Year of Eating Differently - Best of London

So after more than half a year, I had to leave the country. Whether this was because I'd exhausted all possibilities for lunch or not is left as an exercise for the gentle reader. Because everyone likes lists, here's a quick summary of the ten best and worst establishments that I've frequented/endured. (Followed shortly by an analysis of what kind of food I've eaten most and least of).

First, five of the best:
Subway - I can't figure out why, and it really shouldn't be here, but it's a much better example of manufactured food than the other chains - Pret was probably quite close, and Starbucks well behind because of the feeling of impending bankruptcy it induces
Lindsay House - right at the other end of the price spectrum. Simply superlative. (Maybe I'll cross L'Escargot off the list on a visit to Greek Street in the future, which could conceivably bump this down a bit)
Itsu - so good, I had to go to Canary Wharf
Foyles - by far the best cafe-in-a-bookshop I've encountered. Yes, there are lots of Starbucks inside Borders, but quantity is not always the same as quality...
Mr Jerk - I'd include Jerk City too, but it doesn't seem right to have two examples of such fabulously filthy, dirty food. Here's to the majesty of the roti.
Geisya - nervous waiter, great Japanese.

And 5 of the worst:
Govinda - file under trustafarian hippy scum, and with a case of gut-rot to boot
Abokado - not only was this seriously dull, but it provokes somebody to complain that it was much better than I had said. Well, that only makes it worse. (Strangely, the only comments attracted so far have been for Abokado and the aforementioned Govindas...)
Soba - the gloomy reflection of Geisya - best not to eat here if you've recently been to anywhere that can cook Asian food.
Vita Ingredient - for sheer pretension and a badly spelt name. And the food wasn't great
Casa Fresh - what a great leaving present - vegetarian food with added beef - at least the photograph of my wastebin has a certain soft-edged quality to it, like mist gliding across a winter field
Funnily enough, Make Mine is no longer the nemesis that it was when I began all of this. Wouldn't go back there, though, even now. There are other worthy contenders for the crown of worst food, but it would be rather depressing to mention them now.

Statistically top food: Mozzarella (16 mentions), followed by tomatoes (14) and cheese (12), although it's fair to say that these are probably over-represented due to their presence in other food.
First proper meal type (who says they're going to get some mozzarella for lunch, after all?) is falafel (12), although some controversy exists about the correct spelling. Should it be Just Falafs, for example?
burger is next with 11 mentions, and it's interesting to see the almost constant conjunction of curry (10) and expense account (7). Let us be thankful there's only one disgusting on the list - could have upped this score with a few more visits to Charing Cross Road...
Finally, as a well behaved lad, raised by his parents to treat each person as a valuable and unique snowflake, and not just a lump of flesh, I'm proud to report there's only been one instance of needless objectification of women thus far. (This could go up, depending on the cultural surroundings I subject myself to in following months. It's not my fault, it's the pressures of my environment!)

Year of Eating Differently (60): Nando's, Frith Street

I've always found Nando's quite an unnerving experience, as far as fast food goes. Part of the problem, but also the point, of fast food, is that the experience is generic - no matter which branch of McDonalds you enter, you should get the same experience. (This is of course something of a fallacy, as borne out by McDonalds' attempts to decorate every 'restaurant' differently, the existence of localised burgers, and so on.)
The thing that has always got me about Nando's, (and it is a genuine feeling of being caught out, rather than something that just rankles a bit with your sense of self) is the inconsistency. In particular, the inconsistent application of hot sauce. Go to the Nando's in Bromley and order something hot, and you can be the big man and wolf it down. Do the same in Islington, and watch at your girlfriend at the time laughs heartlessly as you stagger outside to the next door supermarket in search of milk, only to come back and find she's eaten all your chips. And you're still crying.
Not that I'm bitter, mind you. I wouldn't want to give that impression. But the point is, you're never quite sure what you're going to get and thus Nando's, however accidentally and possibly incompetently, is providing a useful lesson for you about the unreliability and confusion of life.
Furthermore, every other Nando's I've ever been to has got roosters everywhere and some attempt to look a bit Afro-Portuguese. Not the one in Frith Street; here it's pretty much standard West End restaurant decor - a few bits of glass, a few bits of chrome, no stupid 'ethnic' looking furniture. How odd. Anyhow, three of us go to lunch, and while we wait for my vegetarian pitta to arrive, discuss the iniquities of life and how difficult it is as cash-rich, time-poor urban professionals (cart puppies?) to find your life partner, unless you first bumped into one another at play school and spent time staring into each others' eyes ever since. (According to the cosmic ordering school of thought, one writes down a list of every single last thing required of your prospective mate. According to anyone who isn't STINKING MAD CRAZY first dates aren't conducted according to BS5150 guidelines, and with good reason: Blonde hair? Check. Blue eyes? Check. Teeth? Check. Simon and Garfunkel? Check. ... and then all of a sudden ... what do you mean, you've never watched Battlestar Galactica???? Hardly a mature approach to life, is it?)
The pitta arrives. I don't turn red and go into anaphylactic shock. To be honest, I think this means the cook wasn't trying hard enough; I may have only ordered medium, but shouldn't he have had a go at trying to kill me with an overdose of heat? Never mind. Perfectly adequate, and just like (about 50% of) all the other Nando's I've ever eaten. But that's the point.

