Medlar

Medlar is my friend Stephanie's favourite restaurant - for someone who goes out to eat daily this is saying a lot. She had a wonderful birthday party there last year, and I have been back regularly ever since! Based in Chelsea, with a michelin star to it's name, you would expect small, overpriced portions and pretentious staff but Medlar couldn't be further from that image. Their staff are all absolutely lovely, there is no pretentious-ness at all and the food is mindblowingly excellent. There is also SO much of it that it is very, very difficult to move afterwards (in a good way.)

Medlar operate a three course, fixed price menu for dinner which is £45. A mid-week lunch of the same menu is £27 so if you are looking for a cheaper option definitely opt for that - there is no difference at all except it is a little less busy! It really is excellent value for what you get. 

I went along with Jade last week, and we had the most amazing meal ever. I started with tuna tartare (Tuna tartare with ponzu dressing, tobikko, preserved lemon, avocado purée and crispy garlic) (above), Jade opted for the crab raviolo. The menu here changes monthly, but a couple of star dishes remain constant which include the crab raviolo and the duck egg tart - both of which are amazing. You also start with complimentary bread which is AMAZING - get the bread!! 

For mains I chose the 'Roast Cornish hake with baby violet artichokes, mousseron, fennel purée, sea beet and pennywort'.  This was amazing and also very healthy - a welcome respite from the rest of my eating lately! The different types of fish offset eachother perfectly and the avocado addition was really good. 

Jade went for the 'Roast guinea fowl with summer truffle pesto, sautéed wings, broad beans, St George and cauliflower purée' which she really enjoyed as well, and couldn't finish! 

Now for the dessert. I highly recommend going with a group of friends and ordering one each, to pass around the table as we saw on the table infront of us. We went for 'Passion fruit sorbet with coconut tuile' (above) which was really fresh and tangy, and the 'Chocolate tart with salted caramel and praline parfait', pictured below which was one of the best desserts I have ever eaten. It is literally my ideal dessert - rich, gooey chocolate cake with a splattering of crust on the side, salted caramel sauce drops which were AMAZING and some incredible chocolate chip ice cream. I was sorely tempted to order another straight away, but by this point had already unbuttoned my jeans so thought it was probably better not to. A must try. 

It's ok though - just when you think it is all over, out come the homemade marshmallows (orange flavoured this time, really unusually great) and amazing chocolate truffles. It is things like this which make Medlar stand out - little touches which shows they understand the turmoil of finishing a meal and thinking there is nothing else but the darkness of a food coma lying ahead. They fill this longing hole with delicious complimentary treats, and it goes down a storm. 

If you are looking for somewhere to impress a date, or just a really excellent quality meal with brilliant service, Medlar is definitely the place to come. I think it is also my favourite restaurant in London - I have never eaten anything there that didn't make me convulse in ecstasy so it is a pretty good bet for a great meal.  

Work

Since I finished exams, I seem to have been going full force and have replaced one kind of work with two others. I love what I am doing now much more than spending my days cooped up in the library with books though!

First up is work with Our Honest Foods - I am running their blog and generally writing cute things for them, which I love doing - a combination of writing and eating! Me and Lisa are running the blog (which can be found here) which is great also, working with your best friend :) They are a really awesome company selling Office and Home boxes of healthy, British snacks - I reviewed the box in the past (here) and they are just really great to work with. Hopefully it will help me decide what to do in the future! The blog is updated daily with reviews of different (all literally incredible) snacks so be sure to check it out :)

Then there is the complete opposite of that sort of work - modeling. I have made it on to the asos and urban outfitters websites (inside screams) - it is so much fun shooting for both of them! Definitely my favourite kind of modeling work - easy, quick and fun. Everyone that works at Asos and Urban is so lovely and amazing to work with, I feel very lucky! 

I also have had castings everyday, which the sporadic British sunshine has helped greatly! These can be quite exhausting, but I made some new model friends this week which was really nice and makes the travelling around from one place to another (to be seen for one minute!) much more fun. Next week looks pretty full on too, but I would rather be super busy than doing nothing!

What are your plans for after uni? xxx 

Bodo's Schloss

Bodo's Schloss has been on my to-go-to list for too long. Happily, last week I rectified this and the club is now firmly on my favourites list. I am a sucker for a good theme and cheesy music - what can I say? Bodo's is alpine-ski themed and they take it quite seriously. There are horns poking out of every wall (naughty!) and 

skis just casually lying against the walls. 

We started with a three course meal - unfortunately the food was so delicious we scoffed it all down too quickly for pictures, but I managed a lone picture of a rather excellent apple strudel. 

The food here is the best I have had at a club. Sharing style, we started with a ham board (I'm sure there is a more sophisticated name for that, alas it doesn't spring to mind), hummus, crusty bread and gazpacho (a cold tomato soup) and for mains we feasted on schnitzel, salad and delicious stuffed rolls. The food was all really excellent, I would definitely recommend eating here before partying ze night away ski-style. 

At around 11, the back doors open up to a huge extra room, complete with a DJ in a ski lift. There were already a couple of people dancing away like they were having the time of their life, and on closer inspection I saw it was The Londoner (and her insanely beautiful friend Phoebe), whose blog I am mildly obsessed with. It has literally been the biggest help ever whilst living in London - every recipe or recommendation is always incredible. So safe to say, upon seeing her I retained my cool composure and WENT MILDLY INSANE and embarrassingly told her I love her blog major amounts and asked for a picture. I have met a few famous people, but the one I was most excited about seeing was Rosie Londoner. That is probably quite  really sad but she was so lovely and only mildly freaked out by my fan-girldom. 

