Year of Eating Differently (122): Soho Snax, Brewer Street

Godawful.
Some kind of tricolore focaccia, served up by a guy who was almost too shy to speak, wrapped up in paper like a piece of battered cod, and then I made the mistake of adding a geriatric blueberry muffin to my order. If I've said the Pret Christmas muffin was a ball of hot disappointment dressed up as mucus, wrapped in a doughy exterior, then I'm sorry; this was far far worse. Not in a long time have I had to throw something away because I couldn't face taking another bite of it.

Year of Eating Differently (83): Caffe V, Rathbone Place

Free soup with every filled sandwich. I thought there was a catch, but there wasn't. I needed a sandwich, and I got soup as well. Happy days.
Sandwich - well, it was focaccia with mozzarella and sundried tomatoes, plus some rocket. So pretty much the same as the Tricolore from Make Mine, but not dripping with so much oil that you could feel the early onset of a heart attack.
Soup was courgette and vegetable. If I didn't know better, I'd say that a courgette was a vegetable, but ours is not to reason why, ours is to do and dine. It's very good soup. The last soup I had was probably some of that godawful Covent Garden stuff (half soup, half salt, all man!) whereas this tastes like, well, soup. Could have done with a bit of salt though.
Also got a muffin - toffee apple yoghurt - that will contribute to the muffin directory, and a packet of crisps, for only 5.35. Jolly good.

Year of Eating Differently (71): Candy Cakes

I didn't think I drank that much on Sunday evening - well, two bottles of Hoegaarden and two pints of Grolsch weissbeer - but that and the late night and the continual knackeredness leading up to Christmas and the pounding my body took riding on Saturday, plus the late night after and the long walk home meant that cumulatively I was a wreck on Monday. Blearily, I staggered down to Covent Garden to meet a friend and retrieve the iPod that I'd lost for the second time in two days.
Whilst down that way, stopped off at Candy Cakes. Admittedly, a great big bright green muffin ("that looks like child's vomit" as my bridge-building friend put it) and a bucket of coffee might not be the most nutritious of lunches, but it was all I could stand.
So while my chum launched into an f-word peppered rant about the iniquities of Geordie engineers that forget to put rebar into the concrete that they're building, I ate the muffin. Apple flavoured, rather than vomit, and with little jellied sweets embedded in the surface. A fine muffin, lacking in injected syrup or canker sores or anything else that Pret a Manger have seen fit to inflict on me. And after that, and the smoothest latte since Krispy Kreme on London Bridge station, I felt human again.

Year of Eating Differently (66): Costa, Old Compton Street

OK, it's a chain. And it's staffed entirely by mittel-Europeans (on closer consultation of my list of all flags, think that more exactly they might be Lithuanian), but they do a better job of serving you than the three English builders are managing with trying to get a half-constructed sofa down the stairs into the basement.
Presentation is a bit lacking - you can't see half the baked goods at the counter because there's a pile of tables in the way. Whether this is a protest at rabid over-commercialism, or incompetence, or just because the cafe is too damn small, squeezed as it is into the corner opposite the big green sex shop (and diagonally opposite Dirty White Boy) I just didn't care - my hands were ready to fall off due to the cold and me leaving my gloves at the office.
There are at least TWO lies in the next paragraph.
A brie and cranberry panino? It makes no sense, no sense at all. Is it Christmas already? If it is, surely I should drop the pretence of being vegetarian and binge on turkey, not on a combination of French, Italian, and - and - and where do cranberries come from again? New England, or something daft? Never mind. It's a well attested fact that the French don't celebrate Christmas, and moreover the Italians think that a traditional Christmas meal is a pannetone that's been hollowed out and filled with limoncello. And the panino is ok. Well, it's aaaalriiight, but in a mellow, drawn out kind of way, rather than the panicked yell of a builder as his chums drop the sofa on his head. But the pink innards are disconcerting - you start worrying that Vita has dosed you up with the wrong sandwich entirely, and even when you're eating it, part of you is saying this is wrong, this is so wrong. But it's not like a punishment beating.
For afters, got a muffin. Jolly excited about this because I had a ginger muffin in Costa in Bromley at the weekend (breakfast, I'm afraid, which says a lot about my diet and my burgeoning waistline) and it was better than the fabled Starbucks muffin of yore. This one has got icing on top and a uniform consistency throughout, unlike the disgusting muffins of Pret. A little concerned that it might be of pensionable age, given the display in the shop, and indeed, now it's up close it's not quite so appetising, but not to worry - this is great. It's exactly like a big lump of Jamaican Ginger Cake, but with icing too - well stoked is what I am.