Year of Eating Differently (49): Subway, Dean Street

Long before this project started, I had the misfortune to go to the (now-defunct) Subway in the corner of Soho Square, where I had a sandwich so bland as to be offensive; I retaliatated by going to Make Mine for a few more monotonous months of filthy oil, and lo and behold the franchisee shut down. Sorry about that, but a cheese sub with nothing in it but cheese is something you should have refused to serve me, rather than pollute your brand values. Sometimes the customer is not right, and should be told.
So it was with some trepidation that I stepped out today and realised that Subway was on the menu. First I had to post something to Sweden, which necessitated hanging about in the post office for half my lunch hour, and then I had the whole Post Office depot between me and the Subway just north of Soho Square, so I ended up in the more fashionable environs on Dean Street. Slightly confused that the decor of all Subway has to include bare brick walls, slightly more confused that one of the guys behind the counter had a t-shirt designed to look like he was wearing a Hawaiian lei, and too frightened/cautious/reticent/introverted to ask to take proof.
That got out the way, was swiftly upsold from a 6 inch to a foot long sub, with a vegetable patty and cheese in it. The salad garnish is uninspired (sliced lettuce, tomato, cucumber, olives, sweetcorn, onions) yet utilitarian, so I paid (half the price of yesterday's meal) and made it back to the office.

Where I took this photo, which suggests to me that either I'm exploiting perspective for my own personal gains, orI have respectably LARGE HANDS, or that a foot isn't what it used to be.
And so to the sandwich. It stinks. This is a good thing, because it pollutes the office and annoys the drones around me who don't have their own eating-lots-of-different-things blog. And also it stinks in a good way, redolent of going to Pizza Hut at the age of 12 and then annoying your parents by (in full snotty-nosed child mode) refusing to eat "anything with tomato on it". Must be that mixture of oregano and every other herb they've flung on the bread that's provoking this Proustian type memory. Now where did I leave that madeleine?
The vegetable patty (what does that really mean? Anyone?) has the consistency of a fish finger that has been squashed flat between two volumes of an encyclopeadia (of the sort the father of my friend Barry Sheen used to hawk around post-war Germany, before selling hip replacements, but that really is another story) but has satisfying mouth feel. The salad I referred to just now is mostly extraneous, being swamped by both the texture and the flavour of the bread and the patty, and altogether it's a good, warming meal. Subway, I think you have redeemed yourself. Chapeau!
The astute amongst you may have noticed the worrying preponderance of Gallic references in today's post. (If anyone is actually reading this, that is.) This is mainly due to my brainwave today of having 'Ceci n'est pas une projet d'optimisation search-engine' as the title of the blog, and then realising that would be a mindbogglingly dense and probably quite unoriginal thing to do, as well as possibly self-effacing (see earlier)

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.

