Category: Eating Out

Dinner With John White At The Chancery, Preceded By A Drink In The Cittie Of York, 26 November 2007

This evening did what it said on the tin, I should imagine. It was my turn to pay and John I think felt at that stage of the season that we both needed to be fairly close to work and to routes home – hence the location choice.

I reported it very briefly in e-mail form afterwards as:

great to see you last night

While John’s report back included a caveat…

Lovely evening on Monday but sadly I had to catch a bus from Bishops Stortford due to engineering works. Commuter troubles. A late night in the end. Must learn for next time.

Ouch.

Both venues are still there at the time of writing (January 2019) I think:

Trip Advisor on Cittie of York

Trip Advisor on the Chancery

But I don’t recall The Chancery looking like that – have they changed the frontage or even moved since our visit.

Perhaps John knows and/or remembers what we ate.

Dinner With Charlotte At The Ealing Park Tavern, Then The Glass House Kew, 14 July 2007 & 7 September 2007, not 4 August 2007

Charlotte (Charlie) went through a small phase that summer of staying with us overnight Saturday to Sunday and we’d take her out to dinner.

The first of the two that summer was an excellent gastro pub, the Ealing Park Tavern.

Still well regarded at the time of writing – click here for a link to reviews.

The second was at the Glass House Kew.  Trendy and very good food if I remember correctly.  Click here for reviews.

I originally thought the second evening was 4 August, but we needed to postpone that one due to my dad’s indisposition, so we rescheduled for 7 September.

The weekend before that, 1 September, Anthea and Mitchell came over to to Sandall Close for dinner.

Thems was very pleasant evenings, thems was.

 

Dinner With Mum, Dad and Janie at Lamberts, Balham, 29 June 2007

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A painful memory, this one. Not for the dinner itself, which was a culinary and social success, celebrating Janie’s birthday.

Painful, because we now know that dad only had a few weeks to live. There were just a couple of clues on the  night.

Dad was just shy of 88 and was finding it harder to get in and out of the car without help, but on this occasion he needed a lot of help; far more than he had needed before.

The other clue was that dad didn’t finish his meal. He said the food was very good but that he didn’t have the appetite for any more than he had eaten. This was a very unusual thing for dad to do/say, but we thought little of it at the time.

In fact, dad was riddled with cancer by then. In early August, when he collapsed and we were given the news that he was in such a bad way, the specialist couldn’t believe that he had been more-or-less symptom free until five weeks before he collapsed.

There are a few other photos from the evening including the one above – click here if you want to see them. 

Dinner With Michael And Elisabeth At The Painted Heron, 16 June 2007

I recall this was a fairly pricey but excellent Indian meal in a trendy setting on Cheyne Walk.

At the time of writing (September 2018) the place seems to be closed, but I remember looking it up quite recently with a view to eating there again and it was open then, so perhaps a temporary closure.

It was well received review-wise from the start – this link should find topical and old ones alike.

Michael and Elisabeth arranged Babysitters for the kids on this occasion and brought the start time forward from 8:30 to 8:00 to accommodate a sitter.

I do recall we all had a very enjoyable evening and thought we might eat there again – but so far Janie and I haven’t.  I cannot speak for Michael and Elisabeth.

 

Dinner At Merkato With John White, 20 March 2007

Judging by the e-mail correspondence and crossings out in the diary, the arrangements for this one were a bit messy but it all came good in the end…

…appropriate for this form of cuisine, because…

we ate at Merkato, an Ethiopian institution in Kings Cross. Quite a messy business, Ethiopian-style dining, if you do it in an authentic stylee.

This was about a year after Janie and I visited Ethiopia, so I wanted John to experience Ethiopian-style eating and my description of it had sparked John’s curiosity to try it.

Me and our guide, Dawit, dining in Ethiopia, 2006, taken by Daisy

Trip Advisor speaks of Merkato thus – click here. Clearly still doing OK at the time of writing – April 2018.

John and I had a good evening at Merkato – certainly I remember it fondly. We were in part looking forward to and plotting a gathering of the four of us (including Janie and Mandy) for a few week’s hence at John and Mandy’s place.

Some Meals With Friends Ahead Of Trip To Cuba, 20 January 2007 & 10 February 2007

Quite a few crossings-out in that early part of 2007. For example, we were due to see Kim and Micky in early January, but I think that got cancelled/postponed and became instead the gathering on 10 February.

20 January 2007

A Saturday evening out with Jamil and Souad. We started the evening at their place for drinks. Janie and I are straining to remember where we ate.

We know they like to eat at Noura in Belgravia (and have eaten there with them more than once) but Janie and I both have a feeling we ate in Mayfair that night. Perhaps they just fancied the change or perhaps Belgravia was unavailable when they chose to book.

In any case, we had a very pleasant evening as always with those two.

10 February 2007

We had Kim, Micky, DJ and his then girlfriend Julie over for dinner at Sandall Close that night.

