All The Live Long Day: Restaurants

Showing posts with label Restaurants. Show all posts

Monday, 24 February 2014

Things to do in Margate

I've showed you bits of Margate ~~one~~, ~~two~~, three times before.

Here are some more activities that you could engage in while there:

Visit a sliding house.

Try the pear and cambozola combo at the Great British Pizza Company.

Take pictures of sand and pretend you're looking at the moon.

Breathe deeply and fill your lungs with fresh sea air.

Hunt for textures.

Spent a couple of hours rummaging through the stock at Scott's Furniture Mart.

Look for colour.

Stop for a rainbow on your way home.

Tuesday, 18 February 2014

I am very lucky to have a three-day weekend. I do not work on Mondays, and that third day off has been very successful in curbing the back-to-work blues that I used to experience every Sunday afternoon.
When I first started working part-time, I enthusiastically vowed that Mondays would be fun-days: filled with outings, crafts and awesome dates with myself. I was going to use those 24 hours wisely. Never happened. My typical Monday sees me in sweat-wear, lounging around the house, maybe doing some laundry and having an afternoon nap. Hm.
This Monday, mind you, I did go out! My friend Christina smartly shipped her two girl-kids off to Germany for half-term and was looking to fill her free time. She asked me if I wanted to do something in town together, and I surprised myself by saying yes! So we ended up having a fantastic day filled with culture, tea and shopping.
I suggested we go see the current architecture exhibition at the Royal Academy. I had read about it a little while ago and it looked and sounded interesting. It's called Sensing Spaces, and consists of 7 large-scale installations by different architects trying to convey the essence of their design beliefs. It felt like we were visiting a big playground, as you were able to walk through, touch and interact with the structures. If you are near London and interested in architecture, I can really not recommend this exhibition enough. And I am pretty sure that even if you don't give a rat's bum about architecture, but love to be inspired and to explore, you'd like it, too.

After all the art and a stop-over in Anthropology, we went somewhere secret: a tea room hidden above a Soho pub. You tell the pub staff that you're there for tea, and they will phone up and then invite you to step behind the bar to ascend a flight of stairs into a room that looks like you've made a trip back in time to 1940s London. Vintage jazz was playing, and we were served our tea on mismatched china at small tables with fresh flowers on them. I liked!

After tea, I proceeded to drag poor Christina all over Chinatown to track down ingredients for some Vietnamese cooking I have planned. She was a good sport about it and helped me hold baskets, look through bags of dried mushrooms and even lined up in one of the long check-out queues while I was still searching for an elusive oil. Thanks, Friend!

I enjoyed my London day. I can say I will probably not go straight away and do something again next Monday, but being out in town during the day and not having to hurry anywhere has reminded me that I once used to love this city and all it has to offer very much, and that I should try and keep that love alive.

Thursday, 18 July 2013

Anton's Pasta Bar

After our spontaneous trip to the Sunshine Coast, we had a spontaneous dinner at Anton's Pasta Bar. It's a family-run Italian restaurant with good pasta served in GENEROUS portions. You hardly see somebody leaving the place without a doggy bag.

You can park at the rear of the restaurant and enter through back door, which feels kinda cool, like knowing a secret passage.

We were a bit early for dinner and were seated straight away. At peak times, you can usually be sure to wait in a line-up for a while before you can sit down and eat.

I was very hungry, so I had my bread roll with whipped butter, even though I knew that the linguine with meatballs that I ordered were going to be plentiful. I wasn't overly thirsty, but hey, Long Island Ice Tea was on special offer!

Here's my linguine when it was served. You can't really tell from the photo, but this was a heap of pasta the size of a pillow, with meatballs as big as my fist. And not only was this a lot of food, it was also one of the best meatball pastas I have had. And I do gauge the quality of Italian restaurants on their polpette! Marco ordered stuffed pasta in a meat sauce, which was very good as well.

I did my best to conquer pasta mountain, but this is where I called defeat. I couldn't even finish half of my dish.

When the plates are cleared, the waiting staff do not even asked if you want to take the rest of your meal with you. It's just a given that they come back with the leftovers in a container for you to have later.

I really do not know how the Tiramisu happened. It wasn't my idea, and it's saying something if I'm willing to forego dessert. Marco, however, wanted to try it and actually managed to finish the whole big piece. I had a taste and it was gorgeous. It's definitely home-made and was spongy, creamy, chocolatey goodness.

I really needed the coffee, though, to start of the digestive process. Our bill came to around $50.00, including our drinks, one dessert and a coffee. Now, at $16.50, you might think that the mains are a bit pricey, but bear in mind that you will probably get 3 meals out of one dish and have enough food for next day's lunch and a light dinner!

If you do manage to eat all your pasta then and there in the restaurant, you do get a commemorative pen. I would have very much loved one, but I do not think that without appropriate training and tummy-stretching exercises, I could ever achieve a clean plate. I would, however, recommend Anton's to anybody who likes solid, tasty Italian cooking.

Saturday, 13 July 2013

Vancouver, my Love.

When we do visit Marco's family, we usually do not get much time to hang around downtown Vancouver. This time, I asked if we could be tourists for a few days and get to know the city a bit more. I think we both discovered new sides to the place, me because it was all new to me anyway, and Marco because so much has changed since he permanently lived in Canada.

I had bookmarked quite a few foodie places that I wanted to check out, and so we had a few culinary outings. The most important thing when we touch down and get of the plane is always how quickly we can make it to a Tim Horton's to have a proper doughnut with a coffee. Whenever Marco is asked what the national dish of Canada is, he replies that he thinks it's Timmy's doughnuts, so this is definitely an essential part of each Vancouver visit! We also went for some more upmarket doughnuts at Cartem's, who stock flavours like Earl Grey and Maple Bacon.

I also absolutely wanted to go to Beta 5, an artisan chocolate shop behind an unassuming door in an industrial district. Once you enter through that door, you are enveloped in gorgeous chocolate fumes, and can make a selection from their truffles, bars and chocolate covered fruit. They also sell desserts in jam jars, and the Red Velvet Cheesecake I picked was almost better than the 6 beautiful pieces of chocolate I bought.

This is not actually Vancouver, but White Rock, on the US-Canadian border. It's more or less considers a suburb though, and it's a lovely little seaside town, with a wide beach and a few restaurants. The ocean views from one of those houses on the hillside must be amazing!

Another great place to visit downtown was the huge second hand book shop, MacLeod's. This is a book lovers paradise, with shelves full to the brim and piles of all imaginable kinds of books stacked all around. To be honest, if I worked there I'd live in constant fear of being buried under a literary avalanche, but hey: what a way to go! I bought an old hardback edition of Hemingway's Farewell To Arms there.

We had our customary sushi pig-out, and ate lunch at Save On Meats, a butchery-cum-diner which sits right on the edge of Vancouver's roughest area, so you will see drug users and homeless people. The story that always comes up when I mention this place is how Marco's mum used to place little him on the counter when she went to buy meat there in the days when his parents still lived downtown. Marco only remembers that there were a few characters around that he found scary. Save On Meats do their bit for the community by offering tokens to give to the disadvantaged neighbours, which they can then exchange for a meal.

If you are into cycling, you would like Musette Caffé, which I had read about and took Marco to as a surprise. The owners are absolute cycling nuts, and use their cafe to display racing memorabilia and as a hub for local cyclists to park their bikes, organize rides, buy gear and fuel up.