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. 

Kappacasein, 18th April

Kappacasein may be the original grilled cheese street food trader, touting his wares in Borough Market for 15 years now but I’m afraid the new kids on the block are showing him how it’s really done.

I didn’t think my toastie was that great, but this I am willing to put this down to them being victimes of their own success. There is so much demand, this little food stall is like a factory producing them via a conveyor belt, rather than each one lovingly made to order. Your order is taken in the queue, they have two people grilling and one person shoveling the cheese between slices. They’re trying to serve as many people as possible as quickly as possible and it’s not surprising if quality suffers a little. In my case I felt there wasn’t enough cheese and it was too overdone. I still liked it, but I wouldn’t bother with them again when there are much better offerings out there.

After this I thought I'd better burn off the cheese and went for a marathon of a walk across London. I wanted to see the Tweed Run. I was just a bit too late to catch their pit stop in Red Lion Gardens but I managed to catch up with them at Hyde Park corner. Quite the spectacle to see all these men, women and children all spiffing in their tweed, and sometimes with penny farthing bikes to boot!

From here I hopped on a bus to Shepherd's Bush and from there continued my walk. I wanted dessert after my grilled cheese and I had a destination in mind - WA, the new Japanese bakery. I knew I would probably get there too late in the day to sample their specialities, and so it proved. No curry doughnut for me. But I did get a mont blanc and a pear tart. I didn't know what a mont blanc consisted of when I got it and I still couldn't tell you afterwards but it was a buttery, sweet little pastry of deliciousness and so was the tart. Too much of a schlep for me to visit again but if you are local to it, I would absolutely check them out.

Bread Ahead Doughnuts, 26th April

I'm really enjoying this new doughnut craze happening in London. Doughnut-only vendors are popping up all over the place, and also restaurants and bakeries are bringing them into their repertoire.

So far, my favourites have been Rinkoff with their version of the cronut and Glazed and Confused's ring doughnuts, where I explain that a ring doughnut is my personal preference. But I'm open to any good 'nut and as we found ourselves on the Southbank last Saturday, I thought a stroll up to Borough Market to try the wares of Bread Ahead was an eminently sensible thing to do.

It took a little while to find them among the throbbing crowd so thick it was sometimes impenetrable, but with some persistence, there they were. Bread Ahead is the partnering of the founder of Flour Power Bakery (pretty much ubiquitous at every market for a while) and an ex-baker from St John's Bakery, already famed for their doughnuts, which are pretty good.

When we got there, there was but one of their renowned salted caramel and honeycombs, plus a few rhubarbs and some vanilla (I think). We had one rhubarb and snapped up the last salted caramel one, actually managing to wait until we'd got all the way home before tucking in.

I think, for both of us, the rhubarb was the surprise winner. It was the perfect blend of tartness and sweetness and a hint of orange gave it a nice citrus freshness. I also loved the salted caramel custard with chewy bit of honeycomb protruding but Stephen didn't like that it wasn't quite custard, wasn't quite salted caramel, whereas I appreciated the airy lightness of the filling and that it wasn't too sweet. These could almost persuade me that filled doughnuts are the way to go.

Weirdly enough, my only complaint is that they are too stuffed with filling. I'd actually like a little more doughnut with my jam or custard - there was so much they were tricky to eat; you almost had to spoon some out before getting a hold of the doughnut and eating the rest.

What kind of complaint is that? Well, a pretty weak one by all accounts. Will overfilling stop me from going back? Hells no. I can't wait to have another one!

Maltby Street Market, 21st July

I think Maltby Street Market might be my new favourite market. This little market is located just over Tower Bridge in Bermondsey and is only open on Saturdays between 9 am and 2 pm. What had motivated me to finally get down there was Time Out's description of St. John's custard doughnuts which they advised go quickly. My friend at work had also sung the market's praises. I intended to get down there at about 10 in order not to miss anything but well, it's a Saturday so that was always going to be ambitious. 

I did manage to get there before 11 though and at first I was rather underwhelmed. There's not much to it. But then I thought, well, how much do you need? Probably two cheese places, tops - a couple of places that do meat, a bakery, and a few options of food to eat on the go. Maltby Street Market provides all this with the added bonus that the hordes that crowd Borough Market just a stone's throw away still haven't discovered it. I was really surprised that there were so few people here. What it does mean (I felt) was that, unlike Borough where you can practically go there for lunch and have your fill by grazing on all the free offerings, here I felt I could really only try if I was serious about buying. 

The market isn't a traditional market of makeshift stalls - a lot of the vendors have permanent pitches within the railway arches. If you're a foodie then there are a few familiar names - Monty's Deli, Speckmobile and Sorbitum. And also Bea's of Bloomsbury's and St John's bakery have arches on the other side of the tracks on Druid St as opposed to Maltby Street proper. But it all counts as the same place. There was an amazing looking bakery with both sweet and savoury stuff but I didn't see what it's name was, and had already bought my delights from St John's so couldn't allow myself something from there as well. If anyone knows it, please feel free to leave a comment letting me know. And there were a few unfamiliar names to me - somewhere doing Latin American type food (mental note made to go back to try their cheese bread), a Turkish place serving coffee in little copper pots lovely enough to make me wish I drank coffee and a sweet-looking little gin bar, but it was a little early in the day to try them out. There were also a couple of grocery stalls, one boasting it supplies top London restaurants. But I wasn't there for healthy stuff.


So I went round to St John's and bought myself a custard doughnut. I also succumbed to the lovely looking mini Eccles cakes and bought one of them as well. I must confess I had no idea what an Eccles cake was although I did suspect it would have raisins in it as all English 'buns' and 'cakes' seem to have fruit in them. Sadly, this was the case, but happily, they were just one big ball of them so I just picked off the incredibly delicious pastry around them. 

The custard doughnut was also pretty good, although I don't know if it's worthy of a Time Out 100 Best Dishes. I needn't have worried about them selling out - there was practically a full tray of them. The custard was admittedly fabulous - so light and with just the right hint of vanilla. But the doughnut pastry I found only so-so. 

As you walk into Maltby Street market there's a garage dedicated to Porsche's and round the corner there is an antiques store. And as you go in, there seems to be a stall also selling antiquey bric-a-brac. I saw this:

Anyone think it's genuine?