Padella, 19th September

I’ve been itching to get to Padella. I never used to be a huge pasta fan, but ever since having some silky smooth and buttery pasta at Vasco and Piero, I have been searching for other Italian places to give me the same experience (preferably for less money).

Padella is the fast-serve pasta place from the guys behind Trullo. It’s small and trendy, and doesn’t take bookings so queuing is the name of the game. Unless you can get there early. At 6 pm on a Monday we could have waltzed in except for the fact that one of our number was late and they only seat complete parties. As the clock ticked by to 6:30 we were getting antsy – we had an Escape Game to get to at 7:30 and were running out of time to eat! We were considering suddenly saying we were only a four after all but the girl seating people took pity on us and let us have a table as long as we ordered for our friend while we waited. Luckily, just as we sat down, she turned up. 

The good thing about this place is that pasta is a quick dish to make and even the one which required a bit of  a wait (mine) was only 15 minutes or so. We were in and out in half an hour! Which might be slightly annoying if you had queued for over an hour in the first place but really suited us.

The butternut squash and sage butter ravioli I think spoke to most of us, with all of us considering it at some point. That was partly why I ended up choosing the cacio e pepe so that we didn’t all have the same thing. Plus cheese and pepper are two of my favuorite things. The Late One had slow cooked tomato sauce and my friend Amy tried crab for the first time, in linguine.

We had some beautiful bread with olive oil and creamy, squidgy burrata drizzled with even more olive oil and a plate of the spinach, anchovy and chilli to entertain us during the short wait.

When our plates arrived, I cannot pretend I did not have food envy. My plate seemed like a very small portion of ugly worms. Pici is a pasta I hadn’t had before and is, apparently a thicker, tube like form. Looked gross. But tasted very nice. Just cheese and pepper could have been a bit claggy and overly stodgy but it wasn’t at all. Each, chewy piece of pasta was nicely coated but there was no excess. I do wish the portion had been maybe a quarter to a third bigger though.

I had a taste of the tomato dish – as tomatoey as you could wish, and also a bit of the ravioli which instantly filled my mouth with the saginess of the butter. Lovely.

I feel like Padella is more of a lunch place, although if you wanted you could make more of a meal of it by ordering pretty much all of the pastas on the menu and treating it a bit like tapas. And look! Pasta is an anagram of Tapas. Can’t be a coincidence…

Arabica Bar and Kitchen, 31st July

Honey & Co – done. Palomar – done. Arabica also had to be done. So I made a reservation for one Friday night to cross it off the list.

It wasn’t quite what I was expecting. Knowing it was borne out of a food truck I expected a more intimate setting but this is definitely a fully fledged restaurant. Though our slightly clumsy waitress gave it the less polished feel I had anticipated!

Choosing what to eat was a task as pretty much everything made my mouth water. But they had a few interesting-sounding dishes that particularly stood out. To start we had a couple of dips and bread. We ordered the whipped feta with Turkish chillies, toasted pumpkin seens and mit, and the hummus with lamb which also came with pine nuts, hook and son ghee.

The whipped feta was as light as a cloud. I now believe all feta should be flaggelated in such a way to be scooped up and spread on bread. There was far too much of both dips for the bread we were given but we kept them on the table and used them to accompany our mains so that we made sure to eat up every last drop.

For mains, we had chicken and pistachio shish, which we were warned literally came as is, so also had some Turkish style tomato bulgar wheat pilaf to go with it, and we also got some crispy lamb belly, some chicken wings and a fattoush salad. 

The pilaf was the best rice style dish I have eaten and that is not something I would normally get excited about. The salad was as unhealthy as a salad can get, with great slabs of fried crouton in it. I don't normally feel overwhelmed by salad but this was a lot to handle.

The lamb belly is a dish you shouldn't bother trying to share - deliciously crispy and well spiced with the fat all flavoursome and moreish. 

Chicken wings, while I remember enjoying them, were rather in the shadow of the lamb and I'd probably go for something else instead another time. 

Likewise, the chicken shish was a tasty version - coming with cardamom, honey and green chilli, but could have been a bit spicier, and well, another shish for your dollar (they were £10) wouldn't have gone amiss!

I blame the salad for filling me up too much to try dessert, although there was nothing which shouted out to me to try it despite my fullness. I certainly enjoyed my meal here and would happily return though out of the three places mentioned at the start, it was probably the one I least fell in love with. 

Best LDN Walks, 5th March

Best LDN Walks was brought to my attention via Twitter – someone I know had been on one of their walks where they find all the seven noses of Soho and me and Charlotte, the girl who runs it, got chatting and lo and behold, we organized for my meetup group to go along to one of her walks. She has about 11 different routes, but the ones that stood out as most appropriate for my group were the Sex, Drugs and Sausage Rolls and Haunted Pubs tour. I went with the sex.

We met at London Bridge where the scene was set – North London in days gone by was the posh bit, and South London was where things got interesting – where the drinking and the partying and the fornicating happened. Then we wended our way through Southwark and Borough, with Charlotte telling us the more salubrious history of the places through which we travelled. I have been on a few tours in my time (Duck Tour, Ghost Bus Tour) not to mention being generally interested in London’s history and landmarks so expected that I would know a good chunk of what we covered already. And yes there was quite a lot that I had either visited already myself, or had heard of, but there was more than enough that I hadn’t to make it worth my while. Charlotte seems to be a sponge, continually researching and discovering the hidden histories of London. For example, we stopped off for a drink about halfway through at a lovely pub and she got us all ‘singing’ a Tudor drinking song she’d only just unearthed. We didn’t know the tune but we muddled along anyway.

