thekua.com@rest

On the Friday before heading out on holidays, I had a couple of tickets to see pop band, The Feeling at the Carling sponsored venue, the Hammersmith Apollo. Surprisingly the venue was busy but wasn’t completely sold out given a number of empty seats around us. The Fray performed as the support act and obviously had a large following in the audience given the amount of clapping from the audience. They placed a decent set that lasted for almost an hour before the switch to the main act.

The Feeling opened with an appreciation for their fans by projecting footage of their fans singing their songs on to a huge white sheet. The clips were pulled from You Tube and played for about ten minutes before kicking into the set for the evening. The band’s main singer, Dan Sells, though sometimes overly camp at times, performed perfectly as the hyper-active and obviously passionate lead singer. It was obvious that he enjoyed the attention of the crowd and fed that energy back interacting well with the audience. He had such a great rapport with the audience that he managed to pull off a harmony involving the entire audience - the best I’ve ever seen. They performed a great set, playing most of the songs from their album, a few covers and a double encore (admittedly the first only lasted a single song) and finishing up with the title song of their debut album, Twelve Stops From Home.

A fun performance with a great light show and a very entertaining set of performers.

TheKua.com Rating: 7.5 out of 10

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Just like Japanese food, London doesn’t do Mexican cuisine very well with only a handful of places around London serving a pitiful Tex-Mex selection and a few others that are either poorly themed or otherwise over priced. Thankfully a new place opened up that I read about via an entry in one of my current favourite blogs, Londonist.

I thought it would be good to support a new venture whose goal is to establish more accessible and authentic Mexican cuisine. If you follow the link above you can find out more about what the owner (Joel Henderson) is trying to accomplish.

I’m lucky enough that my current client is just a few streets away from Daddy Donkey’s current location in Leather Lane so I arranged a small outing with a group of us from work. Finding Daddy Donkey is easy - it’s the white cart playing Mexican music that helps make it stand out amongst all the other stalls. After ordering, they even have a couple of tables where you can eat your food at. These worked out well for us since the London’s lunchtime weather actually stayed shining for our entire lunch.

The choice of foods are simple at Daddy Donkey with £5 giving you either a burro, a fajita burro or a burro bowl (salad bowl) with the choice of chicken, meat or vegetarian fillings. All their ingredients are obviously very fresh and although £5 seems expensive for a meal without a drink or side dish, the size of each offering is enough to keep you full for the rest of the day. Levels of “hotness” seem properly adjusted for the English palette (i.e. hot is not really that hot) so make sure you ask for extra chillis if you really want some heat.

All of us who went out for lunch really enjoyed it and I think everyone would highly recommend it to anyone dropping into Leather Lane. One person did point out it could be made even more perfect if they sold Coronas.

Details: Daddy Donkey
Found on: Pitch 102 Leather Lane Market, Farringdon, London
Highlights: Fresh ingredients, large filling serve with simple offerings that hit the spot.
Room for improvement:Slightly more expensive for a standard lunch out compared to other places and could benefit from serving some beer as well.
The Kua Rating: 7.5 out of 10

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I’ve been away for a week of skiing in Andorra and I’ve just spent the last hour or two fishing through the 120 built up emails in my gmail box, deleted the 150 or so spam emails in my work one, and then filtered another 200 or so work ones to determine which ones are worth catching up on. I haven’t even had a chance to hit my regular must read blogs, let alone catching up on my own entries. More to come though…

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