Dinner 1: Homemade Indian food from the S family
Coming off an 8-hour flight to land in a country where you’ll be living farther from your family than you’ve ever lived is an anxious experience. I can recommend nothing better to remedy this than a greeting from the family of a good friend. Now, this is no ordinary family. The S family is one that I’ve never met before. They immediately wanted to make sure I was safe and sound, and came bearing a bag of homemade Indian stew, rice, yogurt. The S family is easy to hug.
Dinner 2: Spuntino
To celebrate my arrival and Mouse’s new job, we struck out for Soho on a Sunday night to eat at Spuntino. The industrial room is tiny, with most of the seating around a large open bar, but the food is momentous. The menu consists of share plates, and we pretty much ordered it all: deep fried stuffed olives, aubergine chips, 4 varieties of sliders (bone marrow, pulled pork, lamb, and mackeral), an amazing fennel salad, an even more amazing calamari and ink salad, a creamy macaroni and cheese, fluffy shoestring fries, sprouted broccoli with romesco sauce, and a delicate little pizza. I paired my meal with one of the most delicious clover clubs I’ve ever tasted, and followed it all with their “peanut butter and jelly sandwich”, a dessert of jelly sandwiched between two peanut butter flavoured ice cream wedges. It’s intense and well worth the effort of remembering to wear a skirt with an elastic waist the next time that I go. I also had a bite of the whisky chocolate cake (very boozy) and the quince ice cream (very lovely and exactly what quince should taste like). All in all, yum.
Dinner 3: A quick-fix English dinner
By Monday, I was exhausted from jet lag and banking. I just wanted to stay home and Skype with my husband all evening. And this I did, with the help of some lovely English supermarket delights: a bowl of organic split pea and ham soup and a toaster potato waffle. Both were lovely, but the potato waffle did steal the show. Why are these not available in Canada? Why did it take 29 years and a trans-Atlantic flight for me to have one? There is no justice, and I’m determined to spend the next few months righting this wrong.
Dinner 4: Tastes like home (sort of)
Four days in and I’m feeling brutally homesick. It’s started to rain in London, which only made me think more of Vancouver. I was tempted to stay at home and wallow, but I decided to get out of the house, hop on a bus, and head to Silk Road in Camberwell, a restaurant which has received some great blog and newspaper reviews. Imagining my mother was at the table with me, I ordered a plate of garlic bok choy and steamed dumplings. The waiter didn’t seem very impressed, but I was homesick and I wanted my mom, okay? When the dishes came, I realized that I had been so spoiled by the Chinese food in Vancouver. I’m sorry, London, but Silk Road does not compare. This ain’t no Congee Noodle House. The dumplings were overly salted and the bok choy was limp. It wasn’t bad food, and on homesick, rainy day, I’ll take it.
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