Openhouse 2012 – Day 01

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OpenHouse London is such a fantastic event that even those who aren’t into architecture and buildings must surely appreciate the opportunity to see a side of London the public probably wouldn’t normally get to see. Sure some of the buildings in the program can be visited by the public (at a price) but the majority of those on offer cannot. As an added bonus if you’re lucky enough you’ll also get a chance to hear a bit more about the building from volunteer tour guides or even the architects or building custodians.

The buildings on offer can vary from year to year (for example the Gherkin, or the Swiss Re building, participates seemingly every second year) so its always exciting to receive the OpenHouse handbook to see what’s on offer. In honesty OpenHouse is one of those London secrets that I wish I could keep to myself – its become so well-known that many buildings are so popular that they have had to begin requiring people to pre-book, and in some cases you can’t even pre-book but you have to go into a ballot for a slot!

In the morning I headed off to visit a Masonic Temple near Liverpool Street. Without OpenHouse I would never have realised that there was a functioning Masonic temple at the back and above of the restaurant Catch. (In fact the previous owners only discovered it when tearing down what ended up being a fake wall!) The building was built way back in 1912 by the son of Charles Barry, who was the architect responsible for the Houses of Parliament. It cost £50k back then, which is roughly the equivalent of £4m. The temple was as grand and intriguing as I imagined it to be – its just a shame that we weren’t given a guided tour like I thought we’d been promised. It was admission by timing (yes, one of the buildings you had to pre-book) so when we were ushered in we kind of sat around waiting for someone to tell us something. After it became obvious that it was a discover at your own pace visit it became a free for all with everyone milling around opening doors, trying to break into secret cabinets and spaces. Hilarious. There was a fact sheet but it didn’t really point out meaning of the various bits and pieces in the temple, which is kind of half the fun of going into a Masonic temple. Although it did point out the fact that the many believe Jack the Ripper was a Mason and likely to have attended this temple as it is closest to his hunting ground. After this it was off to City Hall!

This year, for something different, I decided that I wanted to volunteer to be part of the team over the weekend. I was lucky enough to get a Saturday afternoon slot at the beautiful City Hall near Tower Bridge. Not only is the building in a lovely location, but the building itself is so lovely and gorgeous and exciting that it almost didn’t feel like work as I was introducing people to it’s delights. Of course it didn’t hurt that we also got to have a wander around the building ourselves before our shift. I think I took almost the same photos as I did the last time I visited City Hall!

However, as an added bonus on this visit I not only got a double rainbow …

… but I also got to witness the Tower Bridge opening up to let a boat through!

We didn’t really have too hard a job as a volunteer though by manning the front desk it really helped to know a little bit about the building. The one question that everyone seemed to ask was what exactly was the function of the GLA? I was so caught up in the building itself being a fascinating piece of architecture that I hadn’t even really thought to keep in my mind any key facts about the GLA – like how they are voted in etc. .. although I could tell them at least that this was where Boris Johnson’s office was 😉

Wow! Gorillas in London

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In the spirit of the painted Elephant I was very excited to find that City Hall was surrounded by a troop of painted gorillas! We were very lucky to be getting the 20 visiting gorillas – apparently part of a bigger troop of 60 gorillas the result of a collaboration between Wild in Art and the Bristol Zoo entitled Wow! Gorillas and they were certainly deserving of their Wow! Gorillas tag.

Wimbledon Doggies

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After the Walthamstow Greyhound Stadium shut down the Wimbledon Greyhound Stadium remains the only doggie race track in London. I’ve been meaning to go there for a while now but somehow time got away. However, a Groupon offer of £8 for admission for two including a drink and burger each was just too good an offer to pass up. So, I rounded up some troops and off we were.

Getting to the race track is supposed to be quite simple, even by public transport and merely involves taking the train/district line to Wimbledon and then catching a bus … that is, if said bus actually turns up! We waited, with a ton of other people, for over half an hour for the bus to turn up but soon lost patience and hopped in a cab instead. Infinitely quicker and easier and at about £10 for the trip it was not so prohibitively expensive when split between 3-4 people.

Our experience at Wimbledon was vastly different to Walthamstow – where at Walthamstow we’d had comfortable seats and tables from which to view the race track, because we arrived late there were no tables or spare seating left so we made our way instead down to the race track itself. This actually proved to be fun in its own way as you get to see the dogs up close and personal … though it did start to get quite crowded by the track as the night progressed.

