelter Fund Cab Shelter. Basically a small shelter containing a seating area for cab drivers on their break, and a cooking area (often staffed by the Cabmen’s Shelter Fund, historically, these days often contracted out), these little shelters used to be fairly common all over London, with over 60 of them in the early 1900s. They aren’t as common now (only 13 of them remain in service), but for a small handful of them, the caterers in them are also open to the public, selling the same food out of a window that they sell to the cabbies. St George’s Square has one of these, a business called Alf’s Pitstop, who sells a variety of sandwiches and drinks to the public.

As I mentioned before in my review of The Golden Hind, it can actually be rather difficult to find a good fish and chip shop in London. Back 20 years ago, there were more of them than you could count, and the dish was considered one of the cornerstones of British folk food. But since then, the tastes of London have become more metropolitan and worldly, and as a result, fish and chips got supplanted a while back by Chicken Tikka Masala as the national dish. Meanwhile, most of the really good fish and chip places have closed up. Oh, there’s no shortage of places that can serve up fish and chips, usually by throwing frozen chunks of pre-breaded fish in a fryer, but few places remain that really focus on doing a quality fish and chips. While back in the days of yore it was an upstart (Fisher’s open in 1982), and it’s had several changes of ownership, Fisher’s is still cranking out a variety of fish and chips from their small storefront in Fulham near Bishop’s Park.

(Closed) One of the many things I love about visiting London is that it has a rather nice variety of chocolate shops. Indeed, a few years ago, we did a chocolate tour in London (wow, has it been almost three years?), and William Curley Patissier Chocolatier was one of the stops. Our visit there highlighted their ice creams, sorbet, and hot chocolate, but they showed us what they serve for their "Dessert Bar", which is a multi-course dessert. We vowed to come back. Several trips to London since then threw various complications (primarily, coming during the holiday seasons, when they were either closed, or packed with holiday celebrants), but this trip, we were finally able to get a decent seating for their dessert bar.

Because we were trying to do the trip to Frankfurt on the cheap, my tickets had what most people would consider to be an inconvenient 21 hour layover at London Heathrow. For me, this was an opportunity; my brother and sister-in-law live in London (hence all my frequent London and UK entries), so it gave me a nice opportunity to meet up with them, have some dinner, drinks, and pudding, get rested up, and get back to the airport in plenty of time for my flight. As far as dinner goes, it allowed me an opportunity to finally cross one major food destination of my to-do list: going to Hawksmoor, get a seat at the bar and try their famous Kimchi Burger. It was recommended to me a few years ago by someone on Flyertalk.com, but it’s been resilient to my efforts to actually get one; my first attempt was thwarted by my travel schedule (I was stopping off in London on the way to Spain), and my second thwarted by the large numbers of other people visiting Hawksmoor for Christmas festivities. But this time, I finally managed to pull it off, with my brother and sister-in-law in tow.

One of the more interesting aspects of London is that there are so many good pubs, it can be difficult to experience them all. When we’re visiting London, we’re generally rather spoiled, as my brother and sister-in-law live almost next to the very excellent Cask Pub and Kitchen (which I haven’t reviewed here, since I’ve only ever had bar snacks for food there). The good part of this is that a quality pub with a very good selection of beer is almost always at hand. The down side of this is that I tend to ignore a lot of other good pubs, even ones that are just down the street. One case in point is The Queen’s Arms, which is just down the street from the flat, but until this trip I had only been in there once, and that for a quick pint. Our trip to London, however, was also coincident with my friends Rick and Sarah’s trip to London/Wales/Ireland, and they in particular enjoy getting together with friends from Metafilter (I’m semi-active there as well) for spontaneous meetups. So it was decided that their visit to London was the perfect excuse for a meetup on December 27th. Alas, much of London is shut down around the festive season, with publicans in particular using it as a good opportunity to take a well-earned break from their normal routine. So many of the pubs around Pimlico, including my well-loved Cask, were closed on the 27th. But Queen’s Arms was open, so the meetup was scheduled there instead. I’m rather glad it was, since this finally represented a good opportunity to check out the Queen’s Arms.

Our last full day in London, we decided that it would be nice to go on another London Walks tour, this time choosing a tour of the River Lea and the canals, ending up at the Olympic Park site by the Pudding Mill Lane DLR station. But on the way out there, we decided it was a good opportunity to grab some Vietnamese food, primarily since Carol and I don’t get a lot of good opportunities for Pho (the nearest Vietnamese restaurant to our house in New Hampshire is 45 miles away) at Tay Do…

We celebrated Boxing Day in London by doing some more wandering about town. One of the places we checked out was London’s Chinatown. While a lot smaller and more compact than the Chinatowns in San Francisco, New York, and Montreal that I’ve recently experienced, it does sport a quite impressive number of Asian markets, and more importantly, restaurants. So we used this as a good opportunity to check out New World Chinese Restaurant, one of London’s better-known (and older) Dim Sum restaurants.

A bout of last-minute shopping resulted in another trip to Marylebone High Street, and for lunch we decided to duck over to Baker Street and have a Jewish lunch from Reubens. Reubens is your basic Jewish Deli, not really all that different from it’s counterpart in, say, New York. The biggest difference is in the terminology: in Britain, what we would call “Corned Beef” in the US is called “Salt Beef” over there (the term “Corned Beef” in England implies the pre-cooked nasty stuff in the tins). The difference goes a little deeper than that as well, since the spicing is definitely a bit different as well, with UK salt beef definitely having a lighter spice and more beef flavor than the US counterpart (not unlike the subtle difference between a Montreal “Viande Fumee” and a New York “Pastrami”). Now that you mention it, I feel like I could probably do an entire book comparing the pickled and smoked beef products of several Jewish communities…

On our recent trip to London, we decided to take a day trip out to Greenwich. After we were done with the Greenwich Tunnel (walk under the Thames…), Maritime Museum, and the Observatory, we went back down the hill to downtown Greenwich. One of the features of downtown is the Greenwich Market, which is filled with all sorts of art vendors and food stands. A bit touristy, we did like the place. I ended up buying a ring made of a recycled one-shilling coin, and Carol bought a nice felted wool coat, so it was also a shopping success.

While out and about doing some last-minute Christmas shopping on Marylebone High Street, we decided to divert a little bit and check out The Golden Hind for some fish and chips. While a seemingly simple task (in fact, we’re lucky enough to have a decent place for fish and chips back in New Hampshire), to do it right is actually somewhat difficult in London. Despite Fish and Chips being one of the national dishes of England, there aren’t a lot of places in London itself that serve it (“Chippys” seem to have been replaced with an almost uncountable number of bad fried chicken joints), and fewer that do it well (most serve some sort of half-assed product geared towards tourists). Finding a good one that is generally well-regarded is a bit of a challenge, and the list is short. One that we had an opportunity to try, due to our location, was The Golden Hind.