London in the Rain

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London is a city that's hard to unravel via the internet. For every reliable price estimation on the Squaremeal website, there's a hundred conflicting comments and reviews to weigh up, and top Time Out accolades can be meaningless (especially when it comes to Lebanese food. trust me on that).

So today I'm throwing up a few culinary highlights of our 6-week work stint in London: spots that came recommended by locals or researched by friends. A reliable way to seek out delicious grub in the capital.

FISH N CHIPS

'Wile Out' crackhouse producer DJ Zinc took us to the Butler's Wharf
Chop House on the south side of the Thames - see phone-cam picture at top. The Chop House serves what's probably the best chish & fips I've ever had, with jars of tartar sauce and mushy peas, fish unfurled from a sleeve of grease proof paper, and fat rectangular chips that were not crispy at all but so yummy and potatoey when sprinkled with malt vinegar.
DJ Zinc wisely ordered sides of baby carrots and steamed spinach ("hold the butter and garlic please").
The restaurant is near the Design museum, right on the edge of the river, and we never had trouble getting a table, which is pleasing in a city where diners love to queue. Fish n chips was the cheapest main at around 16 quid.

Butlers Wharf Chop House
36e Shad Thames, London SE1 2YE

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PAKISTANI FOOD

Portuguese producer J-Wow took us to his fave London restaurant, the award-winning Tayyabs. The queue is LONG (literally takes an hour) but it is really worth it. The mixed grill is essential and the naan, chana (chickpea) masala and saag were also dope. It's BYO, and open from midday to 11.30pm. Definitely take beers to drink while you queue. Cheap! And goood.

Tayyabs
83 Fieldgate Street, London E1 1JU

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BRICK LANE
Another one of our colleagues, James Pants, is a well known curry aficionado, and he tested out many Indian restaurants in London. He took us to his favourite on Brick Lane, Shampan. It was most notable for not having curry hustlers outside (the ones who tell you if you come inside you get a free drink, and then the staff inside later claim no knowledge of this mysterious drink deal). I had a xacuti curry with tamarind and toasted cumin that was pretty good, but some of the thali plates looked a bit lackluster.

Shampan
79 Brick Lane
London E1 6QL

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CHINATOWN & SURROUNDS
London's Chinatown is the kind of place, late at night, where you might see a drunk brit spraying air freshener on their socks in an an alleyway. But there's also quite a few decent Chinese supermarkets and a stall selling dragon's beard candy, and another stall outside a hairdresser selling really good baozi/steamed buns (it's opposite Baozi Inn on Newport Court).

Being fans of Sichuan food and also of the writing of Fuschia Dunlop, we tried out all three restaurants at which she is a consultant: Bar Shu, Ba Shan and Baozi Inn.
To be honest, they're all much of a muchness. The fanciest and most expensive one, Bar Shu, has slightly fancier furniture and the staff wear earpiece headset things, but the atmosphere is not really posh despite the prices. My advice if you eat there is to go all the way and get a whole fish or crab, because the smaller plates (though yummy) are like really, really good home cooking. It's hard to feel they warrant the price tag.

Ba Shan (photos above and below) was just slightly better value and still tasty, though the Mapo-dofu (photo below) was a bit gluggy - we prefer the one at our local in Cologne which has tons of chillies in it. The chinese cabbage in broth with goji berries was comforting. I expect Antipodeans would find the prices quite hard to stomach.

My favourite was Baozi Inn, the cheapest restaurant of the trio: despite the uncomfortable wooden stools and the waitress making us take valuables out of our coat pockets before she hung them up. The baozi were sold out, but some reviewers say they're not the best offering there. The handmade dumplings in a slick of chilli oil were yummy, as was the flower tofu with peanuts and homemade tofu hiding under more chilli oil and ground sichuan pepper, and I really loved my red-braised pork - with its stodgy, slightly overcooked white rice.. it was good for a rainy winter evening.

Baozi Inn
25 Newport Court, London WC2H 7JS

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Another decent spot in Chinatown is Haozhan, where you can get a decent meal including a couple of beers for 20 -30 quid. In the couple of years since it's opened (during which time the ex-Hakkasan chef moved on), it's become more shabby than sleek. For someone who doesn't get to eat pan-asian food often though, the singapore noodles, salt & pepper squid, small bowl of egg-fried rice, and softshell crab with curry leaves will wash down very well with your Asahi beer.

