All posts tagged: review

Vapiano, Soho

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Where Vapiano, Soho What The third Vapiano site in London follows the same concept – homemade pasta, pizza and salad dishes cooked fresh in front of guests. Each dish is ordered using a smart card system, which is tapped onto the till every time you order, meaning an easy and efficient paying system as you leave the restaurant. The experience I bet you think I’m going to talk about a big, juicy pizza here, don’t you? Well, guess again folks; I managed to restrain myself from ordering a pizza and instead opted for a pasta dish and a salad. We arrived on a Thursday evening at 6.30pm and grabbed a seat on one of the tall communal tables straight away. The friendly host asked if we were familiar with the Vapiano system and provided us with our payment cards. For those who aren’t familiar with the system, you order what you want to eat from one of the three stations – pizza, salad, or pasta, and touch your card on the reader. When you are …

Pizza Union – Super Fast 12″ Pizza

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Where Pizza Union, Spitalfields What The UK’s first Italian all-day Pizza Bar. Thin and crispy artisan pizzas, inspired by the thin and crispy pizzas found in Rome, baked in three minutes in a traditional stone pizza oven. Pizzas are ordered straight from the counter, while a host of long, bar-style communal tables help create a buzzy, informal dining atmosphere to fit with the Pizza Bar’s contemporary industrial look. The experience I have a problem. I can’t stop eating pizza. I ate a total of six pizzas last week – SIX!!! Why is that a problem, I hear you say. Well it’s not the fact that I’m not getting the nutrients I need from fruit and veg and my waistline is expanding at a rate of knots just in time for my holiday in Ibiza, it is that I just can’t seem to stop. I’m always up for finding new pizza establishments and quite frequently travel around the capital to find the best. I tried Pizza Union a couple of months ago and although this is a …

Emozioni – Italian Style and Substance

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A few weeks back I received a delivery of Emozioni products at work. I knew what was inside but as I pulled the boxes out of the package, I asked my colleagues to guess what was inside. They had their suspicions that it was a trick question but nearly all of them guessed that I would be pulling fancy cosmetics out of the boxes. Even when the bottle of truffle oil was produced, they still didn’t guess that it was edible. I was intrigued by the products; mainly because I have always associated good quality Italian products with classic packaging and the most delicious Italian food I have eaten has always been traditional. Emozioni, however, well and truly bucks the trend with a range of luxury Italian food products with contemporary and distinctive packaging. After seeing the beautiful packaging in the flesh, I was left asking whether it was a case of style over substance. So off I went to try them out. I tried paccheri pasta (£5.90), porchini dried mushrooms (£16.50 for 30g) and …

Karpo, King’s Cross

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When I first moved to London nearly 9 years ago, the only reason I would go to King’s Cross was to catch the train home. It wasn’t exactly a desirable area, but in the last few years the area has undergone a serious transformation and has become a destination, particularly for food. Caravan and Grain Store sit next to the canal in the beautiful new Central St Martin’s campus and the likes of Honest Burgers has opened just around the corner. Another new addition to the area is Karpo, an independent, modern neighbourhood brassiere, which is part of the 4* Hotel Megaro situated right opposite King’s Cross station. I had heard about Karpo, mainly because of the bright mural on the wall of the hotel and I remembered a range of pictures of the interior that really caught my eye. I am always wary of restaurants that have the brasserie label as I have sampled some truly terrible food at ‘brasseries’, but what I have found over the last few years is that it’s always …

Mother’s Day Treat – Afternoon Tea at Milliennium Hotel, Mayfair

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I have eaten my fair share of Afternoon Tea’s over the last few years; some of them incredible and others totally forgettable. It baffles me how some establishments feel that they can serve below average food and charge extortionate amounts for what is essentially just a few slices of bread with minimal filling and unappetising cakes. Not all of them are tarred with that brush though and one that I attended recently has shot to the top of my list. It was Mothering Sunday and me and my mum, who had come down to London to visit from Nottingham, joined me and a number of other bloggers and their mums for a luxurious afternoon tea at The Millennium Hotel in Mayfair. After wrestling with what felt like the whole world on the walk from Oxford Street tube, we turned left and ventured our way down into Mayfair. The streets became wider, less busy, the cars more expensive and the atmosphere far more relaxed. To my knowledge, my mum hadn’t visited Mayfair before so I strolled …