V&A, Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington

The V&A calls itself “The world’s leading museum of Art and Design”, a bold claim. In a city that has many of the greatest museums in the world, the Victoria and Albert is among the best of them. It is certainly my favourite. The permanent collection is vast, with almost 3 million objects and the variety of displays is huge, in terms of time -from antiquity to the present day, geography – literally all over the world and, ideas – ancient Japanese art, through early 20th century arts and craft, to current video game design.

London is very lucky in that most of its museums and galleries are free. The V&A charge for some of their exhibitions but the permanent collection is always free. There are lunchtime lectures most Thursdays, which are free, and these are on a wide variety of topics, recent examples range from “The Christmas Story in Late Medieval and Renaissance Paintings” (I admit that sounded a bit dry, but it wasn’t!), to “Beatrix Potter” and “Hallyu” about popular culture in South Korea.

They have free music concerts – the last time I went, there was a pianist, Ivan Moshchuk, playing Schubert, in Gallery 87. There are also tours of different parts of the collection, varying in subject from Female Voices, through African Heritage, Fashion, and Theatre and Performance.

The collection is far too big to do in one day. So, you will probably need to choose the areas that you are most interested in and save the rest for another day. They have a really good theatre area, very hands on with costumes to dress up in, excellent if you bring children. Their gold and silver collection is remarkable, there is a solid gold door from a Kyiv cathedral, that had been given to them by Catherine the Great. I’m not sure how it managed to get to be in the collection of the V&A, but it is remarkable nonetheless.

There is a huge room dedicated to jewelry. The windows of one side of the second floor are covered inside with stained glass. There is a collection of ancient Chinese ceramics and of Philip Treacy hats. They are strong on fashion, from 16th century underwear to Alexander McQueen evening dresses. There is a display on the history of the mobile phone, it is surprising to see things that you have owned in a museum collection. It made me think “Have I still got one of those in a drawer somewhere?” There is a room of 1960s and 1970s futuristic furniture, which is truly amazing.

The cafe is fantastic, both in terms of the food it sells and its decor. The central seating area is the earliest ever museum cafe, decorated in the bright colorful style of a Parisian Cafe, but with English tin glazed majolica tiles. It is still in remarkably good condition. There are two slightly smaller seating rooms, one decorated by Edward John Poynter and one by William Morris off to either side. The food ordering area is late 20th Century with the sharp clean lines and muted colours of the time. Even if you are not intending to eat you should certainly walk through.

As you may have guessed, I really like this museum and if you are only going to visit one museum in London (but don’t only visit one – see The Wallace Collection, The Science Museum and Natural History Museum too, if you can) then this should be the one. I am certainly not going to dispute their claim to be “The world’s leading museum of art and design”. If you get the opportunity, you should definitely go.

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Joe Allen, Burleigh St, Covent Garden

Joe Allen has been in London since 1977. I first went there in about 1979 and it has been, on and off, one of my favourite restaurants in town ever since then. When I heard that the building it was in, had been bought and that it would be moving, I was disappointed and worried. They found new premises very close to the old venue, and they reopened in 2018. COVID restrictions hit London soon after and last week was the first time that I had managed to go since the move.

The new Joe Allen is almost the same as the old Joe Allen and that is a very good thing. The atmosphere is still intimate, they turn the lack of natural light into a positive. White tablecloths and theatre posters offset the darker decoration. The music is showtunes and old songs but at a low level so as not to interrupt conversation. The service is really good, attentive without being intrusive, I have to say that is one thing that has improved since the 1980s.

The menu has changed a little, while I was sad to see that the black bean soup is no longer on, there are equally interesting things on there to replace it. The type of food that it does remains the same – unpretentious, comfort food done with style. The menu is short but varied, classic dishes done well. The restaurant caters to people attending the nearby theatres and gets busy both before the shows and after the curtains fall, so if you want to eat late, you should book to ensure you get a table. The cocktails are good, and the wine list has a reasonable selection. It is also pretty good value for its position right between the Strand and Covent Garden. We had a lovely meal, and I fully intend to return.

