Category: Eating Out

Three Evenings Of Nets At Lord’s, 18 February, 26 February and 12 March 2010

Having ascertained that Escamillo (Lavender’s beau) was keen on cricket, it only seemed polite to have a few nets with him at Lord’s that winter.

The diary is a bit sparse on what we actually did:

  • 18 February Lord’s @18:00;
  • 26 February Nets & Dinner 6:00;
  • 12 March (Nets) 7:00 to 8:00.

The e-mail is not much additional help – me to E 14 March:

Very much enjoyed Friday evening nets and supper at Harry’s.  Many thanks for treating us to the latter.

In the nets, I have a feeling we worked with Moses (Hallam Mosely) on most of those sessions. He taught me how to pivot to get a bit more umph on my deliveries.

I’m pretty sure Chas was still injured at that time, which is why he didn’t join us for nets that winter. My correspondence with him around that time is prely business related.

I’m pretty sure the girls joined us for the last two – i.e. both of the Friday evenings. Daisy recalls a restaurant in Marylebone on 26 February – we might dig out her diary or trawl Lavender’s memory for the details, but I think we treated the youngsters that night and then they treated us to Harry’s 12 March.

Further details might follow, if Daisy’s diary or the youngsters’ memories bear more fruit.

Postscript:

Not Marylebone 26 February, but The Cow on Westbourne Park Road – well remembered Escamillo & Lavender. Yes, we all agree, Harry’s for the second evening together.

Dinner at E&O, Without John and Mandy, 9 January 2010, With John and Mandy, 6 February 2010

My dairy reads:

9 January, John & Mandy?

…then…

6 February, John & Mandy? 8:30

The e-mails disambiguate. John to me on 11 January:

Sorry we didn’t make it on Saturday, probably the sensible thing not to travel but I was a bit miffed when the 6 inches of snow never turned up. Anyway 6th of Feb is fine by us.  Same arrangements?

Me to John, same day:

Great. Janie and I decided to go to E&O anyway and enjoyed the meal so much we’d be very happy to go there again 6 Feb if it took your fancy.  Otherwise we could go somewhere else if you two have a special request. Let me know asap so I can get a booking sorted.

E&O is a superb Asian-fusion restaurant – still around at the time of writing (2017) – click here.

I first came across E&O a few years earlier than 2010; I recall having a lunchtime businessy meal there with Michael and Jeremy. This seemed a good location for a little lunchtime over-indulgence, as my doctor’s surgery is just a short crawl across the road. Not so useful location-wise on a Saturday evening. But I digress.

I remember both of those early 2010 evening meals reasonably well, although to some extent they merge into one in my mind.

I recall bumping into the then ubiquitous Richard Russell and his family at a nearby table, but I think that was the January visit when I was with Janie only, but perhaps it was the gang of four February evening.

I can’t remember exactly what we ate – perhaps John can. It is an especially good place to go with a small group (e.g. four) so you can share and taste lots of different dishes – I remember thinking that when Janie and I went as just a pair.

I’m pretty sure John and Mandy didn’t stay that time – I’m guessing the kids were being baby-sat but perhaps the girls were staying with aunts or grandparents.

I’m hoping John will chime in with some more recollections about the evening, if he has them.

Dinner With John White At Ba Shan, 2 November 2009

An e-mail from me to John earlier that day:

I’ve booked us a table at Ba Shan – 24 Romilly Street – for 19:30.  Probably a good idea to get there early if anything.  I’ll come over your way c18:30 and call you on your mobile once I emerge from TCR tube station – if we walk towards each other I suspect we’ll meet each other!

Ba Shan. Aka Bashan. Hunanese food. Here is the Bashan website.

I seem to recall really liking the food, although not to the extent that I would prefer it to its sibling Barshu.

It is well-regarded on TripAdvisor – click here.

A selection of small dishes I seem to recall. Perhaps we over-ordered. Me to John the next day:

Just a quick thank you message for last night – great to see you and a very good meal, for which I am suffering as expected this morning.  Thank goodness no clients until lunchtime!

John might recall more details.

