ArcaMax

Pink fir apple potatoes, Lincolnshire poacher, baby chard and pickled onions.

Okay… so the horseradish cream was SO good I’m coming up with my own recipe soon. Imagine clotted cream with horseradish. The bun was poofy and amazing. The crispy quail turned out to be sort of a spicy Thai dish. Dusting the quail with cayenne was brilliant and I’ll never forget the walnut ketchup. It sounds creepy and weird, I know, but it was delightful. The pink fir apples dish was basically a plate of specially cooked baby potatoes. I’ll admit I spared myself the carbs and didn’t finish the plate but having a few felt really decadent and I got my fill.

We did have dessert too. I don’t recall what it was. Our strategy is to generally get one and split it. We both just eat a few bits and let it pass. We get our sugar and the fun of seeing what they did as far as presentation but we don’t pay heavily for it on the scale the next day.

Here’s a link to Fifteen. Just driving up in the cab I was smitten. The building is a quaint, Harry Potter-looking place on a quiet corner. So London.

My birthday dinner was celebrated in the newly-resurging area of east London. Lots of artists and young executives live in this area. It used to be sort of dodgy. Now it’s the cool place to hang.

The restaurant is called Galvin La Chappelle.

With this place, even the architecture is appetizing! As you scroll down in the link look at the background picture. This place is an old, hollowed out chapel of grand design. It’s just the right amount of old with soaring glass for the new. We had a perfect seat right in the middle of the first floor and plenty of action around us to take in.

Here we had them take three appetizers and split them into two portions for us. Each of them fit in a little bowl surrounded by a wide, white china rim. They all involved sauces poured over exotic ingredients. Then we both had entrees. We had dessert, of course. It was my birthday and they knew it. So they not only brought me the dessert we ordered to split, but they also brought some other little cakes and goodies on a plate with the words Happy Birthday spelled out in dark chocolate. My favorite part of that plate was the way they took one, single, little white candle and melted some wax on the plate so the candle stood straight up by itself. These brothers are so good I bought one of their cookbooks on the way out.

And one more meal just to tease you.

We decided one day to do a contemporary Italian meal. We were going to the Brick Lane that evening for Indian food. I knew the Indian food was going to be inexpensive, so this day we put our budget toward lunch. We did a leisurely lunch including wine and then took a luxurious nap before dinner. My kind of vacation.

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