Year of Eating Differently (22): Taste, Rathbone Place

Going here does raise questions about the whole enterprise. If you choose to have soup that turns out to be from a Covent Garden Soup Company carton, and it's warmed up in a microwave, and the sole addition that the staff make is to put some pepper onto it, are you doing anything different to going to Tesco's and buying a carton of soup yourself? But on the other hand, how many cafes are growing their own potatoes/baking their own bread/churning their own butter? If I were that concerned with getting back to the source of the food, then I probably wouldn't be eating out so much. Or I'd be eating out of the kitchen window of a farmhouse somewhere. But I digress.
Taste is ok. It's a shop by itself rather than a chain (what difference does that make anyway?) but the food on offer isn't much different to elsewhere. Seems a more limited range than Shellys or Make Mine, but I haven't dipped too deeply into it. And although the added pepper to the soup improves it, it can't get over the flaw of Covent Garden Soup - it's far too goddamn salty, and a bit of pepper can't overcome that. It's enough pepper to make your tongue tingle a bit though, which is a novel experience. Crisps - well, so what. They work. I did resolve to stop eating crisps recently. Then I went to Charing Cross station, and the experience was so horrible I could only get over it by eating a packet of Frazzles. How weak willed am I?
Akrasia aside, the chocolate coated ginger biscuits are good. Very good indeed.

Year of Eating Differently (105): The Breakfast Club, D'Arblay Street

We were meant to be eating at Pierre Victoire today, but because it seems that every Friday my lunchtime companions are rushing to get back for an important meeting, and because one of them had got tanked up at a Valentine's Night extravaganza on Regent Street and stank of alcohol, nobody was brave enough to take a whole hour out. Plus P-V would be packed full of lunchtime punters who probably eat lunch in the same place from day to day and therefore don't have that monkey on their back of desperation to notch up another meal every day.
Because of last night's booze (not me, I was at home reading a book and watching Ashes to Ashes with one eye, unimpressed for the second week and hoping it was going to improve) we also ruled out the pub on Broadwick Street, couldn't get into a brand new hot dog restaurant because it was having an opening party that was invitation only (surely I should have told them who I was and blagged my way in), and thus ended up at the Breakfast Club round the corner.
Unfortunately, service here is damnably slow because it's always packed. One of our number is dying of a hangover, the kind that makes you want to start crying and crawl under the table, the other two are gabbling away about sexual mores and whether you should put out on the third date or not (should you put out on a first date? should you ever not put out on a first date?), and possibly these two things offend the woman behind the counter.
I order a goats cheese, rocket and mushroom wrap, a packet of garlic flavoured crisps and a couple of date and cranberry cookies. PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THAT.
Pay close attention, because if you ever end up at the Breakfast Club, listening to the (possibly) ironic soundtrack from Footloose, don't ever order any of those three things. It was like an infernal triptych of awful food - the garlic crisps were revolting, the cheese was like a deposit of something and as for the cookies, the forlorn hope I had that they could cheer me up after the other two was cruelly dashed to the floor when they turned out to taste like sweetened MDF. Not too good.

Year of Eating Differently (58): Cafe Arlington, Dean Street

I went to the bank today, and outside there was a Welshman begging by the ATM. Had mixed feelings about this - lots of people were handing him change, and it was cold, and he was missing a few teeth, and could possibly do with some money, but on the other hand you don't spend the best part of a year detailing the iniquities of charity for your MA dissertation and then feel you have to justify not giving somebody cash just because they asked for it.
However, things got further confused when I went up the street to Cafe Arlington. Pretty empty inside and devoid of atmosphere (partly due to the lack of customers, and partly because of the scaffolding outside blocking the view) but before I went in and got my felafel and roasted pepper panino (there's a confluence of cultures...) I didn't realise it was run as an effort to give the homeless and those who find it hard to find work some kind of job.
Not that morality and ethical aspects should shape what the food tastes like. Beneath this unprepossessing exterior lurks a heart of darkness, etc etc. But - well, not bad. No queue because I was the only customer (have they not got a good location? possibly not - people will walk out of Soho Square and demonstrate the human tendency to turn right rather than left, which rather disadvantages the establishment) so I got served quickly. Bread was rubbish - not panini at all, but what appears to be a baguette - but the combination of that with felafel and roasted peppers makes for some good, sweaty dirty lunchtime fare. So they got away with it this time.

Year of Eating Differently Redux: Gourmet Burger Union

I had a friend who went to KFC twice in her life, the second time because she couldn't believe how disgusted she'd been the first time that she went.  Sadly, consistency was the only positive hallmark of her experience.  So it has been for me at Gourmet Burger Union.