Haozhan
8 Gerrard Street, London W1D 5PJ


COFFEE
If you have a bit of time up your sleeve - say two weeks - you can do as our American coffee-loving colleague Todd Osborn did, and get up early to walk to a different coffee spot on the East side of London as research. Thanks to him we know a world champion barista at Prufrock and his Swedish colleague claim to have invented the flat white, and churn them out of a clothing store which is in turn disguised as a cigarette shop in Shoreditch.

Prufrock
140 Shoreditch High St

Other notable mentions: Tina, We Salute You in Dalston, The Whitecross Coffee Cart, Monmouth Coffee at Borough Market (they don't do soy milk), Climpson & Sons, Caravan.

Coffee with breakfast:
My London-based kiwi friends Alice & John are into serious brunching, and my favourite of their haunts is The Modern Pantry in Farringdon, with its omelette with sugar-cured prawns and smoked sambal, or poached tamarillos & yoghurt w manuka honey. They also do a caramelly version of hokey pokey ice cream that's so delicious I've been known to eat it for breakfast.

JERK CHICKEN or PATTY
For a city so famous for its nightlife, a lot of the clubs in London close quite early (they often stop serving alcohol at 2am), and good post-clubbing snacks are thin on the ground. Judy's Divine in Brixton is open til 1 or 2am, and they serve a patty between two fat slices of white bread if there's no buns. It's also just down the road from a club called Plan B, which has a Funktion 1 soundsystem and some good artist line-ups.

Judy's Divine
423 Coldharbour Lane
Brixton, London SW9 8LH



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BISTRO FOOD and DUCKFAT FRIES

Last but not least, Comptoir Gascon in Farringdon has really delicious meats (pork belly with parsnip puree! and little raviolis swimming in a yummy sauce that tastes like posh mushroom soup). YUM.

Comptoir Gascon
63 Charterhouse St
Ec1, EC1M 6

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The Kumara Has Spoken

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These vids are part of a NZonAir-funded website called Rattle Ya Dags, where besides kumara (sweet potato) adages, you can also see food TV host Peta Matthias speaking about how determination will help you to write books (duh) and admonishing that eating cheese and wine is better than fast food, which will "turn you into trash" - well I do declare. And Hugh Sundae gives a ginger-chicken crockpot recipe.

Below Oliver Driver speaks about the guy at the dairy.

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Tasty Buddha



The good people over at Shift have published an interview with Koshi Kawachi to promote his current exhibition Tasty Buddha - The Snack Age.

The title THE SNACK AGE represents as it means, and reflects how I felt: "this age is fribble, flimsy, and unhealthy, just like snacks are." Then, you can also read "AGE" as "a-ge", which I infused a meaning for audience to uplift their feelings.


Gutfeelings member Nalika comments that this refers to the verb ageru 上げる - to uplift, as he put it. The recent colloquial Japanese speech has expression 'agaru' (feel uplifted) and 'age age' (uplifting).

An umaibo is a deep fried snack, so ageru 揚げる(deep frying) could work as a double pun.


EmbalmingPotatoChips

Embalming Potato Chip:
Cracked pieces of a potato chip are "embalmed" to be restored by a traditional technique, kintsugi.



More pictures + interview.

Tasty Buddha - The Snack Age exhibition
April 1st - 16th, 2010
pARa:siTe Gallery
Ne 24-1 Matudera-cho, Kanazawa

Dieter Rams: How to make your toast go Braun

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White bread, black bread or even rye bread? Ask your friends and neighbours and they will tell you that toast is a first-class delicacy. It tastes good and has never been the cause of anyone losing their drivers' license. It keeps you fit and your body needs it.


While in London recently, I visited one of the UK's first major Dieter Rams retrospectives at the London Design Museum close to Tower Bridge.

The stylishly be-spectacled Dieter Rams was director of design for Braun for nearly three decades.
Attractive archaic Rams pieces include the cucumber slicer in the video below and the pretty drip coffee machines.

The Braun toaster, which was selected for inclusion at the New York Museum of Modern Art, is another fine Rams creation: but it's a design innovation which may have been lost on Rams' compatriots.

Germans are not big on toast, and most people I know would not dream of toasting brown or black bread. The only bread deemed worthy of toasting in Germany is '50s-esque miniature white bread squares for toasted sandwiches, packets of which are actually labeled specifically as 'toast'.

Dieter Rams: toast visionary?

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