Date Day

I love day dates, especially in London. There's literally so much you can do - just get the tube to a random area and stroll around, discovering hidden shops, cute cafes and swanky restaurants. Last weekend the sun made a rare-ish January appearance so we wrapped up in lots of layers and headed out! 

I took Dima to Primrose Hill, this beautiful village-like area I had a shoot in a couple of weeks ago. This is yummy-mummy and posh dog territory - on every road there were at least 5 dogs happily bouncing along in the sunshine. We found the Ripe Kitchen, a cafe that generously let me change in their bathroom on the shoot day - they had 4 bowls of free cake samples so obviously I went back for more! 

Exceptional coffee and a vegan, gluten free cheesecake! 

Fuelled by coffee, we started our ascent up the hill..

Which was a lot tougher to walk up than it looks! 

But the views are worth it. And running down the hill of course! 

We just kept going straight, all the way through Regent's Park until we got to a tube station (which happened to be very very far away - we were walking for hours!)

I tried to take my polaroid camera out for a day trip, but it doesn't get on too well with the sunshine!

All that walking made us both extremely hungry - lucky that we found ourselves in Soho, surrounded by hundreds of restaurants. However generally eating out in London on the weekend looks a little something like this - 

A queue for the breakfast club at 2pm on a Saturday! It's good, but not that good! 

So it's a matter of searching out the just-opened-but-not-yet-on-timeout-london restaurants, the ones that stay secret for a couple of weeks before they either become fully booked for the next month or have a queue shivering in the cold outside all day, everyday. (Patty & Bun I'm looking at you and your amazing food hidden behind a constant hour long queue!)

First of all we tried out Bunnychow - a place I'd heard about quite a bit and thought they were based in Shoreditch's Box Park. They just opened a permanent restaurant in Soho! Bunnychow basically empty out reasonably sized loafs of bread and fill the innards with different delicious fillings - we went for meatballs. Other menu stand outs were the pulled pork, and the full english breakfast in a loaf. 

Highly recommended - their food was filling (more than enough to share one between two), reasonably priced (roughly £7 per loaf) and most importantly, perfect food for when it is freezing outside. The juices (above) were also some of the best I've had - particularly the plum and mint. Get the juice!

We purposefully shared one Bunnychow so we could find something else to try too - next up was Shoryu Ramen which was some of the best I've tried in London. 

The restaurant is teeny, hidden away in China Town and buzzing with the atmosphere of hot sizzling gyozas and steaming ramens being hurried around to hungry people. 

 

Try and get all of the above - from the fluffy bun stuffed with incredible pork, cooked to perfection gyozas and a filling ramen - it's a perfect meal.

Dima agrees! 

We finished off our mega-date at Pace Gallery, checking out some amazing photography before going home to play Crash Bandicoot all day - cultural! 

Date Night

Last night I took a well deserved break from studying and went into central London with Dima :)

First of all we went to Wright Brother's in Soho, after trying their oysters at 'Feast London' (AMAZING food festival) and loving them! There they were £5 for 3, and naturally their restaurant was alot more expensive.



Here they were more like 3 for £8 (minimum!) so definitely not on a student budget, but they were great. We got three sets; two undressed and one dressed with coriander and japalenos, The French ones were absolutely out of this world! 

However I wasn't too impressed with the restaurant overall, the staff seem like they kind of want to rush you out of there (we stayed for half an hour!) and are quite pressurizing to buy things. But if you want amazing oysters, these were much better than Harrods Oyster Bar. Overall it came to £46 which was quite steep considering we only had the above and one cocktail (£10!) - I dread to think what dinner would cost. 





 

Then we set off for a long walk around London and ended up in Leicester Square. It was fairly warm and a Friday evening and there were huge groups of people standing outside the pubs, spilling into the roads and I got a quick vision of what my life would be like working in London. I kind of try to avoid central on the weekends, both clubbing and otherwise because the amounts of people that come out to play are astounding.

 
We went to La Bodega Negra cafe; which you can't reserve so I was expecting queues but luckily they just squeezed us in without waiting!



 The restaurant (on the other side of the road) is great (but also very very expensive) but they are almost always fully booked! After last time I had an idea of what was good so we went for the pork belly tacos (amazing), chicken quesadelias and corn salad. The tacos were much, much smaller portions than the restaurant but they were still good. 


 

I also got a mohito which was fab 
 

and there was a mix up with the salad - they brought us another one instead of the one we ordered (they tried to bring us a lot of plates we didn't order) so they gave us a complimentary tequila shot each! 

 

overall that also came to £46 (expensive times!) but it was much more worth it than the Oysters. 


After that, we went on our way to Adventure Bar in Covent Garden as I was hit by an idea of brilliance, on their website if you sign up for the newsletter then you get £10 off (most cocktails are £10) and there aren't any scams ie having to buy another drink, only on monday's between 2-3 pm! So we went with our vouchers and claimed our drinks :D 
 
 

we got a zombie (£11) and a Lemon Cheeseshake (£11) - I had the idea that Dima being the Russian who can drink anything would have the absinthe fuelled Zombie and I could elegantly sip on my cake cocktail. But it was rather the other way around. 

Both were great, and if you go I recommend the ice cream sundae cocktail!