WELCOME TO LONDON
For my first post, it’s fun to return to a place that received us to London in the best possible way when we moved here. We arrived at this restaurant in the middle of winter 2011, temperature outside was around 4 degrees C, no matter how heavy we were dressed, it was always cold, and the best part of the story is that two of my best friends joined me and my dear hubby to the upcoming culinary experience. We had so much fun that evening, that since then we return to this restaurant when-ever we feel like celebrating something or just indulge in a superb meal.
BARBECOA is one of the many restaurants owned by the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver and his partner the chef Adam Perry Lang. BARBECOA specializes in barbeque food, proud for celebrating the relationship between Food and Fire, how could we survive without those two elements (the way I see it Food is the fifth element after Fire, Earth, Wind and Water which everybody knows). Actually, I found this place by Googling ‘best steak in London’. Not always a random web search leads to such good results, but in this particular case – I got the best I could hope for! So we came prepared for a feast!
BARBECOA is located in the heart of London, in the City, overlooking one of its popular attractions - St. Paul’s Cathedral, where Charles and Diana got married and which was burned almost completely in the 1666 Great Fire. From the moment you walk into the restaurant you can see the cathedral in all its glory and you feel like you’re actually in one of the most beautiful and special places in London.
This time, we come with two friends who came over for holiday, and what place is better to take them if not BARBECOA?!
18:30: Dressed up & ready, reminding my beloved to get out of the office, on my way out to the Tube. It’s great that you don’t need a car to get around London!
18:37: Hope the wind in the Tube station tunnel won’t ruin my hair...
19:20: Arrived at St. Paul’s station, of course I’m early.... Looking around at people passing by, keeping my fashion critic senses sharp!
19:30: My beloved emerges from the Tube looking tired after a day’s work, our guests right after him. Should we go to the place or wander around the Cathedral first?
19:45: Walking around just made us hungrier, finally entering the restaurant!
YEY! We’re here!! Starving!
A lovely hostess receives us at the entrance, leading us to our table. It’s not easy to follow her –some of us are distracted by her looks (guess who of us), and all of us are distracted by the simple fact that the place is so beautiful, the view is hypnotizing, and our heads spin around the open kitchen that captivating scents and noises emanate from it. The hostess seats us on luxurious leather sofas around a huge marble table – let’s get on with it!
After giving our friends a short brief about what they should order and what they can pass (YG actually considered ordering veggie salad!), we decide on starters and mains for everybody; we’ll find out about the deserts only at the end of the meal... after all who knows how will we end this evening? We ordered my favourite wine in the last months – Gewürztraminer, a white mildly spicy sweetish wine, that will blend nicely with our starters (£45).
Service at this place is very light, un-assuming and at the right pace, not too quick but also not of the kind that makes you wonder if the waitress is dying to head for home or she misses her boyfriend and just now decided to call him instead of serving us... (or maybe that’s just my own fears).
20:05: We’ve finally made our decision!!! SHOOT:
For first I ordered Salmon Gravadlax – although the name sounds like a torture device used minioms of Queen Elizabeth (the 1st), it’s actually a light dish suitable for summer days when you don’t want to indulge too much before the food yet to come – slices of salmon with touches of sour cream, dill and some caviar (Yum), accompanied by a shot of Schnapps placed in the centre of the plate (£11) – a great start for the evening!
GG ordered another interesting starter – Crab Meat Salad (£12), this dish is also light and very well seasoned with a refreshing sense of sour named ‘Green Goddess Dressing’. In case you never heard about this, it’s a winning combination of sour cream, chive, capers, tarragon, a bit of lemon juice, and usually also anchovy. In my opinion, the menu should’ve mentioned that the dressing includes anchovy, many people don’t like finding this fish in their food... but who am I to argue with the enterprise called Jamie Oliver... anyway it was delicious.
For the centre of the table we ordered the restaurant’s famous bread platter (£4). All breads are baked here, they’re using very special techniques to create really special bread flavours that are delicious (of course) and you can’t find them in many other places. For example: black bread, not the one you buy in any shop, but bread that was baked in a coal oven so that it got a black crust bordering on burn with a strong taste that even reminds of stout rich beer.
20:15: Hello! Our starters are here! It’s awesome to see how dishes that are rather simple, which you can find their likes in more than one place nowadays, manage to get surprise cries out of us when they arrive to our table. The dishes are served in a very aesthetic way and their size is a compliment to the diner (and to the price).
21:00: Minimal wait between starters and mains, in the meantime we order another bottle of wine. As you can see from the pictures, all is left for us to do is to eat and enjoy!
My beloved had a hot date with a Pulled Pork Shoulder with barbeque sauce and jalapeño corn bread (£16). The dish’s ingredients give a ‘masculine’ impression (Pork, Shoulder, pulled out of it’s socket, with barbeque and jalapeno...) but actually the tastes blended in together in a nice way, the meat simply dissolved in the mouth. Interestingly, contrary to what you would expect from a meat-and-barbeque restaurant, this dish (and others) doesn’t look like a Slab of Meat, but is designed like a rustic farmer’s dinner meal, made suitable to appear on a Central London table – all that was left for us to do at the end of the meal was to pick the corn bread up and wipe the plate clean.
YG ordered a main that on first glance you wouldn’t think it’s very special – fillet steak with bone marrow, smoked béarnaise, chalets and herb salads (£35). The steak was made just about right but what drove the dish (or the diner) skyward was the bone marrow that was juicy and full of strong meaty taste, exactly what this dish needed.
21:40: As part of the restaurant’s amazing location, we don’t really have a choice but to go out to the roof and enjoy the scenery of this gorgeous city on the background of the bright night sky (yes, summer does arrive to London, for around two weeks every year).
22:00: Tired but happy, we couldn’t really avoid the deserts, so we ordered the Chocolate Nemesis cake (£8) – a mousse cake that melts in your mouth and melts away any feeling of guilt of eating all this chocolate. The cake’s not too heavy, just about right, and you sense immediately that the person who thought of this cake had consummate chocolate-lovers in his mind. The chocolate was sublime and so was the rich Mascarpone ball with some orange zest, we couldn’t ask for more.
The coffee came right on time to help us close off this meal and gave us just enough energy to pay the bill and drag ourselves home.
22:30: Tired, a little bit tipsy but very happy, looking at the bill in shock, not being able to believe how did this happen to us, but not feeling bad for a moment. It was a great dinner for two couples that proved again that Master Jamie and his partner know exactly what they’re doing and make us spread the word onward all the way back home to Israel.
Next week – August Bank Holiday and a hot date with Chef Rick Stein in Cornwall – we’re going to stand in the queue with all the other fans, you can’t really book a table in advance at this place...
How to get there?
Tube: St. paul's
Tube: St. paul's
20 One New Change Passage
London EC4M 9AG
TEL: 020 3005 8555
WWW.BARBECOA.COM
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