Year of Eating Differently (117): 12-Bar Cafe, Denmark Street

Like a step back in time to the 1980s, or indeed some indefinable era before I was fully conscious. This may be to do with the terrible cold air today, or the NME obituaries of Marc Bolan, Sid Vicious¹ and Kurt Cobain that decorate the walls.
However, this morbid atmosphere is alleviated somewhat by the cheerful reggae that keeps plonking away, although that too adds to the sense of this being a cafe before time. The plastic coated menu, the plastic table cloth, they too seem like something very old - not necessarily aware in some awful ironic sense of its retro status, but just a bit old, possibly a little tired.
When my burger (my reggae burger no less, complete with cheese, pineapple and chillis) arrives, it is in an old school bun, with no sesame seeds on top. That is how in the 1980s we would know we had something English, a little tired, the quintessence of the Old Country rather than the brash competence of McDonald'. But I go on too much. The chips and the 'salad' (tomato, one slice, cucumber, one slice, lettuce, one leaf) are somehow moribund, but in keeping with the burger, which is bland and yet with a hidden sting to it. Just as I thought to myself that the chillis were unnoticeable, my mouth began to quiver. But of course, in the 1980s we didn't eat spicy food (apart from chicken tikka masala, one supposes, but never in my childhood experience - I had mashed potato, carrots and peas and that was as far as it went), so in a few moments the burning sensation vanishes again.
So far, this sounds a little derogatory, but this is one of those few places that provides a simple oasis from the world for a moment or two. You could imagine that mobile phones, the internet, the very word (or words) 'dot-com' had yet to materialise into our daily lives. And that, perhaps, is what a meal should provide in the middle of the day.^2
1 Is it just a terrible rock legend, or did Sid's mother really drop his urn as she carried him back home from New York, with the dire consequences that his ashes were sucked up into the air conditioning systems of Heathrow, never to rest? Surely seems too awful an end not to be true...
² In writing this, I may have been unduly influenced by reading Starbucked which raised (for me, for the first time) the concept of the third place, as possibly invented by Ray Oldenburg and then promulgated by Schulz and Starbucks et al, of cafes/bars/etc providing some adjunct to the humdrum experience of sleep-work-home-sleep by being an alternative to exist in. Or maybe I had just been time tunnelling...

Year of Eating Differently (59): Maezo, Old Compton Street

Again, it was a cold and miserable day, so we wandered down to Old Compton Street, where I could cheer myself up by looking in the window of Skinny White Boy before going back for a two-hour HR briefing on how to fill in forms. I was expecting another small cafe, but then the blinding bright green frontage of Maezo attracted us, and we wandered in. By the look of it the place had been open a week, although the woman behind the bar assured us it had been there for 6 years.
As the picture above shows, their brand seems to be a bit ... well, possibly overtargetted to their environs. I don't want to be crude, but the mouth of the guy on the left, and the whole singlet thing the guy on the right is into; it's just a bit too ashamedly rough trade for lunchtime. (I could digress here into the unpleasantness of Georgina's in the Covered Market in Oxford [it 'oozes sex' apparently] but we'll leave that treat for another day.)
Anyway, Maezo does felafel, in pitta with salad, but for some strange reason they're called maezo instead. Possibly this is to distinguish them from 'the runner up prize' when you go to a kebab shop and everyone else is eating sliced elephant leg. But you also get chips, which is a nicetie. All good, but the construction is a bit overwrought - first you order, then you get your felafel in a little pitta with a cardboard holder, and then you go back along the counter to pick out your own salad and add that in, at which point you're having to galumph through the lunchtime queue and then double back on yourself to sit down. So not very well thought out by a time-and-motion standard.
It is good felafel though - high on the dirtiness stakes, and unlike Cafe Arlington yesterday it has the right ratio of bread to filth. Good selection of salads, although I wimped out of the beetroot. Chips were possibly a bit much - felt like I was going to burst while listening to the intricacies of career appraisals half an hour later...

