48 Hours of Eating, Drinking in London

As you may know by now, I was in London earlier this week attending the “World’s 50 Best Restaurants” awards ceremony. While I was there, I tried to make the most of my extremely short trip. I had lunch at an amazing regional Indian restaurant – Veeraswamy (no relation to Veerasway in Chicago) – the oldest Indian restaurant in London (1926). I also got a reservation for lunch at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, located in the Mandarin Oriental next to Hyde Park. Blumenthal’s Fat Duck (located in Bray, about an hour from London) came in 5th this year; Dinner… is his first restaurant in London, and our lunch was very good. Squeezed in a breakfast at the posh Wolseley on Piccadilly, where I had my first haggis (reminded me of kishke my mom used to make); then managed to slip into Purl for a really unique cocktail experience that would make The Violet Hourlook positively old fashioned (you’ll see what I mean in the video above). Our group also managed to have dinner at Pollen Street Social, the latest restaurant from Jason Atherton, which proved to me yet again, that there’s so much more to London’s dining scene than Gordon Ramsay or fish & chips.