Ducksoup, Soho

My excuse for the horrendously bad photos to come: Ducksoup is DARK, and TINY, with hungry Soho cool kids occupying every inch of space, eagerly waiting for a table, or waiting for the hanger steak, like us, for almost an hour. There’s a vinyl player right behind us where if you fancy you can bring your own records and put them on, and next to us is the (all natural) wine list, scribbled on the tile wall. In front of us, the menu, a handwritten piece of paper with today’s dishes. Bar snacks (£3.50), small plates (£7) or large plates (£14). I am excited because Ducksoup really is very atmospheric, loud and buzzy and fun, and the menu looks good.

We order:

Duck rillette (£3.50), good but not brilliant.

White gazpacho (£3.50), really quite lovely, very garlicky in the best of ways.

Pork short ribs with ceps (£5), a winner, incredibly tender, rich and delicious

Chopped hanger steak (£7), took very close to an hour from ordering to receiving but well worth the wait; lots of flavour, tip top quality meat. I wanted MORE of this, but would’ve upset the long queue if I decided to wait another hour for an extra portion.

Grilled quail with aubergine and yogurt (£7), another very well done dish, quail perfectly charred, aubergine which made me so very happy to be alive and able to eat, as aubergines always tend to do when they are done right.

For dessert, we shared the creme caramel because the waitress recommended it as “REALLY good”; it wasn’t, unfortunately. While perfectly cooked, it was just a little bit too unexciting to warrant its £5 price tag.

All in all, I felt Ducksoup was a bit overrated and overpriced. Don’t get me wrong, we had some really good dishes, and I’d love to come back and try more, but the food was just not as exciting as nearby competitors. They don’t take reservations, nothing wrong with that, but unlike say Spuntino or Barrafina where long waiting times are made pleasant by a decent long drinking table along the wall, Ducksoup lacks an obvious waiting area, leaving you awkwardly holding on to your glass in front of the door, leaning over other diners’ tables a little bit too much with the feeling of constantly being in the way.

Ducksoup is still new and I will definitely pay it another visit in a couple months; I love the daily menu updates on Twitter, the solid cooking and brilliant produce, and hip and happening atmosphere. Not sure if I’ll ever be able to get a table again, though.

Ducksoup
41 Dean Street, W1D 4PY

Bubble tea adventures in Soho: Bubbleology and Boba Jam

Is bubble tea the most fun drink on this planet? Yes, yes it is. My bestest friend (appearing as the bubble girl poster girl in the photos in this post) has been telling me about this drink, which she obsessivly drinks every time she leaves for Hong Kong, for a long time and recently we realised that bubble tea shops were popping up (ha ha HA) all over Soho. Obviously, a bubble tea adventure was in order.

Bubble tea, originally from Taiwan, is a sweet and milky tea drink with tapioca ‘bubbles’ (chewy, slimey, amazing). There’s plenty of flavourings, like passion fruit, coconut, chocolate, honeydew, etc etc in all eternity. The most common one, the plain ‘pearl milk tea’ is what my friend recommends and chooses.

On our search for the best bubble tea, we visit two Soho shops. The teas are £3.25-3.75 at both.

Bubbleology
Bubbleology, located on Rupert Street, is decorated like a lab and the ‘bubbleologists’ wear lab coats and ditz around with funky looking little machines; the girl serving us, super cute in pigtails, is all smiles and bubbles. There are a couple seats inside the shop.

We order: assam pearl milk tea and me, coconut milk tea with extra passion fruit bubbles, he he. Choosing what flavour to get is fun; ordering is fun; piercing the plastic film with the fat straw provided is fun, but not nearly as fun as drinking it: super sweet, coconutty, chewy bubbles tasting of tea, slimey bubbles bursting with passion fruit juice. Very addictive.

Boba Jam
Boba Jam, on Shaftesbury Avenue, looks according to friend more like a traditional bubble tea shop. It’s small, though apparently far from as small as the HK ones. We have by now recruited another curious friend and who just like me is in awe of the choice and the incredible FUN-NESS of bubble tea. I get a matcha flavoured milk tea, friend number two flips out over the choices and ends up with a peach honeydew green tea with soya pudding and plum bubbles. We are so very cool and experimental! Both our teas are mindblowing. I am currently on a mad sugar high and will never be able to go to sleep, but it doesn’t matter… this summer will be all about bubbles.

Cay Tre, Soho

For the last two years I have been living in close vicinity of Kingsland Road’s ‘pho mile’ and like any sensible person would I have developed an obsession with Vietnamese food; weekly dinners, takeouts and a great deal of forcing friends not yet pho possessed to join in on the fun. My favourite is still Mien Tay (though on my recent visits their pho hasn’t been as good as it once was; still, cheap and cheerful and I am a big fan of BYO restaurants). For fancier occasions such as picky parents London visits, Viet Grill is incredible.  So hurrah! Cay Tre Soho, part of the same expanding ‘chain’ (including Viet Grill, Cay Tre Shoreditch and Keu) opened a while ago, giving me the opportunity to eat decent Vietnamese without dragging friends across town.