A Few Days in Burgundy With Tony and Phillie, 1 to 5 September 2009

I had to do some serious detective and memory work on this short trip to Burgundy, as I didn’t keep a journal.

Here is an extract from an e-mail from “Auntie Janet” at Ultimate Travel:

I think you are best to fly to Lyon, which is about 2 hours/86 miles from the hotel.

The flights are as follows:

01 Sept.    BA 360    Depart Heathrow 08.40    Arrive Lyon 11.15

05 Sept.    BA 363    Depart Lyon 19.25    Arrive Heathrow 20.00

…small automatic hire car, Citroen C3 or similar…will be on request if you want to go ahead and they can be quite scarce.

Darn right about scarcity – we ended up needing to reacquaint ourselves with a stick shift for that trip.

We ended up booking this hotel, Moulin d’Hauterive. It boasted a pool and a tennis court. The tennis court was an interesting wreck, I remember, variable bounce, varying between “in yer face” and non-existent, like playing real tennis except without walls, galleries and roofs. I have written a short aside on the tennis – here.

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Tony and Phillie were going to be on a driving all the way to South of France holiday late August. The idea was for us to join them in a nice spot mid-France as they wended their way back to Blighty. Once we’d booked, I wrote:

We fly in to Lyon late morning on the Tuesday, so should arrive at the hotel some time mid afternoon if all goes to plan.  Suspect we might get there before you unless you leave early and put your foot down.

The hotel restaurant does not open on Wednesdays and the nearest alternative is some 15 kms away from the hotel.  We might want to try that alternative place or we might want to arrange a picnic for the Wednesday!  We can decide all that when we are there, but thought you ought to know this vital fact.

We did indeed arrive some time before them on the Tuesday, 1 September. Janie got busy making sure that we (and Tony/Phillie) had the best available rooms, which got us off to an interesting start with the son of the proprietor, whose name escapes me and is absent from the website. Sonny took pains to tell us that he had worked in advertising in Paris for many years, before reluctantly agreeing to retreat and help run the family business when it got a bit harder for his parents. The parents were noticeably absent throughout our stay.

I recall that we did indeed eat in the hotel with Tony and Phillie on the Tuesday and the Thursday evening. The food was very good there. The wine pricey but that’s Burgundy for you. I also recall us going into Beaune on the Wednesday evening and having a very pleasant meal in the town. Tony decided to drive in the end, after we toyed with the idea of getting taxis too and fro.

We mostly just all relaxed together for two-and-a-half to three days. Tony and Phillie set off for home Friday morning; we’d booked the extra night.

Tony and Phillie both looked at us quizzically before they headed off when the answer to their question, “what are you going to do after we leave today?” was, “we’re going to the Bresse service station for lunch”.  Our culinary service station quest was largely a result of reading this article by aptronym extraordinaire Heston Blumenthal.

We did also want to see Beaune…

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…and Bourg-en-Bresse, but the most important bit was to eat lunch at the Bresse service station, where they serve poulet-de-Bresse and yes indeed it was wonderful food.

After lunch, we strolled around and found a nice music shop (I think in Bourg, not Beaune) where I bought some very good CDs, not least Jean-Guihen Queyras’s Complete Bach Cello Suites (we have subsequently seen him perform at the Wigmore Hall – click here). We also bought some well-cool Paris Jazz CDs, which Janie still plays when she is feeling in a suitably continental mood.

When we got back, the weather had perked up, so we played tennis and relaxed around the pool.  I was reading Life Beyond the Airing Cupboard by John Barclay – a seriously good book btw.

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King Cricket published my book review of Life Beyond The Airing Cupboard in October 2017 – click here or the above photo.

If anything were ever to happen to the King Cricket site, a scrape of that review can be found here.

We didn’t take many photos on that trip; indeed I think none until after Tony and Phillie had gone. In truth, Phillie was not very well by then (it turned out to be Phillie’s last holiday) and I don’t think she much fancied being photographed. The few pictures we did take are of Beaune and of me and Janie relaxing when we got back from our poulet-de-Bresse quest – on this small album going forward from the starting point.