Treasure Hunt, Hidden City Adventures

Hidden City Adventures provide an option of three treasure hunts taking you around different parts of London, guided by clues sent to your mobile phone. The one we chose to do was Moriarty’s Game, a Sherlock Holmes type mystery that led us around Fitzrovia and Mayfair.

The walks are set in the real world and do involve you interacting with various people along the way -such as going up to a barista in a certain coffee shop and telling them that the white knight sent you (not an actual clue, by the way!). It will involve real detective work and the clues are quite challenging, but this all adds to the sense of achievement when you actually figure them out. You should think of the experience as a day out, rather than a brisk walk, because although we covered a distance of 3km, it took us around three hours with breaks for drinks or snacks as we sat and worked on the various clues.

The games have been set up with great care by people who are interested in London because they bring you through surprising areas and spaces that you would not otherwise see. I have lived in London almost my entire life and there were some places that I didn’t realise existed right in the heart of town. I would say, that it is a social activity – best undertaken with at least two or possibly a small group – as working out the fiendish clues together can be a fun, bonding experience. Also, you should be aware that you will need to add the cost of stopping for coffee or drinks, two or three times during the walk, to your budget for the day.

Having said that, this is a great day out, it involves a small amount of exercise, that you can take at your own pace. It has great puzzles that will stimulate your brain. It is a good social activity, that involves interacting with both unknown people and members of your group, you get a nice sense of achievement when you complete it…. and most of all it is fantastic fun!

Jazz Brunch at Ronnie Scott’s

Ronnie Scott’s has been at the heart of the London Jazz scene for over 60 years. It opened in 1959 and has hosted many of the world’s most famous musicians in that time and continues to do so now. During the week they host shows in the late afternoon and evening, staying open until 3am. However, on Sundays they have and afternoon session between noon and 4pm, they serve brunch, and they have a live band playing between 1pm and 3pm.

This session is usually relaxed swing, and they serve a lunch menu – what better way to spend a chilled Sunday afternoon. If you wish to eat there is an extra charge, but the food is good quality, and the service was fast and unobtrusive on the day we were there. Once you have bought your seat ticket there is no pressure to buy either food or alcohol, the waiters refill your glasses with still water through the show.

On the Sunday I went, the music was of the highest quality, a set of Wayne Shorter songs, from his time with the Miles Davis band. Every seat in the intimate venue has a good view of the stage and the sound quality is what you would expect from one of the most famous jazz clubs in the world. The décor is dark, and the lights are low, the whole place is geared to showing off the band on stage to their best effect.

The sunshine is a shock when you leave at 4pm but it is a very pleasant way to spend a Sunday afternoon!

Brinkley’s Kitchen, Bellevue Road, Wandsworth, London SW17

Wandsworth is a suburb of South London that is well served with places to eat. Bellevue Road in particular is an attractive road with the broad expanse of Wandsworth Common along one side, and an array of restaurants, pubs, artisan tea rooms and independent shops along the other. Brinkley’s Kitchen is near the top of this road, we chose it for a late lunch on a Sunday afternoon.

The restaurant is decorated in a smart contemporary manner. The photos on its website show it as very bright and airy, but the blinds were all drawn on the afternoon we were there. There was no tablecloth on our table for three, but it does have linen napkins, nice cutlery and glasses. The brunch menu has good choice, we opted for roast beef and a steak. The wines by the glass had a more limited selection, for example they only had one rose. When I asked the waiter what it was like – as I didn’t know it – he told me it was very good. I said I was hoping for a more descriptive reply, he just said “you will love it”. So, I asked to taste before I chose and it was fine, although I suspect the whole bottle cost a fraction of what they charged for the glass.

The food was good but unremarkable. The beef was overcooked for my taste but the gravy was nice. When I pay top end prices for a Sunday roast, I would expect the Yorkshire pudding to be freshly prepared. These had clearly been made earlier and reheated. The ribeye was okay and the chips were hot and fresh. When my friend asked for tomato sauce for her chips, they brought a bottle of ketchup to the table, at least it was Heinz. It came without the lid, so much hitting the bottom of the bottle was required to get any out.

