Lotus Floating Chinese Restaurant - Docklands

Summary: Nice atmosphere and décor but bland food, worn furnishings and overpriced. Not recommended. Three-course a la carte meals for three people with beer cost around £80. The menu's range was wide, with enough vegetarian, seafood and meat options for everyone to find something edible.

Contact Details:
http://www.lotusfloating.co.uk/
Tel: 020 7515 6445

The Lotus Chinese Floating Restaurant
38 Limeharbour,
Inner Millwall Dock,
London E14 9RH

Full review:
Starters tasted acceptable - chicken and beef satay with a bowl of peanut sauce and bon bon chicken which was described as sliced chicken with peanut sauce (cold dish). This turned out to be slices of chicken with hot peanut sauce poured over them and hence, was actually steaming when it arrived. Not quite as described but tasted fine.

The main courses were reasonable and thoroughly cooked but I can't say they were good. They all just tasted a little bland and the beef in my beef with black bean sauce felt like it had been boiled to death. The sauce itself was liberally sprinkled with chili slices yet somehow managed to be completely devoid of spicy goodness. I wouldn't mind if it was sweet, or salty or something but it was just kinda... sliced beef boiled in stock with soy sauce added for colour. Very dull. The lamb was similar, and while the duck didn't feel boiled, it wasn't anything remarkable either.

Finally, there was a piece of unidentified meat lying on the floor next to our table for a good 10-15 minutes (not dropped by us) . Ick!


Tagged: london | restaurants | chinese | food

TGI Fridays, Covent Garden

Summary: Great place to go in the evenings, not so good on a Saturday afternoon unless you don't mind lots of kids and slow service. Food portions are large and tasty, cocktails list is extensive, toilets have blue lighting (dodgy!). Two-course meals for three people came to just over £50 in total, not including the bottled San Miguels.

Contact Details:
TGI Fridays
6 Bedford Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 9HZ
Tel: 020 7379 0585
Fax: 020 7240 3239
Email: tgif.covent-garden@whitbread.com

Full review:

The bar is a good evening out - very friendly atmosphere, a large range of cocktails and the bar staff toss the bottles about like it's become a compulsion. I do wonder if they're capable of just pouring a shot any more. BTW, avoid the "Mini-Me" cocktail sampler. It looks cool but the drinks are warm, sticky and flat and taste nothing like their full-size counterparts.

I was there last Saturday afternoon and the place was packed with diners and a kid's birthday party. The food took about forty minutes to arrive but the waiters were friendly and brought drinks quickly. The food is slightly pricey but extremely tasty and comes in large portions. I ordered the fajitas was slightly unimpressed to find that the lid of my tortilla-bowl-thing was missing and they had substituted a plate instead, but it tasted very nice! Beef and chicken were both thoroughly cooked and tender but they way they're served makes fajita-construction a bit precarious, especially when trying to apply sour scream or guacamole from the top shelf, which is above eye-level when seated. My bf had a giant burger and chips and was very satisfied, as was our friend whose meal I can't remember but his side dish of onion rings did appear to contain an entire giant battered onion and almost threatened to put him off his three-scoop chocolate ice-cream popcorn sundae thing. Almost.

(I should really start taking notes if I'm going to write reviews, huh?)

Every other time I've been there has been in the evening, around 7-9pm and the food has always been just as good but usually arrives within a reasonable amount of time. I think Saturday lunchtimes are just a bad time to go.

The toilets are mostly clean with just the standard bits of clean bogroll littered about the floor. I was mildly perturbed by the blue lighting in each stall though - I hear that blue lighting was a method of stopping drug addicts from shooting up in your establishment but then again, as long as they're not inside and you don't go walking down too many nearby dark alleys looking rich and alone, I suppose that's okay.

Tagged: london | restaurants | food | american

Pizza Express - Canary Wharf

Summary: Good, fresh pizzas but I think they got my order slightly wrong. Great Italian wine. Toilets are unmemorable but my bf says he thinks the blokes' was nice and clean last time he was in them. Approximately £12 per head for starter + main.