As cool as it was to see the dogs we were all there for a wee gamble and (hopefully) a win. I hadn’t really remembered much from my visit to Walthamstow as to how to choose a winning dog and I certainly hadn’t remembered how quickly the races were run! It seemed that just as one race was run the next one was nearly about to start again. As for winning – everyone has their tactics (bet on the big dog, bet on the inside dog, always bet on dog no.2 etc. etc.) but really it all comes down to luck most of the time. Taking a lead from Philomena (who ended up the biggest winner of the night) betting on a win actually wasn’t enough, you really had to start betting on two- or even three-dog combinations if you really wanted to make a decent return. This certainly made it more challenging!

In the end there were winners and losers … but the most important thing was that everyone seemed to have fun!

La Trompette

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It felt just a little bit naughty today to be taking an extended lunch break to meet Laney for lunch at Michelin-rated La Trompette in Chiswick. Even though I was legitimately away from work I had the same feeling that I would get if I’d been wagging the day off from school (not that I ever did that of course ;-))

Lunches are a great way to get that fine dining experience for a lower price – sure you’re not getting the full experience of a sumptuous tasting menu but three courses is certainly more than enough to give you a flavour at least for a restaurant. We’d chosen a beautiful day for lunch at the La Trompette and we were happily seated right by the floor to ceiling windows/doors so had great natural lighting and view out on to the road.

Food at La Trompette was not only gorgeous to look at but it also gorgeous to devour. I had a tough time choosing my dishes by the way as everything sounded equally delicious.

Here are our starters of Rare Grilled Tuna with sauce vierge, celery and black pepper crème fraiche (Laney’s dish) and Roast Quail with spiced aubergine couscous, orange, pomegranate, pine nuts and coriander. I love how they did the quail two ways on my dish. Doesn’t everything look just so scrumptious!

The mains that followed were Parmesan gnocchi with ceps, cauliflower polonaise, baby artichokes and truffle pecorino (Laney’s dish) and Daube de boeuf a la bourguignonne with pomme puree and spinach. I was actually torn between the gnocchi dish that Laney ended up with and my dish but the fact that I generally dislike gnocchi pushed me over to the beef choice. To be fair the gnocchi was pretty good for gnocchi as it had been infused with the parmesan and, if not fried, toasted to a good consistency. My beef was perfectly tender and juicy.

Finally we finished with Crème brulee and Lemon grass panna cotta with passion fruit, pineapple and coconut madeleines. A very lovely finish to our meals! Oh, but wait, they also presented us with petit fours of miniature warmed melty chocolatey cakes (okay I don’t know the technical term!) Not the grandest of petit fours granted but enough for us after the very rich meal we’d just consumed.

Service at La Trompette was efficient and friendly but it did suffer from that thing that seems to happen when the restaurant gets busy – somehow we kept losing our waitress and the service dropped off every so slightly (but noticeable enough) in terms of how slow/fast they were. On the plus they didn’t rush us to leave the restaurant long after we’d finished our meal.

Drive

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Tonight Sandra and I were pretty lucky to be amongst the first to be checking out the newly renovated cinema (renos costing around £3m) at Swiss Cottage. The cinema itself doesn’t actually re-open until tomorrow so the guy who met us at the door was pretty excited that we were getting this sneak preview. As we had some spare time before our movie he offered to give us a tour of the new cinema to show where the £3m went – don’t think Sandra was particularly interested in this but I couldn’t help but be infected by our host’s excitement and didn’t see it hurting any.

The organisation tonight was a little bit lacking. We were supposed to be seeing the 7.30 screening but apparently there were two screenings tonight and no one had though to really sort us out into the right screenings. We were all kind of herded up into the new bar (admittedly very flashy and with a very extensive drinks list) and told to wait to be summoned. Drinks were offered to us but seeing as we were all here on a freebie – we didn’t want to take a drink in case we had to pay for it! Ha – we are so cheap! 😉

In fact none of us were actually watching the movie on the Imax screen, instead we were checking out the new Club screens. These new cinemas offer a more premium experience for a more intimate crowd (60+ seats as opposed to the Imax’s 300+). After waiting and waiting and seeing some people leaving we decided to take it upon ourselves to just head down to one of the screening rooms to seat ourselves! This was a good decision in te end as we managed to nab some decent seats. The club cinema offers some very comfortable seats (the only way they might have been more comfortable would have been having the legs left up so you could almost lay down) with the promise that food and drinks would be brought to you. Tonight at the premiere they offered up bottles of water and popcorn – unexpected so gratefully accepted.