Year of Eating Differently (78): Cafe Nero, Frith Street

Wasn't it a young Snoop Dogg (back when he was still Doggy Dogg) who declared 'make my s__t chronic, I want to get f___ed up'? In my opinion, he should have asked for his s__t to be made out of Brasso, because I reckon drinking metal polish is a sure-fire way to ruination, whereas your experience of smoking cannabis may vary.
Not sure why such a rumination would flicker across my frontal lobes today, but perhaps it was the surprise that it's taken this long to get round to Cafe Nero.
Possibly this is because it's such a dull experience. Pret is annoyingly earnest. Why have all those instructions printed on bags telling you how to make your own sandwiches? Surely the reason you bought a sandwich is because you haven't time to make your own? Starbucks is overpriced. Coffee Republic is also overpriced, but with that nagging worry at the back of your head as to why it hasn't shut down yet for lack of custom. Costa used to do decent muffins until they retired the ginger one last week, and replaced it with an orange muffin with lemon-flavoured smegma on top (that was a nice breakfast today).
Nero, on the other hand, apart from enraging its shareholders with some kind of MBO last year (the details of which are too dull to go into here) is just a coffee shop, with an ok line in preprepared pannini. I made the potential mistake of choosing the pasta instead, which turns out to be bits of pasta in a microwave-hardened tomato paste. But it's not half bad, surprisingly enough. Or rather, it tastes just like one of those Tesco Finest upmarket pasta snacks, microwaved. For a third more volume, but three times the price. Still, I've done Tesco's already, so I can't really complain. That aside, it's about as ersatz as large coffee chains go. But that's not so bad, really.

Year of Eating Differently (68): Geisya, Dean Street

This is more like it. Went to the South Bank last night and saw the Kneehigh Theatre put on a production of Rapunzel, which was very good, but like all pantomime about ten minutes too long. I think the Jenny liked it, although being American and not having a tradition of being dragged to the panto, probably hard for her to contextualise it. Anyway, after that strolled off to dinner, and had a woeful time at Wagamama's; weak miso soup, noodles that seemed to be in an arrabiata sauce - yeuch.
So today when an friend from out of town turned up and said she wouldn't mind Japanese, I was stoked, because I've been walking past Geisya for a while. Went in there (after getting lost and walking up and down Frith and Greek Streets instead) and disconcertingly we were the only diners - so it was us and the nervous waiter, plus a plasma screen with the Christmas Number Ones for the last 20 years playing. Thus, ambience scores about nil.

Food was great though - I think this is properly Japanese run, because the miso soup actually tasted of miso for a change, and the tempura was light and crunchy, rather than the soggy mess that Soba presented me with. My friend had sushi and apparently the fish was "like butter" - or poisson comme buerre, I suppose? Maybe I should have paid more attention in GCSE French.
Anyhow, the waiter was incredibly nervous, and I think Japanese (the handwriting gives it away, plus the terrible feeling of guilt I had when he had to come back and apologise for my first choice of meal being off) and then there's the qualm of whether you should tip or if that's actually a real faux-pas (it is in Japan, but if you're in London, who knows?), but this is irrelevant when the food is up to scratch, so all in all, all good. Shame I can't go back for the rest of the year, but hey.

Year of Eating Differently (16): Foyles, Charing Cross Road

A day behind on the eating plan, I suppose, due to taking Friday off with Being Ill. Ah well. I'm not posting pictures of me eating soup at home. Sorry.

So, Foyles. Or rather, not the bookshop itself, but the cafe on the first floor. Aubergine and mozzarella baguette, and, (a first since this started) the bread is actually decent - crusty crust, and soft, fresh bread inside. Nice. Haven't eaten aubergine since I can remember, so that's also another plus point, and it's no more expensive than surrounding places. The ambience is nice too (who doesn't like bookshops? Furthermore, it's a bookshop that doesn't play music, unlike the slightly unpleasant Borders over the road, which seems to assume that books must be so dull that you have to have canned music blaring away while you browse.) but unfortunately I had to head straight back to the office to sit down (crashing from drinking a giant latte at Cafe Nero this morning - bit of a tactical error, that).

Anyway, sandwich is great. But better was the cake, which instead of being factory packed like everywhere else (think of that awful bit of shortbread from establishment 13 last week) does a good semblence of being homemade. A jaffa cake, no less - a sponge cake slathered with chocolate icing, and with a smashing orangey bit inside. Spirits lifted, back to counting planes...

Year of Eating Differently (9): Make Mine, Dean Street

Nicely packaged, but inside lurks a heart of darkness...