Full review:

I think our waiter lied to me. I ordered a Quattro Formaggi (four cheese) pizza with spicy beef, since the menu says that you can add toppings for £1.45 or £1.10 depending on the topping. I got a Quattro Formaggi with spicy beef, onions, green pepper and two olives. That looked a lot like a Sloppy Giuseppe to me (spicy beef, onions, green pepper) so I called the waiter over and asked if it was right, since I didn't want to be digging into a pizza if it meant out that some other poor slob would have to wait an extra 15 minutes for their food. The waiter told me that yes, it was a Quattro Formaggi with spicy beef, but since the beef is already mixed in with onions and green pepper, they have to put it on the pizza as well.

That wasn't mentioned on the menu.

And he could have bloody told me when I ordered it! I could be allergic to green peppers...

So yeah, I think the pizza chef got confused and maybe slightly carried away with his normal Sloppy Giuseppe-making routine. No matter, I ate it anyway and it was really nice. But I still think the waiter lied to me.

Starters were nice - dough balls (fresh-baked, faintly crusty with a lovely soft centre) with garlic butter and my bf had garlic bread. (You know how if one of you has garlic the other has to as well, otherwise there's going to be trouble if you try getting close later? Lucky we both like garlic). They're both very nice starters but I do get concerned by the massive amount of garlic butter they give you for dipping the dough balls in .There's just no way you could eat all that garlic butter with the dough balls you get unless you have a lump the size of a dough ball on each ball. Do they just top it up and serve it to the next customer? Or do restaurants really generate that much waste? I had maybe a third of the tub, and I like garlic.

We didn't have wine today but their house wines are always Italian and specially selected for Pizza Express (so says the label). I've never had a house bottle there that I didn't thoroughly enjoy and they're tasty, yet never overpower the food. I would list the price of a house bottle but I forgot to check - I think it's about £11.

Tagged: london | restaurants | food | pizza

Ah, Subway...

Summary: Good food, lots of sandwich options, feels like a fast-food restaurant. Coz it is a fast-food restaurant. No toilets.

Full review:

I do like Subway sandwiches :)

Subway is a US franchise of submarine sandwich outlets. They have six varieties of bread, a vast array of meat and vegetarian toppings and the brilliant thing about them is that they operate as a customised production line, making your sandwich exactly as you want it. So if you're picky about your food like me, you don't need to worry about your turkey being tainted by olives.

Great things about Subway:

1. Bread and soft cookies are baked fresh every day. So soft and tasty :)
2. Sandwiches are fully customisable.
3. Meat fillings are low-fat and fresh, not like certain unnamed bagel stores who will give you shrivelled dried fillings that have been sitting in their display fridge for days.
4. "Sandwich Artists" will change their gloves when you ask them, so vegetarians don't need to eat nasty meat-tainted product.
5. Chipotle Southwest Sauce!

Dodgy things about Subway:

1. I think their seats are made of lead. They weigh a bloody ton, anyway. Some branches are only take-away.
2. You can get stacks of grated cheese from the salad section for free, but they charge you 20p for an extra square of plastic Kraft Singles. And since the salad cheese is post-microwave, I pay the extra 20p.
3. At peak times there is a large queue. They never keep you waiting very long but you can feel rushed while ordering.
4. It's pretty faceless - definitely feels like a little sandwich factory.

My local branch is on Farringdon Road, but every Subway I've been to is like this. They do a very good job of franchise control, so you get the same product everywhere you go.

Subway. Good sandwiches!

Edit 10th Oct 05: Keep an eye out on the final cost - they're in such rush to get you through the queue that every time I've been there in the past 3 weeks I've been charged varying amounts that bear little resemblance to the actual meal. I was definitely overcharged today but I let it go coz I think I was undercharged last week.

Tagged: london | restaurants | food | subway

C&R Restaurant, Piccadilly - Hainanese Chicken Rice!

Summary: Busy place but great traditional Singaporean/Malaysian cuisine with quick service. Prices are very low for the location but can be confusing. See below. Toilets aren't the best but the restaurant itself is clean.

