Year of Eating Differently (124): Palms of Goa, Charlotte Street

One last lunch before leaving Soho Square, and it was at Palms of Goa, a crowded joint on Charlotte Street. Service was pretty slow, but then they were congested with Friday lunchtime traffic. Of course, if we'd been hard charging on the lager then that would have got us served (and probably processed back out again) much more quickly.
I was suffering - 7 doses of Sophie's Choice plus a ginger martini (all at Polka) the night before was leaving me shaking like a sick dog. Luckily I got to skulk off in the afternoon and get my back seen to over in Clapham - so no stress for me.
As a result, not paying full attention to the meal that it possibly deserved. Fairly ersatz biryani (although recent perusal of Swindled! and consultation with Germanophones has educated me to realise that ersatz != mediocre and actually substitute/replacement (eg chicory coffee)) but it filled a gap.

Year of Eating Differently (120): 7 Soho Square

Possibly this should be taken as an admission of defeat; exhausted, tired and stressed at trying to arrange flights to a foreign country, I've resorted to scavenging from the left-overs from a business lunch, that have been deposited, unloved and unwanted, in the company kitchen.
As one might expect, presentation leaves a lot to be desired; they've just dumped a whole bunch of partially dismembered sandwiches, and a heap of potato crisps, on a silver plate and left it atop the fridge. Quality isn't too bad though; the sandwiches are suffused with oil but there is enough sundried tomato/avocado/cheese to feed me. Service: well, that was non-existent. At least there's dessert, in the shape of dozens of galia melon slices that were apparently too healthy for the occupants of the meeting, plus strawberries, grapes etc. All washed down with a can of soda from the company fridge. I may have no self-respect, but my wallet is unscathed today.

Year of Eating Differently (118): Rasa Samudra, Charlotte Street

Pretty good for lunchtime, although I had real troubles from about half way through - think my cold was starting to kick in and I went from happy awareness of my environment to feeling like death in about ten minutes.
Staff are a bit too attentive - I really wished they would stop asking me if I was happy with my food or not, but perhaps I've had too many aggressiveness pills this week. Food was all good though, apart from the yoghurt & aubergine, which I felt masked the aubergine's flavour with nothing satisfactory. Dosa and mango & green banana curry particularly recommended...

Year of Eating Differently (102): Siam Central, Charlotte Street

Ran over here, checked the menu, ran back to work, spent half an hour in a meeting discussing statistical significance and how to isolate the effect of other changes when altering a single variable, said something else people agreed with, walked back up stairs and hoorah - there was my lunch waiting for me, brought back by that fine corpus of people that make up my co-workers. A penang curry and some rice - good kick of heat to it, went down a treat. Then back to meetings for the rest of the day.

Year of Eating Differently (63): Lindsay House, Romilly Street

OK, first expense account lunch since records began. Lindsay House is great - slighly odd decor (lots of paintings involving cats, or policemen, or policemen with helmets made from cats) but there's a fireplace, the service was excellent, the wine worked, there was a fine, fine amuse bouche of pumpkin soup and walnut brioche to begin with, and it wasn't like Claridges and their snooty "if you're vegetarian why not eat some of Gordon Ramsay's snot" attitude. I can even forgive the guy who came around to comb the crumbs off the tablecloth.
Talked business for several hours, ate lunch, came back to the office. S'all good, baby baby.

Year of Eating Differently (47): Lazeez, Dean Street

Curry at lunchtime is always a bit disorientating. Should you go and get bent utterly out of shape on Kingfisher, mop up the dregs of booze with a poppadom, and then slink back into the office? Or be civilised, eat your chicken tikka masala without recourse to booze and somehow feel the experience isn't entirely 'sincere' because it's not the same as those halcyon days with the rugby club back at 'uni' when you competed to steal items of crockery from the curry house?
Most confusingly of all is when your bosses' boss (or maybe his boss, but who wants to spend that much time traversing corporate hierarchy diagrams?) takes you all out for lunch. You might have been expecting to get a sandwich from some hellhole on Oxford Street, but instead we all troop down to the Soho Theatre, and thence down into the basement where there's a very passable Indian restaurant.
There's a mindbendingly expensive restaurant over the street (the Red Fort) which we'll deal with at some point, but it's best paid for by somebody else's expense account, so not today.
Anyhow, the menu's not bad at all. Not much vegetarian stuff - one 'platter' which consists of four different sauces, some rice and some bread - but nobody complained about the chicken/lamb/prawns/seabass on offer, and I was full up by the end of it, to the point that when I went off to shorinji kempo that evening, I didn't feel like I was going to die. Well, actually, I did but that was probably the cumulative effect of not enough sleep and too many missed dinners this week.
Oh, and we had homemade limoncello afterwards back at the office. That could never be a productivity boost.

Year of Eating Differently (42): Nusa Dua, Dean Street

6.95 for a two course set meal - you can't go wrong with that