We can’t honestly remember the menu, but with two vegetarians in the group (Kim and Julie) almost certainly one of Janie’s takes on Lebanese food (perhaps inspired by the Noura experience a few week’s before) so that four of us got a good meaty main course while the others had loads of dips, tabbouleh and the like to make up a substantial meal.

If it was anything more complex, there’d usually be some tell-tale notes in Janie’s diary, but there are none…

…except for:

collect shoes Kogee

…I don’t think Janie cooked those.

Fun evening it was, that much we do remember.

Some Dubs At Queen’s With Abe Koukou & His Pals, 24 November 1999

Same place, 20 years later

I have previously written about my inadvertent act of gamesmanship – specifically guestmanship – with Abe Koukou at The Queen’s Club earlier in 1999.

Lawn Tennis At Queen’s, In Which I Inadvertently Deployed Gamesmanship Masterfully, Yet Still Lost, 24 June 1999

This note in my diary reminds me of one of the occasions when Abe nevertheless invited me back to play doubles with him and his pals. Not on that wintery-looking grass court, of course, but indoors on the carpet.

I don’t recall what happened tennis-wise – I suspect that I partnered the best of the four and that we had a decent game on the back of that.

I remember what happened afterwards more clearly. Abe was keen to see the progress (or lack thereof) in my Clanricarde Gardens flat, which had been a conversation piece over drinks. I think we also agreed all to dine at The Park Inn, my favourite Chinese restaurant, on Wellington Terrace just a few strides from the flat. So all four of us bundled over to my part of Kensington as it were, to see the flat.

It was very much still work in progress. I remember one of the guys questioning whether it would all be done before Christmas if, as I had described, Gavin was unable to retain a member of staff even for half a day so was effectively working alone on the job.

I also remember one of the guys (perhaps the same one) suggesting that the smell of solvents inside the flat was so great that it was making his eyes stream after five minutes and was surely so strong that anyone working in there for several hours would be “high as a kite” for much of the day.

Valid points, I sense.

Eventually it was all done and lovely…much to the relief of all of the then residents.

I don’t much recall the meal either. But at The Park Inn it will have been good.

Bank Holiday & Birthday Treats: Dinner At Nobu & A Party At Lammas Park Tennis Courts, 28 & 29 August 1999

Nobu Tuna Sashimi Salad by Tzahy Lerner, CC BY-SA 3.0

Janie’s treat to me, I suppose: a slap up meal at Nobu in Mayfair, which was all the rage back in the late 1990s and priced accordingly.

We were there just a couple of months after Boris Becker’s now famous tryst in the broom cupboard, of which we were blissfully unaware when we visited.

Everyone who was anyone dined at Nobu back then…and so did we. I recall the meal being fabulous and I also realise that it was the first (but far from the last) time I tasted black cod in miso sauce. Exquisite.

Lammas – returning to the scene some years later

Back then we played tennis at Lammas Park Tennis Courts every weekend – much as we now play at Boston Manor. It was run by a chap named Larry and his belle, whose name escapes me. When things went awry between those two (not long after this party) things went rapidly downhill at Lammas Park until we had long since escaped and then the place got taken over by Will To Win (or initially one of its predecessors).

Anyway, this bank holiday party was billed as “party – bring wine”. Which we did. It was informal and fun I’m sure.

Dinner At Club Gascon With Michael & Elisabeth Mainelli, 9 April 1999

CLUB GASCON [2]  CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This was a memorable evening at Club Gascon in Smithfield. It was a new place (it had only opened a few months earlier) and all the rage when we visited it with The Mainellis in April 1999.

That was our first but certainly not our last visit.

I’m pretty sure the place became a reasonably regular haunt for Michael, at least for a while.

Janie was especially taken with their use of foie gras, which was celebrated in Club Gascon’s early incarnation. I too was taken with the food, but I am not partial to foie gras.

The restaurant gained a Michelin Star a couple of years after our first visit and still thrives at that location – here is a link to its website.

The Day We Went To the Oriental Restaurant In The Dorchester Hotel And Later Ran Out Of Monet, 1 February 1999

Did you see what I did there?

Janie and I had a day off.

We went to the Dorcheter Hotel for lunch at the Oriental Restaurant. We had been dying to try the place and had been tipped off that the lunchtime offering was a much better deal than the evening meal.

We both remember it being excellent scoff.

Jay Rayner in The guardian wrote up the notion of going to the place for lunch a few years after we worked that out. I don’t recall our lunchtime meal revolving around dim sum – I think that was a later lunchtime innovation there.

Then on to the Royal Academy to see Monet In The 20th Century, which was an excellent exhibition.

Big thumbs up from Laura Cumming in The Observer:

Monet Cumming ObserverMonet Cumming Observer 24 Jan 1999, Sun The Observer (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com

Sebastian Faulks in The Standard seemed less sure.

Monet Faulks StandardMonet Faulks Standard 22 Jan 1999, Fri Evening Standard (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com