I spent six months eating nothing but Make Mine sandwiches, which probably is part of the motivation for this endeavour. Make Mine have one person taking orders at the till, then a production line of sandwich builders that chuck out your finished order a few minutes later. Works fine when there's nobody else in the shop, but at 1pm on a weekday the place is maxed out and the queue spills out onto the road, so it's not necessarily the best place to grab a quick bite. Contrast that with Shelly's (to be visited later) where the same person takes your order, builds it and then gives it to you. Although they're also really slow when you're in a hurry.
Anyhow, the purple and white colour scheme is intended to make the place look fresh and fun. At first glance, the sandwich shop counterpart to the white and orange of Imli. When you get the sandwich, you realise that fun was accidentally identified with cholesterol and nothing else. The damn thing is dripping oil. It's the closest thing to a dirty burger without there being a burger in it; the sundried tomatoes could just as well be oildrowned tomatoes, the sprig of salad hardly counteracts this, the avocado and mozzarella - well, they're just fat anyway and the foccacia itself has been liberally hosed with pesto that seems to be mostly oil too. Sure, it tastes good for the first bite or two, but by the end you're feeling nauseated by the whole experience and it becomes a triumph of the will to finish the thing off. (Not sure as I should be comparing eating a sandwich to Leni Reifenstahl, but them's the breaks.) Oh, and the foccacia was a bit burnt on one edge.
Tricolore focaccia, £4.00. Shame and guilt, well, I get those for free

Year of Eating Differently (50): Govinda's Vegetarian Restaurant, Soho Street

In Govinda's favour, it's vegetarian. Against that, it's vegetarian, so there's not even anything interesting to read on the menu*, it's staffed almost entirely with trustafarian hippies who are probably having a year out finding themselves and slicing cabbage in between, and the food doesn't taste of anything much at all.
Lasagna. It was functional. I don't think I'm about to be sick, I'm not feeling like I need to eat lunch again, but there was no pizzazz, no excitement, no hope that this might push back a little against the gathering clouds of a miserable universe.

No, I haven't been reading Schopenhauer this morning; I've just had another knock back from one of the teeming army of internet dates that I've downloaded this year. Never mind. I'm sure by tomorrow I'll be full of joie de vivre again. In the meantime, Govinda's offers no solace against heartache. I had to cross the road to Starbucks afterwards to buy a muffin, in the hope that it would lift my spirits. No dice, unfortunately.
Or maybe it's not to do with personal strife. Maybe the one thing that really got my goat about Govinda's was when I ordered lasagna, and the person behind the counter asked me if it was hot enough. How am I meant to know? Should I have stuck my thumb in it? Given it a lick, and then told her it needed a few more minutes under the grill? Given free rein to my clairvoyant abilities? Good grief...
* Yes, I'm fully aware you could have a solely vegetarian restaurant with a decent menu, but this wasn't it, and neither was the place I went to in Oxford where they served up Linda McCartney pies without a trace of irony or self-awareness. That is all.

Year of Eating Differently (90): Med Kitchen, St Anne's Court

Nestled next to a tiny internet cafe, a barbers that offers free pints of beer with your haircut on Fridays (what would you infer about the quality of their workmanship from that) and an overpriced avant-garde shop selling trainers, is this perfectly example of a kebab shop. Inside it's all overbright fluorescent lighting, a plastic menu, two donners rotating on spits, a couple of guys from the Med wearing bandannas, all the usual stuff that you'd need on a Friday night after you've been kicked out the pub. Strange, then, to find it sprouting fully-formed in Soho, particularly in the middle of the day.
Still, it was doing a roaring trade, and one could hardly complain about the absence of vomitting drunks in the doorway. Got a generously sized flatbread full of falafel and salad for £3.80, scurried back to the office and was full of food in less than 20 minutes from start to finish. A good efficient use of time and money.
Still fancy eight pints of Stella, mind...

