Weekend in London

Katy and I were in London last weekend to go see Avenue Q. The show rocked. It was brilliant. It was wrong at so many levels but that didn't prevent us from laughing our asses off.

With songs like Everyone's A Little Bit Racist and The Internet Is For Porn, you have a clue what I'm talking about. The Bad Idea Bears, as pictured above, have the best lines in the show. Imagine two of the cutest little things you've ever seen yelling shit like “She's wasted! Take her home! Yaaaaaaaay!” and “Absinthe daiquiris!!!”

We bought the soundtrack CD, but I'm really going to have to be careful if I hum it at the office :)

Katy had booked us into the Hilton in Mayfair. I'm always surprised between the discrepancy between hotel ratings and value-for-money between North America and European hotels. This was supposed to be a 4-star hotel. It had no air conditioning and the rooms were stifling. For the same price and star rating, we can get an executive suite at the Casino Hilton in Hull, with marble bathroom and king sized bed overlooking the water fountain… It's just one of those things that is consistently different, but what can you do.

Mayfair is an interesting mix of money and minge. We saw homeless men crashing in the doorway of a Porsche dealership. We walked by a chauffeur in full dress livery and then ran into a fat guy with missing teeth coming out of a Tesco express…

As a side note, London in the summertime is stupidly busy. Every other time I've been there, it's been off-season – usually in winter. You know what? It's so much better! The crowds this weekend were stifling. You couldn't walk without somebody bumping into you. Piccadilly Circus smelled like shit and piss. We didn't go to the Aquarium as we'd intented to because of the queues and we couldn't be assed because we knew we wouldn't have a good time once we were in. We decided to avoid the crowds and keep to the smaller streets. We went and had a pint at the Sherlock Holmes pub off of Trafalgar Square. We went to Fortnum & Mason and browsed stuff we would never be able to afford (or want, really). We managed to have a good time regardless of the crowds.

We also ate waay too damn much. Friday night, we went to Shogun (Adams Row, Mayfair, London, W1K 2HP). It's a really, really good Japanese restaurant hidden in the basement of a hotel but damn! It was some of the best traditional food and sushi that I've had in a while. I had seafood soup served in a teapot (cute!), followed by sushi and finished off by sauteed pork with ginger and scallions. Katy had a steamed omelette with shrimp and veg served in a gaiwan, sushi and duck teriyaki.

On Saturday night, we went to Latium (21 Berners Street, London, W1T 3LP). It's a really cosy little Italian place off of Tottenham Court Road. I strongly recommend the place. A four course menu, with antipasti, pasta, main course and dessert is about £40 per person. We bought a bottle of wine that seemed never-ending (as well as glasses of sparkling water). The meal lasted well over two hours of excellent food – and they kept bringing more of it out all the time! I had steak tartare, tagliatelle with morels and pancetta, veal with runner beans and a trio of sorbets and gelato. Katy had a mozarella salad, spinach taglioni with courgette and shrimp, lamb with asparagus and roast potatoes. In a word, num!!!!! Like I said, go try the place while it's still undiscovered :)

I have to say that we found both restaurants because of a website that a co-worker recommended. It's a good thing too, because we would never have found either restaurant on our own. Both were a bit out of the way, but they were well worth it!