It was not going to win a first place in a beauty contest!
I thought observing the not-so-round and primitive Capricciosa pizza the waiter had just served me after not much of a wait together with my girlfriend’s Tagliatelle della Casa.
The La Luna restaurant has a cosy feeling that you won’t expect from outside, sandwiched as it is between some run-down shops in a quite unpolished building down Walworth Road. It has no more than a dozen of tables, all set on one level with an oven and a preparation area positioned in the middle of the floor. The atmosphere is definitely Italian without the cliché Venice gondoliers or opera singers pictured on the walls. In the background contemporary Italian songs were playing and the flat screen TV on the far off wall had the sound off.
The menu is of a manageable size and includes pizzas, salads, meat courses, pasta and only one kind of beer (Italian) and a handful of red and white wines.
The pizza was surprisingly good despite my first impression. However, there was some work to do on the base, and the peppers and ham had been cut too large and thick: they looked like they had landed on the pizza instead of being part of it. My girlfriend’s tagliatelle was al dente, the prawns were fresh and the sauce tasty.
The homemade Tiramisu was to be the best part of the meal: it had the right mix of mascarpone cheese, ladyfingers and coffee. It could have competed with my mother’s one.
The bill was reasonable and while sipping my espresso I realized that probably this is the way pizzerias ought to be: family-run with an informal but warm and unpretentious service and a pizza that doesn’t care to look pretty or not.
La Luna restaurant, 380 Walworth Road, London SE17 2NG
Tuesday, 29 May 2007
"Fantastic" Georgian restaurant London EC1
This Georgian restaurant opened just a couple of weeks ago and it shows it. More than a restaurant in fact it looks like an office space made up for employees’ party with last-minute tables, a couple of pictures on the walls and a Coke vendor machine at the far end of the room.
As we entered the restaurant there wasn’t much of a greeting. The guy and the girl in charge of the restaurant just pointed the finger to any available table without any bother to accommodate us. The waitress coming to take the orders wasn’t friendly at all. She barely smiled and looked at us as if we were a kind of a nuisance.
The menu was manageable and there were no alcoholic drinks (they don’t have the licence yet) so we opted for a bottle of water instead. For starters we ordered soup (kharcho) and bread (lavash) for my girlfriend and bread with cheese (khachapuri) for me. Two different lamb dishes were our choices for main course: khachapuli and mtsvadi.
The water didn’t arrive for an awful long time and when it finally appeared it was nothing more than a plastic bottle of water of 50cl. Apparently they didn’t have any bigger sizes.
Another fifteen minutes or so later a round yellow bowl with meat floating in basil sauce appeared alongside rice and bread. The waitress served the dishes without a word or, God forbid, a hint of a smile. I mistakenly thought that was some kind of a Georgian snack due to the size of the meat in the bowl (not much) and also because I was still expecting the starters and that did not looked to me like any of the dishes we had ordered.
Shortly afterwards kharcho and lavash arrived but what about my cheese and bread starter? The food was eatable but not “fantastic”, as bland as the non-existing décor around and the still-life expression of the staff. The girl was visibly struggling to cope with the orders and the guy, probably the owner, was sitting at the table with some friends of his where the wine was generously flowing, even if the restaurant didn’t served alcoholic drinks. I guessed they had purchased the bottles at a nearby off-licence.
The waiting after the first set of dishes was so unbearable that we lost track of time. It was already an hour after we had entered the restaurant and we still had one starter and two main courses to go, or so we thought. We decided to cut short the suffering and asked the waitress if we could forget about the main courses when she explained that the yellow bowl I had eaten was in fact my main course and that she had no record of my starter…My girlfriend’s mtsvadi arrived shortly after but I couldn’t care less. The waitress positioned the dish on the table between me and my girlfriend, gracelessly, as if she was handling an ashtray. The dish looked basic or maybe it was just my impression but I had been in that pseudo-restaurant for much more than an hour and everything by then looked numb to me.
The bill was in rhyme with the rest of the experience. Even half of it wouldn’t have been worth it. £32.50 will buy you a better meal with a decent service in many restaurants in London with a wait of less than half of what we had to endure at the so-called Fantastic restaurant.
It has just been open for a couple of weeks but I will not be there to check the improvements, that’s for sure.
Fantastic restaurant, 65 Farringdon road, London EC1M 3JB (Georgian cuisine)
As we entered the restaurant there wasn’t much of a greeting. The guy and the girl in charge of the restaurant just pointed the finger to any available table without any bother to accommodate us. The waitress coming to take the orders wasn’t friendly at all. She barely smiled and looked at us as if we were a kind of a nuisance.
The menu was manageable and there were no alcoholic drinks (they don’t have the licence yet) so we opted for a bottle of water instead. For starters we ordered soup (kharcho) and bread (lavash) for my girlfriend and bread with cheese (khachapuri) for me. Two different lamb dishes were our choices for main course: khachapuli and mtsvadi.
The water didn’t arrive for an awful long time and when it finally appeared it was nothing more than a plastic bottle of water of 50cl. Apparently they didn’t have any bigger sizes.
