Category: Eating Out

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

8504679068_bbe0de7c6e_z

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.

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

Dinner With Mike Ward At Silks & Spice In Foley Street, 15 December 1998

I know that Mike and I had tried to meet up for dinner in London a few times in the mid 1990s without success. This might even have been the first time that our diaries conspired to enable us to meet for dinner in The Smoke. We dined in Silks and Spice

We certainly weren’t conspiring in the manner of Bryce Taylor & Max Clifford, who famously had liaised in that very restaurant in the matter of Princess Diana photographs a few years earlier. Nor would we have been discussing my Princess Diana lyrics, e.g. this one, which to all intents and purposes died with her the previous year.

But no doubt we were discussing his forthcoming Actor’s Workshop New Year Revels show and possibly his plans for writing a couple of plays and shows, which Mike wrote and produced over the next few years.

I remember the restaurant being quite a good one. it is now, 25 years later, Foley’s Restaurant, a modern fusion take on South-east Asian food. Just around the corner from the old Harris family homestead, as I now know. Back then, who knew? Well, I sort-of knew but didn’t pay the matter much heed back then.

Mike and I will have had a very pleasant evening no doubt.

Z/Yen Christmas Dinner At Caldesi, 10 December 1998

Photo: Mike Quinn / Caffè Caldesi, Marylebone Lane, W1

I remember this Z/Yen Christmas event being an especially good meal. We were depleted in numbers that year for some reason – I think one or two illnesses – so Kim & Micky joined us as guests rather than allow paid-for dinners go to waste.

I wrote up the event for the Now & Z/Yen newsletter, which survives on-line despite several deportations in the intervening 25 years – click here.

Just in case a future deportation upsets the above link, here is a scrape of that page. And just in case you don’t like clicking, here is the raw text I wrote in 1998 that became the relevant paragraph on that page:

Hark! The Herald Angels Sing
[xmassy picture]
The annual Z/Yen Christmas stuffing took place at Caldesi, our favourite Tuscan restaurant. Z/Yen staff bravely fought their way through six courses, including Jane Beazley’s birthday cake, as well as through one badly mangled Christmas carol, to the tune of “D-Mark! Z/Yen Angels Sing”. Contrary to our seasonal hopes, the heavens did not flood the party with D-Marks (current currency of choice in the run-up to the Euro, as recommended by one self-interested wife), nor were angels or singing much in evidence. A great time was had by all and huge relief sighed by the restaurant staff when they realised that Z/Yen people were not going to conduct quantum physics experiments on their fibre optic Christmas tree.

I particularly like the reference to quantum physics experiments, especially as, 25 years later, we really were conducting quantum physics experiments (specifically Einstein’s two clock time dilation relativity experiment using NPL nano-clocks), rather than writing about quantum cryptography , some apparatus from such experiments was on the site of our 2023 Christmas lunch.

The Now & Z/Yen write up also refers to Michael’s attempt at a seasonal lyric – this 1998 one was his first for Z/Yen. Let’s just hypothesise that Michael is better at quantum physics than he is at song lyrics. Evidence below:

D-MARKS! Z/YEN ANGELS SING
(Sung to the tune of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” or “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” in the Mariah Carey style)

“D-Marks!”, Z/Yen angels sing

Glory to the Euro thing

Peace in Europe, markets wild

Blair and Schroder reconciled

Joyful all recessions rise
Join the Bank of England’s sighs
With Zeee/Yen consultants claim
Markets are in may-eh-hem

“D-Marks!”, Z/Yen angels sing
Glory to the Euro thing

Glo….oh….oh…oh…oh….ohria

In consultants’ fee-eees
Glo….oh….oh…oh…oh….ohria

In consultants’ fee-eee-eees

Z/Yen by highest fees adored

Z/Yen for those who can afford

Late in time, does Ian come

Often late, the favoured one

Z/Yen, so fresh the clients see

Hail, the astronomical fees

Pleased as gods with men to dwell

Z/Yen as blasphemous as hell

“D-Marks!”, Z/Yen angels sing
Glory to the Euro thing

Glo….oh….oh…oh…oh….ohria

In consultants’ fee-eees
Glo….oh….oh…oh…oh….ohria

In consultants’ fee-eee-eees