A Birthday Treat For… Someone, Vito’s Restaurant, 29 August 2009

We visited mum on that Saturday afternoon and then took her to one of her favourite Italian restaurants, Vito’s, on Northcote Road.

This will have been, in theory, mum’s birthday treat to me.

In practice, Janie will have driven to Streatham, done mum’s feet (there are copious notes about that in Janie’s diary) and then we’d have chauffeured mum to Vito’s.

There, the waiters will have fawned over mum in their classic style (Janie deliberately malapropises that description to “fornicating waiters”) while mum will no doubt have proudly told the waiters that she was treating us to an evening out for my birthday.

We’re somehow getting by without treats like this now that mum has gone.

We went to Vito’s quite a lot with mum in those days. She had her favourite places and it was a lot easier to take her to one of those. We went again 1 November, I can see in the diary.

Still, the food at Vito’s was always satisfactory and that style of service certainly pleased people like my mum. Unfortunately, that generation of customer has been dying out for some years and Vito’s itself has bitten the dust, at some point in the second half of the teeny decade, I presume.

Oh well.

Dartmouth With the Worms, 17 to 20 April 2009

It seemed like a lovely idea for Janie, her sisters and the husbands/significant other to gather for a long weekend somewhere nice. We settled on The Dart Marina in Dartmouth. Very nice.

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We gathered on the Friday as the afternoon went on. I think Janie and I got there first, obviously, as we had by far the furthest to travel. We all agreed/decided that the pub adjoining (part of, really) the hotel would be our best bet that first night. It was old-fashioned fish and chips type food, done very well.

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On the Saturday, Phillie, Tony, Hils and Chris had planned a pootle around town while Janie and I went off to meet our friends Nigel and Viv (who then lived in Totnes) for lunch – more pub grub.

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This time we took it easy a bit, though, as we knew we had a big meal planned for the evening in the hotel’s posh restaurant:

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If it looks as though we spent most of the weekend eating and drinking…well you’re not entirely wrong. But that was about to change.

The Sunday plan was for Phillie and Tony to do a bit of gentle shopping while Chris, Hils, me and Janie did a proper walk. Chris and I planned the walk and off we set up the hill. Hils (no aptronym here) started protesting vigorously that we must be going the wrong way as we were walking far too much up hill. Now despite my spatial and directional challenges, I am quite good at plotting routes on maps. Moreover, Chris works for Ordnance Survey and is a specialist map guy.

In short, I think we were going in precisely the right direction, while Hils was barking up the wrong tree.

Still, once we explained the plan to her, which included descending to a lovely sounding village with a pub, she calmed down and cheered up.

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By the time we got to the pub, Hils was a convert to this walking thing and has undertaken many walking holidays since. Must be to do with the pubs…I mean the exercise.

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In the above photo, I’m sporting a West Indies ground staff tee-shirt from Nigel and Viv’s recent sortie to the Caribbean (was it Antigua or Barbados, I forget?) with Charlie and Dot. When I sported the tee-short again in front of Charlie later that summer, it had the desired effect (intense and voluble envy).

That evening we ate in the third of the Dart Marina’s restaurants – the bistro -style one, which we decided was possibly the nicest of the three for our purposes, not least because the weather smiled on us enough to enable us to eat outside under the patio heaters. There was some debate about meal timing and whether or not Chris and I could choose the wines we wanted to pay for rather than the house wine that Hils insists is always adequate. The photographic evidence (below) suggests that, for once, Hils didn’t get her way:

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There are other photographs from that trip – click here for the Flickr set, but in truth they are for completists/connoisseurs – the ones that tell the tale are included in this posting.

Dinner At Hereford Road Restaurant With Souad & Jamil, 9 January 2009

I had been really impressed with Hereford Road when I visited it with John a few months earlier…

Dinner With John White at Hereford Road, Preceded and Followed by a spot of cricket at Lord’s, 3 September 2008, plus a snippet on 4 September 2008

…so Janie and I arranged to take Souad and Jamil there – an opportunity to reciprocate for their warm hospitality in (mostly Lebanese) restaurants.