Located on Dean Street, Cay Tre Soho is slick and slightly more expensive than its Shoreditch counterparts. Here’s what we consumed:

Grilled aubergine with ground pork and nuoc cham. My incapability to ignore aubergine dishes on any menu made me order this; I didn’t regret it.

Dong du lamb chop curry, served with fun vermicelli ‘dumplings’.

Soft shell crab curry with dried tamarind and curry leaves. Nice and spicy, with a big crab plonked in the middle, I enjoyed this very much.

Pho bo. The pho was good, though far from the best I’ve ever had (I believe London’s best pho is cooked by Uyen at her Fernandez and Leluu cooking class; nothing else comes close).

We shared a pot of tea, and bill came to just over £40 for three people which I think is decent value. I liked Cay Tre’s Soho branch; it’s in a very convenient location, food’s good and you’re not rushed to finish it as I find is the case in many other Soho restaurants. Still, I think Viet Grill and Cay Tre Shoreditch offer dishes a bit more exciting. If you’re lazy and far from Kingsland Road, try it out, but if you want really really good Vietnamese, opt for Mien Tay, Song Que or Viet Grill.

Spuntino, Soho

This week has been food and drink madness – Hix on Tuesday, Zucca on Wednesday, and yesterday, Spuntino. Happiest week in a long time. And it continues to be a happy week: I am sat in my living room with a pretty amazing bottle of wine and great company, pork cheeks on the stove and loads of cheese in the fridge. So, Spuntino. Smack in the middle of peep show central I met up with the lovely Jing for drinking, nibbling and feeling hip and trendy in this newly opened, pretty awesome restaurant. Here’s what it looks like from Jing’s camera:

We arrived at 6pm so queuing wasn’t an issue – an hour later, it very much was. Here’s what we ate:

Aubergine fritters with fennel yogurt – me and fritters usually get along well, and this was no exception. I’d like to think that these were complimentary because we were looking particularly hungry and handsome.

Next up: truffled egg toast. Awesome! Smelled of truffle, tasted of truffle, I loved this, though my sweet dinner companion was not as convinced.

A beet salad with ricotta salata. And a beef and bone marrow slider which was great.

Last but most certainly not least: macaroni and cheese! Ahhhh, this was bloody ridiculous. I am semi-drunk and can’t get my words right but trust me – it’s good. Go get it!

While I just had a few of the many lovely-looking dishes on offer here, I loved it and can’t wait to go back. Wine’s cheap, cocktails are cheap, food’s cheap. Go, go, go!

How not to get rid of your caffeine addiction: central London’s best coffee

In the last few weeks of finishing up my dissertation I got into the habit of drinking mad amounts of coffee every day and since I handed in the damn thing last week I’ve been trying to cut down on the caffeine but this is proving to be a lot easier said than done. I’ve promised myself that this week is the last of excessive coffee consumption, then I will be drinking no more than three doubles a day. Seeing how this is my last week, I thought it appropriate to try out every single good coffeehouse I could find in central London, and after this experiment (8 coffees in an afternoon – I didn’t sleep very well that night) I hereby announce my 5 favourite coffee places in central London:

Monmouth Covent Garden, 27 Monmouth Street
What can I say, I love Monmouth of all my heart, I have coffee either here or at the Borough branch almost every day and I’ve never had a bad cup. In addition, they’re a lot cheaper than many other places (£1.35 for a double espresso!) and they’re such nice people…

Kaffeine, 66 Great Titchfield Street
Goodlooking little place; great outside tables for watching Marylebone mums parading down the street, and most importantly, very good coffee

LJ Coffee House, 3 Winnett Street
Loved my espresso here (which was served with a glass of water, I like that), great atmosphere, charming barista. And sofas and Scrabble, does it get any better?

Tapped & Packed, 26 Rathbone Place
Never been here before my coffee adventure – loved it – and they told me about their home brewing classes which I’d love to go to and hopefully will soon, sounded great.

Fernandez & Wells, 16a St Anne’s Court
Very, very good espresso (the strongest of all I tried), and great food.

The others I tried – Milk Bar, Flat White and Store Street Espresso – were all good but they didn’t blow me away. I’d love to find more good coffee though, so suggestions very appreciated! Before stopping the coffee madness I am planning on a big coffee round in Shoreditch and Hackney too, then it’s green tea and water for me for a while…. hmm.

Koya, Soho

I love Koya. I really do. I don’t care that I have to queue for 45 minutes every time I decide to treat myself to an amazing bowl of udon noodles. I don’t care that my questionable chopstick skillz + slippery, hot noodles = udon broth face mask. They’re really the most delicious thing on earth. Well, I say that about quite a few things, but you have to go try them out!

Saba – with smoked mackerel and green leaves

Kinoko – mushrooms and walnut mis