We heard all about the wicked Bishop of Winchester and his poor Geese (prostitutes), and visited the famous Crossbones Graveyard where they were buried. We went through Borough Market and learned the origins of many a phrase such as ‘umble pie, being dirt poor and pulling your leg (that one particularly gruesome – it comes from when young urchins would be employed to ensure that someone just hanged was actually dead and not faking – by pulling on their leg). We passed the site of the original Globe and paused for thought by the wonderfully gruesome Clink and its ‘mascot’ hanging outside (the inside of the Clink is definitely worth a visit). There was a healthy dose of death as well as the fun stuff – we had started off being shown an old map of London which clearly marked all the decapitated heads put up on London Bridge as warnings.

Fittingly, for such a tour, we ended up near a lovely pub into which we all bundled for a nightcap. I know I speak for the whole group when I say Charlotte was a welcoming and entertaining hostess and we all had a brilliant time exploring the seedy side of London yore. 

Bang Said the Gun, 27th September

Bang Said the Gun prides itself on being the noisiest poetry night in London, even garnering complaints from the locals on occasion. To be honest, most of this volume is created by the audience who are encouraged to take up the makeshift maracas (milk bottles with rice in) and shake them at every opportunity. The poetry itself is spoken at a fairly normal decibel.

The night is held upstairs at The Roebuck pub in Borough (which is a lovely pub and serves some excellent chips. It’s also great value for money – a large wine was only £4.80!). The room is quite small and it does get busy so getting there early is advisable.

And it gets busy for a reason. There wasn’t a single bad act, though some of them stood out more than others.

After our compere for the evening had stopped skipping around the stage to the music, shaking his ‘maraca’ all the while, and occasionally banging on the bar in case rattling wasn’t loud enough, he introduced himself and the night began. It has been going for 15 years or so I believe he said, and was set up because they wanted an antidote to all the ‘beard-strokey’ serious poetry happening at the time. Instead, this is supposed to be more light-hearted . . . more raucous, and they achieve this by playing loud music and having some silly interludes, such as playing ‘keepy up’ with a balloon for a prize. The first act introduced rather emphasised how this night contrasts to others.

Fresh back from the Edinburgh festival, he was definitely one of my favourites of the night. Not strictly spoken word, but part comedy act, his ode to yellow was completely off the wall and silly and not to everyone’s taste, but right up my street. I’d urge you to seek him out and see if he appeals to you. Unfortunately I cannot remember his name. But I can remember some of his shopping mantra ("take a lemon from the shelf, take a lemon for yourself") so if anyone recognises that, please let me know who is responsible for it.

The final speaker of the first half was also excellent. A lot of spoken word artists speak about things that they strongly believe in; it is not unusual for the poems to have a political leaning (always liberal, I do wonder what would happen if a right-wing poet ever found their way to the stage). But, even though I am sure they believe what they are writing, sometimes it is hard to believe that they really know what they’re talking about. Not the case with Joelle Taylor, who works closely with young people from all walks of life via Slambassadors, using poetry as a way for them to deal with or escape from their sometimes tough situations. Her poetry was powerful and touching, clearly inspired from experience (she said as much but you could tell from the way she delivered it that this was true). In fact, she was so overcome with emotion from her words that she couldn’t finish the poem. She was completely forgiven this by the audience who were all touched by the message.

After the break, the person who won Raw Meat Stew last week took the stage. Raw Meat Stew is the open-mic part at the end of the night where you win a slot in next week’s gig. He’d only been doing spoken word for a few months and his novice status was evident, but having said that he had good stage presence and I think his poetry showed promise, there were a few clever turns of phrase, even if it was a little rough around the edges. And long.

My overall number 1 act of the night was Musa Okwonga who brought a huge amount of energy to his poems, commanding the room so much that he didn’t even need to use a microphone. His first poem on the fast pace of this world was delivered with breathless velocity, his poem on the father he never really knew was moving, and his words on the tremendous effort it takes to just do the adult thing and tidy your room (a metaphor for dealing with life as an adult in general) was spot on. I will make the effort to see what else he does. I’m already following him on twitter. Proof of my admiration.

And almost last was Raw Meat Stew. Even the people who did this were pretty good (though not as good as the ‘pros’) and had a charm to them. The guy who won was a bit of a regular at Bang apparently, often participating in the Stew. He won over Joelle, who was judging, and the rest of the audience, with his poem about Shelley Long from Cheers. Clearly we’re all suckers for a bit of audience participation – having to shout “Cheers” whenever he signalled clinched it for us despite his halting deliver (well, English wasn’t his mother tongue).

I was incredibly impressed with the standard of this night. I’ve been to a few spoken word events in my time and this was a head above the rest. Even if it didn’t have all the silly noise and jingles (yes, Raw Meat and the balloon game come with visuals and a song) this would be a night deserving of becoming a regular feature in my repertoire. Bang Said the Gun was kick-ass.