Full review:

Hainanese chicken rice is a signature and unique Singaporean dish: Chicken meat is cooked in herbs and served cold on a bed of vegetables alongside rice cooked in chicken stock with oil and garlic and served hot with soy sauce. Traditionally it's accompanied with a chicken broth and crushed ginger, chilli sauce and soy sauce for dipping but hey, you can't have everyting halfway across the world.
For all you Singaporeans (and Malaysians) in London who have been craving chicken rice since you left (like me!), go to C&R Cafe, near Piccadilly. Address:

3-4 Rupert Court,
London,
W1V 7FQ

The rice is full of flavour, chicken is well-cooked and it's served with a little dipping bowl of chilli sauce. Mmm, tasty... No broth, ginger or soy sauce bowls (well, soy sauce is poured over the rice before serving) but it tastes fantastic! :) If you're like me and don't like dark meat they're happy to serve you a breast meat portion if you ask when ordering. I had a thigh/drumstick portion there once that was mostly bone and very little meat. It's priced at about £6.50 which is very good value for Central London, but we were once charged £8.50 per plate, which may have been a peak times surcharge. Or not. I'm pretty sure I once paid for dinner for three people all ordering different main courses and it was £16.50 but since lots of people were waiting, the number of illegible scribbles on the receipt looked right and we didn't have a menu to check against, we didn't query it.

Also on the menu is Roti Canai/Prata (very heavy and greasier than I like it) with runny, sour and spicy curry sauce. It's quite different from the thick coconut or tomato-based sauces you normally get in curry houses in England but still tastes great. There is a large selection of other Singaporean/Malaysian foods as well, like Nasi Lemak but I haven't haven't tried them yet coz I like chicken rice so much :)

The restaurant is usually busy and most times I've been there I've had to wait a few minutes for a table. The owners have packed it with as many cheap tables as they could and furnishings are sparse - no tableclothes and little decoration although the seats are padded, so slightly more comfortable than most fast-food places. This only helps their rapid turnover, as we usually don't wait long and are seated within a few minutes of a table being vacated and cleaned. It's a noisy place due to the lack of soft furnishings but the quality and price of food (okay, that one dish) more than makes up for it. Toilets are hiding downstairs and are a bit shoddy but clean.

Highly recommended for anyone who likes oriental-style spicy food, particularly if you want traditional Singaporean and Malaysian dishes.

Tagged: london | restaurants | food | hainanese | singaporean | malaysian

Hi

I'm starting this blog because English newspaper restaurant reviews have become almost unreadable lately - places are frequently compared to the latest celebrity chef's restaurant (which you can't afford to eat at) and the writers just witter on about nothing, as if desperately hoping that some day, someone will turn up to offer them a book deal and deliver them from all this horrendous food writing.

Example: Times Online 30/7/05

"And the men still exist in clumps of thirtysomethings lying sprawled across chairs and benches (as if they’d fallen there from exploded aeroplanes) wearing white moccasins on sockless, suntanned feet, jeans horizontally ripped at the thighs, short-sleeved Ralph Lauren polo shirts with (I vomit even to write this) the collar turned up and a thong necklace, lots of bracelets, brown-tinted aviators and swept-back hair, smoking constantly, babbling on their mobile phones and generally behaving as if they owned the place, which, upon inquiry, I discovered that most of them did."

So? I don't care about the other people. Tell me about the food! Ambience, lighting, furnishings, okay, I'm happy to hear about them as well. But the fashion sense of other diners? What, you want restaurants to start turning people away coz they look different from you?

Anyway, I'm going to start writing my own easy-reference food reviews. Enjoy!

Updated 21/9/2005: Perfect example of a hated restaurant review in today's Metro (print version only I'm afraid)

"Maybe his lobster omlette isn't quite as luxurious as the Gary Rhodes [a UK "celebrity chef"]version but its a stalwart bunker of a thing...
...A meal for two with wine, water and service costs about £130"

£130!!