Year of Eating Differently (119): Bar Chocolat, D'Arblay Street

There have been varying reports about the quality of food at Bar Chocolate; some people have said it's good, others that it's bad, and still others that it's non-existent because all they serve is booze.
Had a sort of assignation here to meet with a Swedish sound designer who has brought me back some sweets from Stockholm (Plopp, if you were wondering...). Always go mobbed up to a meeting like this, so she brings back-up in the form of another sound designer, and I have an accomplice too, so that if things go south while we make the exchange, somebody's got my back.
Nobody turns up with a shooter though, so we have lunch instead.
Service isn't bad, just very shy. Eventually the waiter detached himself from his hiding place behind the bar and took our order. What is a little surprising is the size of the options. Two of us ordered a chicken wrap, which you wouldn't expect to be big, but turned out to be a cruciform arrangement of four wraps each, in both cases forcing defeat before the meal was over. I got a vegetable pie. A pie in a bowl. A pie in a bowl with no pastry, but with two small pats of butter next to it. Some kind of condiment for the pie? Very confusing.
Full marks for the cocktails. Because I couldn't go back half-cut, and neither could the designers (both working on something top-secret for Sony that involves Terrible Sounds being made in the basement of their Soho building) I had something non-alcoholic; presentation good. Only problem is that the ginger in the ginger beer wasn't strong enough. If a constituent of your meal doesn't make you weep, you're probably not sufficiently emotionally involved.
Finally, although it looks great in the evenings, in the daytime it looks rather shabby on the outside. Here's a photo from the inside instead:

Year of Eating Differently (88): Moak, Soho Square

This used to be a Subway until a while ago. I had an unpleasant time there, as documented, but then it shut. For about six months it then remained closed, with the mysterious sight of a bright yellow Cinquecento viewable through the window, along with a load of building supplies.
Just this week it reopened as Moak, a pasta/pizza joint. There are four tables crammed into one corner of the shop, a couple of pizza ovens, a counter for fruit smoothies - all really rather polished. Not sure if these are real Italians or faux ones, but they call me signor and not signorita and then gave me a slice of hot pizza as fast as was necessary.
Pizza was good (although it punched below its weight, if you compare flavour to taste), but it had an underlying flavour of fishiness. I'm not sure what that can have been, because aside from anchovies (which weren't on it) there's not many forms of piscine life that have made their way on top of a pizza. Please don't write to me and tell me about the eel pizza you enjoyed as a small child, by the way. Anyhow, glad to see something rising from the ashes of a previous establishment.

Year of Eating Differently (56): Abeno, Museum Street

Headed east in search of okonomi-yaki today. This may have been slightly ill-advised; last night I left the office at 6 and then ran to Vernon Square, before doing two hours of shorinji kempo - one of those tough sessions where by the end of it you go down to the floor and then can't bring yourself to get back up again. Possibly it was the ten minutes of battering pads continuously that did for me, but today my legs feel screwed and I just want to sleep.
It's not a good look to pass out at your desk, so at 12 I nipped down to our faithful newsagent and bought some Frazzles - unfortunately, if you've just had a packet of crisps, ordering miso soup and okonomi-yaki may not be the best decision.
Good stuff though - once you've ordered, the food comes back and gets fried on the hotplate in front of you (although this does mean that by the end of the meal you feel significantly overheated) - and the miso soup actually tasted like miso soup for a change, after the miserable examples from Abokado and Soba in recent weeks. Service was a teeny bit slow (5 minutes to attract attention and get the bill) and tofu isn't the most fun thing to eat (I was jealous of my companion's bacon, and think the Osaka-mix okonami-yaki might be a better bet for those carnivores amongst us) but at least it felt like a Japanese restaurant rather than some strange English approximation thereof.

Year of Eating Differently (62): Pure California, Wardour Street

After a short frustration trying to get my Sony Ericsson K850i fixed (the buttons don't work, which is a software problem, apparently, despite them BEING BUTTONS) went down Wardour Street in search of pizza. I've already done Maletti's and Pizza Express, and although there were some nice-but-pricey places ahead of me, I felt strangely reticent at being sat alone in a restuarant eating a pizza. I used to be fine with that, but perhaps I'd worry too much about the human condition and start crying. So I'll save that for later in the week.
Pure California - well, when I went to California I saw the Greyhound bus station at Los Angeles and it was nothing like this. Nor was it anything like Haight-Ashbury, but since that's just the end of the 60's / Camden that's probably a good thing. Hippies not able to get over the end of their decade are so declasse darling.
Anyway, Pure California offers things with beans, hummus and amusing titles. Yes, very funny. My sides split the time I read a pun on the word hummus. Must. Get. Out. More. Settled for a wrap with beans and avocado in it - a combination I've never encountered before.
It's better than I feared. Annoyingly, you buy what looks like one wrap and then it turns out to be in two sections (similarly, I've always been frustrated by Bounty bars and the fact that you don't get one really big wodge of coconut covered in chocolate) but the combination of what appears to be raw broccoli, quite spicy sauce and almost no identifiable avocado turns out to be pretty good