The week of lunch experiments finished with a trip to Noodle Noodle, a Chinese restaurant/noodle bar on Buckingham Palace Road.
Mixed reviews of the food here. I had some stir fried vegetables and noodles which were OK if nothing particularly memorable, and the chicken noodle soup Paul and Mark had looked very basic.
Last day in London this year (indeed for a while as I’m travelling for work and pleasure for a couple of weeks after Xmas) and a slightly disappointing way to finish the run of new lunch venues.
We were trying to arrange a mini-Xmas lunch at work for a few of us, but Mark couldn’t make it so he very generously offered to take us out for Xmas breakfast/brunch instead.
He’d booked us into the The Goring Hotel, a very posh place where Princess Kate (or whatever she calls herself now) stayed the night before the royal wedding.
The food was OK (meat eaters breakfast looked more substantial), and the service was slightly weird as I don’t think they were really expecting 4 nerds from Microsoft to turn up - not their typical clientèle I expect.
All in all it was a very interesting experience, definitely something new, and many thanks to Mark for taking us there.
Making the most of my last few days in London this year by stepping up the quest for exciting new lunch places.
Yesterday we went to Lime Orange, what looks like a brand new Korean restaurant on Vauxhall Bridge Road. I had a tasty vegetarian bibimbap which was an interesting bowl of rice and assorted vegetables with a fried egg on top, and Paul had a meat based version with some very stinky kimchee.
All very tasty, and may make it on to our new rotation.
Also, make sure you check out the comedy misspelling on their website!
Finally, somewhere decent to eat near Victoria!
A few people in the office had mentioned Picante as a good place to go, but Monday was the first time I’d ventured there myself. It’s not that easy to find being in the middle of a pretty residential area, but well worth the trip as the burrito I had was excellent. Not quite Chipotle standard but close enough, and I will almost certainly be going back here at least once a week.
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Decided to make something nice and warming, so I made some vegetable ramen which I hadn’t done before.
I just added some shittake mushrooms, spring onions, a little ginger, soy sauce and 2 chopped chillis into some vegetable stock, simmered for 30 mins then added some stir-fried noodles into the mix and served.
It was actually very spicy as the chillis were very strong, but that’s not really a bad thing. Very nice on another very cold day.
We went to the Newcastle v. Swansea game yesterday. It wasn’t a great game - a 0-0 draw despite Newcastle having most of the play - but the highlight of the day turned out to be when we got home and spotted ourselves on Match Of The Day.
I’m sure you saw us too, but in case you missed us it was in the first half when Cabaye hit a free kick from outside the box and it just clipped the bar. Hilary had wanted to sit nearer the pitch than last time we went, so we were just 4 rows back slightly to the left of the goal in the Sir John Hall stand. From the “reverse view” replay you could clearly see me, Hilary and David sitting there when paused on Sky+.
How exciting!
Winter finally arrived at home in Hexham with some heavy snow showers, so it wasn’t really a day for venturing out. Therefore I thought stay indoors and checked out the “Cool Tools” app for Windows Phone 7.
It’s a really nice collection of small but useful things such as a stopwatch, ruler, flashlight, …
Really well done, and definitely something I’d recommend for anyone with a Windows Phone.
It was my last day in Munich so obviously I had several easy new things but nothing particularly interesting (nothing new there then). So in the spirit of the blog I’ll mention a new lunch place we went to.
Abhishek took me and Andras along to a kebab and falafel takeaway place, where we had some pretty tasty falafel in a pitta bread with some tasty salad and sauces. Nothing particularly fancy, but we’d love something like that in Victoria.
I tried finding it on the map, but other than knowing it was on Rosenheimer Strasse I’m not 100% exactly where it was - hopefully the street view below will give you some idea of the area anyway.
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One other mildly memorable occurrence was Dereck Chisora, the heavyweight contender being on the same Munich-London flight as me. I believe he was in town because of his upcoming fight with a Klitscko in Munich in February, and having seen both of them in the flesh I think he’ll be massively over-matched.
Still in Munich, and yesterday we went to Tollwood, a winter festival held on the same grounds of the more famous Oktoberfest.
It was an interesting night out, as there were some massive marquees full of either fairly random food or slightly hippy-ish craft stalls. Unfortunately I couldn’t get a veggie version of the half-metre sausage the others had, but we had fun with more glühwein and lager, as well as a fantastically crazy stall selling some sort of dowsing rods for determining freshness of food.
Still really enjoying Munich!
Tuesday’s Munich excursion meant a trip to a local Christmas market. This was great fun, as I had some Glühwein - basically some mulled wine but much nicer than the UK variety - and then an interesting star-shaped bakery item from a stall.
A really nice way to start off the evening, which continued in a local Greek restaurant and then a reasonably early night.
Munich is great!