My favourite thing about Bodo's is definitely the music. They play classic cheese, 2000 pop hits like Beyonce and Kelis which are the best to dance along to drunkenly. Also there are some remixes mixed in which stops it from becoming too 'school disco'ish.

This unfortunately also encourages very cringey alcohol fuelled dancing and singing...

... my favourite kind! 

If you are looking for pure FUN, Bodo's Schloss is the place to go and get schlossed. It is impossible to defy the fun atmosphere, especially when you are with a great group of people! 

Cronuts in the park

This week has been super busy again with work and castings, but I had a random day off mid week and it was luckily sunny! I grabbed my friends and we made the most of it. 

First up was a trip to Buckingham Palace, a place I had never been before! It was a liiittle bit underwhelming (I sort of had in mind tea and scones with the Queen) but we saw the impressive changing of the guards. After this exhausting tourism work, we rewarded ourselves with some incredible doughnuts. 

Dum Dum Doughnuts have luckily opened up a doughnutterie in Harrods food hall - their shop in Shoreditch BoxPark is sold out daily by the afternoon so this is great news! These doughnuts... are amazing. They are literally the best I have ever eaten, and I'm not even much of a doughnut fan. They bake them instead of fry so you can sort of kid yourself they are 'healthy(ier)' for you than say.. a fried doughnut? Even in the midst of my super healthy eating, I would give it up at any point for one of these. 

The 'Zebra' cronut. I had this for the first time a couple of weeks ago with Dima and I haven't really been able to stop thinking about it since. It is just INCREDIBLE - layers of croissant and doughnut inbetween chocolate buttercream arghhhh so good. It is definitely a must try if you are in London, the other cronuts I've tried have been distinctly lacklustre after all of the hype but this exceeds it. It is also around £4 which is pretty good value for something so fab yet generally overpriced. 

We found ourselves in Hyde Park munching away happily and enjoying the sun. 

Nicola also got a creme brulee doughnut which was amazing - she actually preferred this to the cronut which is saying something. 

working off the doughnuts!



If you are still doing exams, don't worry they will be over sooner than soon! It's already mid-May, I can't wait for everyone to be freee so they can come out and play :)

 

Summer Days

Hasn't the sun been AMAZING? (for the past two days - it is probably gone for another couple of months now!) Luckily it was on the weekend, so me and Nicola headed down to Victoria Park for yet another picnic and frolic in the sunshine :)

 

Victoria Park is such a nice place to run - we used to run down this path when we lived in University, literally opposite! You can get there from Mile End tube station.

Nicola brought along a ridiculously amazing apple pie she whipped up - I ended up eating a LOT of it (theres two more layers under there!)

And attempted to work it off with some bridges!

We then headed to the Olympic Park - the swimming pool there has just opened up and it is incredible. For us, having lived in Cyprus, when it is warm we can usually just dip into our pools at home or go to the sea. So it was really nice to be able to casually go for a dip in the Olympic pool! It is huge and was quite empty, we paid £4.50 by pre-booking here.

We then explored the Olympic Park - I had never been properly before and it is looking pretty good! 

  

 

We had a lot of fun playing in the fountains...

Probably too much fun, we got all wet again after swimming! 

But it was seriously beautiful at sunset - it would be the perfect date spot (I had my best friend as the perfect date with me too luckily! :)) 

Even though I'm still not sure what the giant red statue is meant to represent?

A perfect day finished by a perfect sunset - I am SO happy that Summer has finally arrived!

Life after uni so far!

Since finishing uni, I have been non-stop working! I am taking a year out to do modeling and hopefully get lots of experience in different things to find out what it is exactly I would like to do in the future! It is so difficult when you haven't had a job to know what you want to do, so I'm very lucky that I have modeling to do in the meantime whilst I figure it out :) 

The first day after my exams I had a graduate show for Rochester University, where all the final fashion graduate students showed their collections. There was three shows each with about twenty different designers, lasting for one hour each! We were definitely worked very hard!! 

Some of the clothes were pretty amazing though! 

It was held in Spitalfields church, slightly random but I think it worked (and just 15 minutes from my house so no complaints here!) 

and then some very interesting outfits such as the above! The bhurka looked incredible on the catwalk!

The next day was more graduate shows for Westminster uni, so another long day followed by castings! 

Friday was a shoot I had been looking forward to for a very long time! Asos! I am literally the laziest person ever, and shopping in London can generally be quite hectic and insane because of the sheer amount of people, so I generally do all my shopping on Asos. I went to a casting before my exams started and luckily had my first shoot for them last week, which was incredible :) 

By the most amazing stroke of luck ever, it happened to be the day of their office sample sale (once a month) - a room full of asos clothes in my size, priced between £1-3!!! It was pure heaven  and also a mad dash around in my lunch hour to try and buy as much as I could with the cash I had on me! I returned to the shoot one happy model :) Everyone that worked there was lovely and I had the best day ever. 

This was my treat for finishing exams (and uni!) - not sure how I have lived without an ipad before now! Good luck if you still have exams, they will be over soon and Summer will be here! xxx