Photos by Janie – talk about “focus on the food, not the people”
Actually that headline photo is an aberration. The focus of planning this get together was very much about the people, not so much the food. A long in the planning date to meet up with Pady Jalali on her long-delayed visit to London. Her previous visit had been planned for June 2023…
…but those plans went awry because Pady suffered an injury just prior to her planned trip.
This time, even more sadly, Pady had to cancel her trip due to the demise of her beloved father. As with the June 2023 gathering, we considered cancelling the whole event, then decided that we were in any case overdue for a John, Mandy, Janie and Ian gathering, so went ahead nonetheless.
After much debate, having been assigned “choose the restaurant” duties, Janie and I settled on Tatar Bunar, a new Ukrainian Restaurant in Shoreditch, which had been very well received in the gastro-press-and-media-world in the spring, e.g.:
Not all that many high-quality and trendy restaurants open on a Sunday evening, but Tatar Bunar does. Those criteria, together with the helpful (meet part way) location helped get that place the gig.
It was lovely to see John and Mandy again – first meal out together for some while. We did some catching up and we raised a glass to Pady and her family. It was such a shame that Pady couldn’t be with us again this time.
And then there was the food:
We enjoyed trying the Ukrainian wines, which matched extremely well with the Ukrainian foods. The foodie reviews linked above will give you far more detail and precision about the food than we could, other than to say that we found every dish we tried interesting and delicious. And we tried plenty, given the sharing plates concept.
Unlike some sharing plates places, we found the guidance from our waitress helpful in terms of sizing the meal as well as in recommending things to try when we explained our tastes, preferences and limitations.
We’d had a lovely evening. Hopefully we’ll do something similar again soon and hopefully we’ll get to see Pady again soon.