As for the movie itself – well, Drive was certainly indescriable. For a start I don’t think there could have been more than three or four pages of dialogue in the entire movie! Drive is shot in an olden-day-style – including the font used to show the credits, the music (oh the music!) and some of the stills. It felt awkward at times as there wasn’t a lot of speaking with lots of long silent pauses between characters – sometimes fitting but on other occasions I felt I’d wandered on to the set of the Bold and the Beautiful (or any day-time soap opera where they have those long giant pauses.) It was very odd but … yet … I found myself paying extra attention when characters did speak as you knew it had to be important. This is truly the oddest and weirdest romance you’ll ever watch. Startlingly it’s also very gory in parts starting about half-way through the movie, and when I say gory I mean blood and guts and all sorts of violence on the screen. *Spoiler ahead* A guy actually gets his head kicked in and its literally stomped and flattened in front of you.

Oh and by the by – plot summary: Ryan Gosling plays a driver for hire: stunt driving for movies during the day and driving getaway vehicles at night. He falls for his neighbour, who is still tangled in her husband’s criminal life. There is a robbery gone wrong, lots of people die and lose body parts. It’s a total mess.

Don’t really know what to think of the movie but it is certainly one of the most interesting I’ve seen in a while, and certainly a most original screenplay.

Me Love Sushi

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Somehow scored some last minute tickets to a movie premiere tonight at the new Imax cinemas in the refurbished Swiss Cottage Odeon so of course I took along my regular partner in crime – Sandra, for this experience. But first, dinner! Situated just a very small stroll from the cinema and a nearby theatre I was surprised that Me Love Sushi wasn’t at all busy. Admittedly it was rather early abut even at about 6.30 you might have expected a few more than just us three or four diners. Not to worry – that wasn’t going to stop us tucking into our fare.

Me Love Sushi has a reasonably extensive sushi menu featuring all sorts of styles of sushi for your choice. Nothing on the menu though that isn’t comparable to Yo Sushi or Itsu in price or offering. In addition to sushi they also offer hot dishes such as tempura, kushiyaki (skewers of grilled foodstuffs), noodles, rice dishes and other odds and ends including a black cod miso dish served with rice. This was actually quite well-priced at £14.50 though as we didn’t actually sample it I have no idea whether the portion was reasonable.

Sandra was in the mood for sushi so we selected a mixture of ngiri and maki dishes and finished the meal with some of their own branded ice cream. The food we had was nice though I’m not convinced as to its absolute freshness. From a stomach filling perspective we didn’t feel the portions themselves were particularly generous and we left, if not feeling hungry, at least not particularly full. I’m not saying that you have to leave a restaurant staggeringly food-coma full, especially a sushi one, but in hindsight I would have preferred to have mixed my sushi with some of the bulkier items like a rice bowl to get better value for money, and save my ££ for more established sushi restaurants.

Me love “Me Love Sushi”? Well, not so much however I can see why I might come back – decent variety on the menu covering more than just sushi, service which is very friendly if sometimes a bit slow and distracted, and a cute little venue with sweet added touches such as the writing on our sushi plate, and prices are average for a London restaurant.

Imli, Soho

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Sometimes it pays to eat a lot … or at least to make a lot of reservations. Ha ha! Today Jenny and I took advantage of our dining free points to score a free three course meal at Imli, the tapas-style Indian restaurant in Soho. In actuality we should have only got two-courses but somehow we ended up with free third course of ice-cream which we weren’t going to poo poo. I’ll even forgive the fact they brought out the wrong flavoured ice-cream to me … twice.

The funniest part of the meal today was that a whole heap of our (big) bosses from our former work place were dining at the table behind us and the first I realised was when I heard my name being called as we walked by! On the one hand it was nice to see some of them, on the other hand … bit awkward! Small world.

Naru

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The search for that one really great Korean restaurant in London continued tonight with Sandra and my visit to Naru. Naru, located pretty much dead-centre between the three stations of Tottenham Court Road, Covent Garden and Holborn, is still somehow not that easy to find. I don’t think many people just stumble on to it at any rate.

The restaurant is cute with its silver chopsticks on the table, the pretty paper type lanterns and the wood framed calligraphy adorning the walls … but devastatingly no grills on the tables! Something we were a bit disappointed to see … or not see. But that wasn’t going to stop us eating of course and in actuality the grilling at your table is a bit a novelty and at least our clothes didn’t leave smelling of BBQ …

Dining at Korean restaurants, like dining at Chinese restaurants, always presents me with something of a dilemma – on the one hand I want to try all sorts of different and new things that I’ve not tried before, but on the other I also want to try the dishes that I always get so I can get the real measure of the restaurant. And as with many food journeys before this one, Sandra and I ended up taking the middle road – choosing some new and “old” dishes.