I don’t recall much about the evening – nor does Janie. I think they liked it but I also think Souad and Jamil’s European food preference is for Italian.

What A Megillah…An MTWD Dinner, 4 December 2008

There is a long, almost self-explanatory thread on MTWD planning this dinner – between October and the event itself on 4 December:

Here is a link to page one of two of the thread.

Here is a link to page two of two of the thread.

Just in case anything ever happens to Sportnetwork, here is a scrape of Page One…

…and here is a scrape of Page Two.

The subplot to the planning was a whole load of nonsense which got one site user banned and had several others incensed.

At one point in the e-mail trail Barmy Kev and I talked about boycotting the evening, which would have made it very interesting indeed as I get the impression that, in the end, it was just the two of us who turned up and dined.

Sometimes I wonder whether we should have renamed the site MTWLTWTL (Middlesex Till We Lose The Will To Live).

We went to the O2 Centre on Finchley Road.

We plotted lots of interesting stuff for the MTWD website that evening by all accounts.

Strangely, I don’t think anyone ever attempted one of those MTWD Xmas dinners again. I cannot imagine why not.

Dinner With John White At The Pearl But Total E-Mail Silence, 19 November 2008

Nothing in the e-mail trail about this. Nothing at all. Not setting it up. Not cancelling it.

The e-mail trail stops with John apologising that he will have to miss my Gresham Lecture a couple of weeks before this date…

Commercial Ethics: Process or Outcome?, Gresham Lecture, Barnard’s Inn Hall, 6 November 2008

…but I know that John came to the lecture because I even wrote him into the script and handed him a bootleg CD as he dashed off to his unavoidable engagement that night.

So I guess we must have spent some time talking to each other on the telephone during those weeks. I remember talking on the telephone. That’s what we used to do to arrange things before e-mail and messaging and things.

Anyway, it was my trusty payments log that helped me solve this one, as I spent a suspiciously John & Ian dinner sum at The Pearl on the very night recorded in my diary.

Pearl At Renaissance Chancery Court – click here for a link.

Here is a review from a year or so before we went.

Review scraped to here just in case – after all, the place is long gone now.

I remember a good but pricey meal. The company, needless to say, was excellent. John must have chosen the place because I paid.

Do you remember anything else about it, John?

Dinner With John White at Hereford Road, Preceded and Followed by a spot of cricket at Lord’s, 3 September 2008, plus a snippet on 4 September 2008

Wednesday 3 September 2008

One of the regular/irregular meet ups between me and John White. John had not yet been to Lord’s to see proper (i.e. red ball, white clothing) cricket, nor had he yet done the pavilion thing.

As it was my turn to choose the eating venue, I hatched a plan for the meal to be at Hereford Road (which I was sure would be to John’s taste) and for both of us to finish work early for a change, starting our late afternoon at Lord’s. My e-mail to John a couple of days before:

We’re meeting early at Lord’s if you are still on for that – I have 4:30/4:45 in my diary.  I have booked Hereford Road for dinner – excellent restaurant between Lord’s and my place – owned and cheffed by the former chef from St John.

So John joined me at Lord’s for an hour or so of cricket and the informal tour of the pavilion, then the restaurant, both of which he seems to have enjoyed – John’s subsequent e-mail words:

As always a lovely evening.  It was very kind of you to let me into Lord’s.  Although nobody is really that interested I have been endlessly describing the various bars, characters and atmosphere of the place.  I don’t know if you won?  Orient managed a 2-0 win away at Walsall on Saturday if you’re interested.

The restaurant got and still gets good reviews:

As for the cricket, I did return the next day…

Thursday 4 September 2008

…but again only for the last couple of hours, primarily as a convivial meeting place with Steve Tasker to go through some UNISON business; probably thinking through project budgets for 2009. I’m sure we got to see a bit of cricket and enjoy a beer at the end of the day as well.

As for the Friday and the remainder of the match – I wrote that up at length at the time for both MTWD and King Cricket – all linked up and explained through the following Ogblog piece – click here. Rain-affected draw for those uninterested in clicking through to read the slapstick exploits of Ged and Charley “The Gent” Malloy, yet interested in an ancient match result.