Another fifteen minutes or so later a round yellow bowl with meat floating in basil sauce appeared alongside rice and bread. The waitress served the dishes without a word or, God forbid, a hint of a smile. I mistakenly thought that was some kind of a Georgian snack due to the size of the meat in the bowl (not much) and also because I was still expecting the starters and that did not looked to me like any of the dishes we had ordered.
Shortly afterwards kharcho and lavash arrived but what about my cheese and bread starter? The food was eatable but not “fantastic”, as bland as the non-existing décor around and the still-life expression of the staff. The girl was visibly struggling to cope with the orders and the guy, probably the owner, was sitting at the table with some friends of his where the wine was generously flowing, even if the restaurant didn’t served alcoholic drinks. I guessed they had purchased the bottles at a nearby off-licence.
The waiting after the first set of dishes was so unbearable that we lost track of time. It was already an hour after we had entered the restaurant and we still had one starter and two main courses to go, or so we thought. We decided to cut short the suffering and asked the waitress if we could forget about the main courses when she explained that the yellow bowl I had eaten was in fact my main course and that she had no record of my starter…My girlfriend’s mtsvadi arrived shortly after but I couldn’t care less. The waitress positioned the dish on the table between me and my girlfriend, gracelessly, as if she was handling an ashtray. The dish looked basic or maybe it was just my impression but I had been in that pseudo-restaurant for much more than an hour and everything by then looked numb to me.
The bill was in rhyme with the rest of the experience. Even half of it wouldn’t have been worth it. £32.50 will buy you a better meal with a decent service in many restaurants in London with a wait of less than half of what we had to endure at the so-called Fantastic restaurant.
It has just been open for a couple of weeks but I will not be there to check the improvements, that’s for sure.
Fantastic restaurant, 65 Farringdon road, London EC1M 3JB (Georgian cuisine)
Sunday, 27 May 2007
Review of the Apex International hotel, Edinburgh
The hotel bathtub duck couldn’t float. The head was too big and heavy to balance the rest of the body. Shame because it was very cute but this in a way reflected my experience of the hotel as a whole, starting from the bathroom itself, where I was enjoying a well deserved bath after a long coach journey from London.
The bathroom had a separate shower and bathtub, however the style was very bland: the wall was in fact covered in white tiles, which made the room look more like a hospital than a four star hotel. There was no moveable showerhead in the bath, which meant I had to move to the opposite shower to get rid of the soap on my body. On the plus side, the bathtub was quite deep and comfortable.
Adjacent to the bathtub a huge square mirror was covering most of the wall but there wasn’t much room for toiletries, a couple of little shelves would have done the job. The shower was up to a standard, apart from the glass door that could had been cleaned a bit more in depth.
The bedroom itself was of a reasonable size with a desk, a table and few chairs. There was a mini-bar but no alcoholic drinks in it, just water. The room was a Standard however a DVD player was present along with the flat-screen TV without any foreign channels.
The bedroom had three main faults I could not fail to notice: a stain on the blanket, two unstable boards of the wooden floors that would rise up every time I walked over them, and lastly the noise from the street getting through the closed doors facing the little terrace overlooking the Edinburgh castle.
The Apex International hotel has two restaurants, one on the ground floor and another one, the Heights, on the 5th floor, overlooking the castle. The food at the Heights is refined and well cooked, Scottish cuisine at its best, and it can claim a AA Rosettes certificate. Although the food was good I wasn’t impressed by the restaurant’s atmosphere. The room was a square box with no much decoration or colours, used daily for breakfast, and this in my opinion spoils the restaurant’s appeal to the hotel guests.
The hotel facilities include a gym, a sauna and a rather small swimming pool where an Apex toy duck, much bigger than the one I had in my room, was floating.
The bathroom had a separate shower and bathtub, however the style was very bland: the wall was in fact covered in white tiles, which made the room look more like a hospital than a four star hotel. There was no moveable showerhead in the bath, which meant I had to move to the opposite shower to get rid of the soap on my body. On the plus side, the bathtub was quite deep and comfortable.
Adjacent to the bathtub a huge square mirror was covering most of the wall but there wasn’t much room for toiletries, a couple of little shelves would have done the job. The shower was up to a standard, apart from the glass door that could had been cleaned a bit more in depth.
The bedroom itself was of a reasonable size with a desk, a table and few chairs. There was a mini-bar but no alcoholic drinks in it, just water. The room was a Standard however a DVD player was present along with the flat-screen TV without any foreign channels.
The bedroom had three main faults I could not fail to notice: a stain on the blanket, two unstable boards of the wooden floors that would rise up every time I walked over them, and lastly the noise from the street getting through the closed doors facing the little terrace overlooking the Edinburgh castle.
The Apex International hotel has two restaurants, one on the ground floor and another one, the Heights, on the 5th floor, overlooking the castle. The food at the Heights is refined and well cooked, Scottish cuisine at its best, and it can claim a AA Rosettes certificate. Although the food was good I wasn’t impressed by the restaurant’s atmosphere. The room was a square box with no much decoration or colours, used daily for breakfast, and this in my opinion spoils the restaurant’s appeal to the hotel guests.