We started off with Kan so sae woo (which was basically deep fried prawns in a spicy sweet sour sauce) and Ke Sal gu jeoul pan (Pancakes with crab, mixed salad, sliced courgettes, carrots, mushrooms with mustard honey sauce) – the latter being my push for something “new”. The prawns were delicious if hardly challenging and the pancakes – well, not as exciting in flavour as I was hoping it would be – let’s just say they will never replace Crispy Duck Pancakes in Sandra’s heart (ha ha). At the very least it delivered some of those vegetable nutrients normally lacking in an oriental/asian meal …

We then followed these with our mains of Korean Fried Chicken (yep – still looking) and a Naru specialty – Special Sam Kyeop Sal (pork belly poached/braised in a special house sauce of chilli and soy) The KFC, again, alright without being exciting (search continues) but the Sam Kyeop Sal was divine though likely to be a little on the fatty side for most people’s taste (to me the fat just gave the dish that extra deliciousness …) Accompanying this was a fairly ordinary bibim bap (to satisfy our requirement for carbs.)

So overall food was pleasant without that O.M.G wow factor that would get me excited enough to get people to come back with me. (In all honesty we probably should have added one of the BBQ dishes to our meal to give Naru a proper test-run.) As a plus it wasn’t overly expensive (£26 each including a drink and service) and service was friendly and efficient (though sometimes getting the attention of the waitress was difficult .. like when we wanted to pay.)

I’m not writing this one off for a repeat visit just yet.

The Troll Hunter

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Sometimes the best movies are the ones that sneak up on you. Craig and I made a last minute decision to check out the Norwegian fantasy film The Troll Hunter and I must say it was one of the most enjoyable and fun movies that I’ve seen in a very long time. Filmed in the style most recently made famous by The Blair Witch Project, The Troll Hunter is an infinitely classier production. Not that I’ve seen The Blair Witch Project myself but there was something about the humour mixed in with realism and fantasy in tonight’s movie that made it pretty special.

The Troll Hunter follows a group of students who want to tell the story of trolls under the theory that there has been some giant government cover-up to hide their existence. They team up with a reluctant “bear” hunter, played by Norwegian comedian Otto Jespersen, to try and capture these trolls.

I think it was the wit and the dead-pan way that the whole story was told that drew me into this film and it almost fit into the so-silly-it-was-utterly-enjoyable-category. The actors, mostly unknown, were superb and I really loved Otto!

Its very hard to explain the magic it wove over me but I’m definitely under the spell of The Troll Hunter. Troll! A must see film.

Port of Manila

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I keep looking for that perfect Filipino restaurant in London but alas my search still continues. Every Thursday I got to the markets for lunch at Hammersmith, specifically I go to the Port of Manila stall as they serve some of my favourite Filipino dishes: Lechon (roast pork), Bicol Express (pork stew of chillie, shrimp paste, and coconut milk) and afritada (meat stew in tomato sauce with vegetables normally including carrots, capsicum and plaintain.) Thinking that I could build on this success I thought it would be a good idea to also check out their restaurant located nearby.

Both our starters just ended up being of the deep fried variety – White Bait and Lumpia Shanghai (Mini minced pork roll served with sweet chilli sauce.) Ok without being stunning. My Mum’s Lumpia shanghai are much nicer 😉

For main’s I thought we should try something that’s slightly unusual for those not used to Filipino dishes – Kare Kare (Tender Ox tail & tripe in peanut sauce with annatto oil, pak choi, aubergine, string beans served with sautéed shrimp paste) and of course a BBQ dish (chicken on this occasion.) Done well Kare Kare is a comforting dish (though without the shrimp paste could be a bit mild tasting for some) but I guess I should have known better than to order it in a restaurant where we were the first (and for most of the meal, only diners.) Kare Kare relies on the meat being tender, soft and fall off the bone and realistically unless the restaurant has a pot sitting there stewing away, the dish you will get is going to be tough and unsatisfying. The BBQ was alright though I would have been happier with more meat and less veg. heh heh.

I would have liked to have sampled dessert, since the Philippines is actually one Asian country that does good ones, but sadly we had to depart to make our movie.

Overall, Port of Manila was not a bad experience. The staff/owners are friendly (it was hard to measure true efficiency as we were the only customers for the most part) and accommodating. Food is reasonably priced. I still think I’m looking for that killer Filipino restaurant. Perhaps I just have to eat in the Kitchen of Dad and Mum …