the things we ate...

You know how I waffled on for days about the things we ate in New York? Now, it's not like there's nowhere good in London, only we don't go there very often since I moved away and had kind of forgotten how great it can be. We went there on an indulgent shopping trip yesterday and discovered a few things that I'd never gotten round to doing whilst there, or had not come across in my limited explorations. It's a common affliction of the London-dweller - this blindness that keeps you going to the places that are most familiar, whilst making you forget to go out and have a good rummage somewhere else.


Now, I'd been down Brick Lane and environs before, but never on the best day - Sunday. Luck had it that just as lunchtime arrived, we passed by the legendary Beigel Bake at the top of Brick Lane, where they serve the most incredible salt beef in sweet home-made bagels with a slick of mustard for added punch. I swear I nearly died, it was so good. (Image from londontown.com)

Onwards down Brick Lane, we stopped to look at shops, we spent money down Cheshire Street, but as we drew towards the Sunday UpMarket at the Old Truman Brewery, we were ambushed by the smells of cooking. Inside the market there were dozens of stalls selling wonderful-looking food - mostly not the trashy, sweet-and-sour stuff that is pervasive in such markets, but instead lots of home-style, honest food cooked by people with an obvious passion for their cuisine. There were (praise the lord!) bánh mì, dumplings, Moroccan, Sri Lankan, you name it. The choice was so huge I nearly wept with excitement. Yeah, that's how sad I am. No photos, I'm afraid - I never remember to bring the camera with me.

So of course we had to have a second lunch. What did we go for? A vegetarian 'three-sauces wrap' from the Ethiopian stall. I don't quite know what was in it - green lentils, some familiar curry-like flavours, plenty of heat, a great cabbage salad, a pillowy, thin pancake... it was spectacular, like oh-my-god-why-can't-we-eat-this-all-the-time? We couldn't SPEAK, it was so bloody good.

We proceeded, via a juice bar, into central London for shopping. And when that was over, we headed over to a Chinese supermarket in Chinatown where I bought salt-laden, MSG-pumped instant noodles that are my secret indulgence, and buns to steam for breakfast. Then I led the husband into a tea shop where I had iced Hong-Kong style coffee with tea which is much like Hong Kong milk tea, but with coffee in it too. Had we not been heading straight for dinner afterwards, I definitely would have had tapioca 'bubbles' in it for fun. I used to love the milk tea when I first tasted it as a seven-year-old in HK - it's probably a bit sweet for my taste these days, but it was an amazingly nostalgic experience yesterday and quite a treat.

And could we fit in dinner after all that? Of course we could! At Busaba on Wardour Street, where the food is to die for, especially the violently garlicky goong tohd prawns. Needless to say I'd eaten too much by the time we went to bed and spent the night having weird itchy episodes intermingled with peculiar dreams about pink, man-eating cockatoos and a bear that ate my finger. No, I'm not lying about the dreams - that's what a surfeit of sugar and shellfish can do to you!