The hotel facilities include a gym, a sauna and a rather small swimming pool where an Apex toy duck, much bigger than the one I had in my room, was floating.
Review of the “City of the Dead tour” of Edinburgh
The last tour of the evening was scheduled for 10:45 p.m.
“Good” I thought, “so the tour will terminate at midnight, the perfect time to be in a hunted graveyard!” My girlfriend wasn’t looking forward to the experience at all but decided to come along for the only reason that she was more scared to spend part of the evening in the hotel room by herself.
At the rendezvous outside Saint Giles Cathedral there was a group of approximately twenty people. The tour guide, a young Scottish girl, was addressing the crowd about the seriousness and dangers of the tour: people apparently get bruises from the ghosts and suffer panic attacks, start crying and wish they have had spent the night anywhere but there. “You are still in time to change your mind and decide not to come to the graveyard” she said and my girlfriend would have agreed, she was already holding me as tight as she could and the tour had not even started!
We walked behind the Cathedral to the main square where the guide explained to us the tortures that were going on during medieval witch-hunting times and she was very theatrical and persuasive in describing the pain inflicted to the unfortunate ones, picking some of us to play the part of the victims. The main part of the tour however, after a 10 minutes walk through Edinburgh’s chaotic Saturday night streets, was the Greyfriars graveyard enveloped in the windy moonless night.
As soon as we reached the graveyard’s gate the guide started re-enforcing the ghost stories and related poltergeists that previous tour participants had apparently experienced and that we will probably soon witness too. I was trying my best not to be influenced by her talking and it was difficult though, she was doing her best to convince me that something bad was going to happen and the surrounding graveyard looked like an army of ghosts ready to stand up at any moment to scare me away.
We reached the Covenant prisons with the Black Mausoleum after a short but frightening walk through the graveyard with the sensation at every step of having awakened an unkind ghost.
The prison was a small dump room with an awkward sinister feeling, and the ghost tour guide’s stories were filling the room with imaginary visions of dead people’s spirits ready for revenge. At the back of the group a girl was crying, some people looked horrified and others sceptical, and my girlfriend in the meantime was clinched to me hoping for the tour to finish soon. I was looking around trying to keep a clear mind and figure out if I could really see a ghost without letting my imagination leading me into believing something that wasn’t there, but I couldn’t focus. I wish I was there by myself or with just another person, so as not to be influenced by the guide’s stories and people’s fears and scepticism around me.
My thoughts were then interrupted by a shout and although it was a human one it was frightening nonetheless, and we all reacted shouting back, like if it could change anything.
It wasn’t a ghost of course but just another guide that thought one last blow of fright was the only possible ending to an evening enveloped by frightening stories and unanswered doubts.
“Good” I thought, “so the tour will terminate at midnight, the perfect time to be in a hunted graveyard!” My girlfriend wasn’t looking forward to the experience at all but decided to come along for the only reason that she was more scared to spend part of the evening in the hotel room by herself.
At the rendezvous outside Saint Giles Cathedral there was a group of approximately twenty people. The tour guide, a young Scottish girl, was addressing the crowd about the seriousness and dangers of the tour: people apparently get bruises from the ghosts and suffer panic attacks, start crying and wish they have had spent the night anywhere but there. “You are still in time to change your mind and decide not to come to the graveyard” she said and my girlfriend would have agreed, she was already holding me as tight as she could and the tour had not even started!
We walked behind the Cathedral to the main square where the guide explained to us the tortures that were going on during medieval witch-hunting times and she was very theatrical and persuasive in describing the pain inflicted to the unfortunate ones, picking some of us to play the part of the victims. The main part of the tour however, after a 10 minutes walk through Edinburgh’s chaotic Saturday night streets, was the Greyfriars graveyard enveloped in the windy moonless night.
As soon as we reached the graveyard’s gate the guide started re-enforcing the ghost stories and related poltergeists that previous tour participants had apparently experienced and that we will probably soon witness too. I was trying my best not to be influenced by her talking and it was difficult though, she was doing her best to convince me that something bad was going to happen and the surrounding graveyard looked like an army of ghosts ready to stand up at any moment to scare me away.
We reached the Covenant prisons with the Black Mausoleum after a short but frightening walk through the graveyard with the sensation at every step of having awakened an unkind ghost.
The prison was a small dump room with an awkward sinister feeling, and the ghost tour guide’s stories were filling the room with imaginary visions of dead people’s spirits ready for revenge. At the back of the group a girl was crying, some people looked horrified and others sceptical, and my girlfriend in the meantime was clinched to me hoping for the tour to finish soon. I was looking around trying to keep a clear mind and figure out if I could really see a ghost without letting my imagination leading me into believing something that wasn’t there, but I couldn’t focus. I wish I was there by myself or with just another person, so as not to be influenced by the guide’s stories and people’s fears and scepticism around me.
My thoughts were then interrupted by a shout and although it was a human one it was frightening nonetheless, and we all reacted shouting back, like if it could change anything.
It wasn’t a ghost of course but just another guide that thought one last blow of fright was the only possible ending to an evening enveloped by frightening stories and unanswered doubts.
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