The service was entertaining, every different waiter who came to the table enquired “How is your day going?” which became a little Stepford Wives creepy after the sixth time of asking, especially after the busboy asked it twice in five minutes without waiting for a reply. I didn’t like the fact that they brought us the bill without us asking for it, I felt they were rushing us to finish our drinks.

Overall, Brinkley’s Kitchen served us reasonable quality pub food, but charged high end restaurant prices. In an area, indeed even a street, where there are so many fine places to eat, it will not be difficult to find somewhere that gives far better value for money.

Porches Velho, Porches, Algarve, Portugal

Porches Velho is a restaurant that could be called a hidden gem. Porches is an attractive village about three kilometres inland from the Southern Algarvian coast, between Carvoeiro and Armacao De Pera. It is quiet and calm, with narrow cobbled streets and is relatively untouristed, even in the height of summer. The area is famous for its pottery and the local workshops are certainly worth a visit. However, the largest of these are on the nearby N125 and not so many people go into the village itself.

The village has a pretty church. Its bells rang (8pm on a Wednesday, if you would like to try to recreate the effect) as we walked up the hill to the restaurant and a sliver of moon shone over its steeple, making us feel a little like we had stepped into a spaghetti western, so the romantic scene was set even before we entered the restaurant. The room itself has high vaulted ceilings, it is a 200 year old converted wine cellar. It has thick whitewashed walls decorated sparsely with antique agricultural equipment, tiles and old fashioned lamps. It oozes Portuguese tradition from every beam.

Porches Velho is a “Restaurante Tipico Potugues” which means that it serves classic Portuguese food. The tables are dressed in white linen with white napkins and soon after you are shown to your table the waiter brings the couvert dishes, fish paste, olives, pickled carrots and pickled beetroot, also a basket of sliced local bread with oil and butter. The wines are all Portuguese and there is a full list to choose from.

The starters consist of fish, soup or vegetarian dishes. We had a Portuguese Gazpacho and the vegetable soup. Both were excellent, the vegetable was thick and hot and the Gazpacho was spicy and juicy. The main course menu has many traditional dishes. Rabbit Cataplana, Alentejo Lamb and chicken casserole are among the interesting choices.

We went for the Old Portuguese Style Steak and the Medallions of Black Pork Tenderloin. The Pork was perfectly cooked, and served with a sauce of wild mushrooms on the side. The sauce was delicious and thick with different types of mushroom. The Steak is served in a deep dish, covered in serrano ham, surrounded by sliced potatoes, in a thick brown gravy and topped with a fried egg. This is a traditional way to serve steak in the Algarve and many restaurants offer this dish. This particular version though, was beautifully tender, the steak was very good quality and one of the nicest that I have had.

For the dessert offering, the waiters come to your table carrying the choices available. This is a clever idea, as one is much more likely to be tempted by seeing the dishes than by reading about it on the menu. The ice-cream is homemade and I can certainly vouch for the chocolate one being rich and flavourful.

The service was very good, we felt that they were genuinely interested in our opinions of the food and went out of their way to ensure that we had a good evening. Porches Velho is a wonderful Portuguese Restaurant with lovely traditional Portuguese hospitality. It is a hidden gem of the Algarve, a little of the beaten track but all the better for it and certainly worth the trip to visit it. Highly Recommended.

The Patate, Kerb, Camden Market, London NW1

The next step on our hunt for London’s best burger led us once again to Camden Market. This time we went on a dreary damp Monday in December, and still the place was mobbed. We had friends visiting from Ireland, who combined the trip with some light Christmas shopping. On a side note, the market appears to be a very good venue if you are searching for unusual and funky gifts. The Patate is unit 215, the centre of a bank of three purpose built food stalls facing into the square. The main sign says French Burger with The Patate in smaller letters underneath.

 

The have a pot of boeuf bourguignon heating on the griddle and it is this that they make their burgers from. They are very specialised, that is all they do. You can have it with or without cheese and with or without fries. They do have three different types of cheese, and they do have béarnaise sauce to go on the chips, which you can have with added chilli. When you order, they take the beef bourguignon and make it into a patty on the griddle and cook for about five minutes drizzling the gravy over as it cooks.

We had one with Raclette cheese and one with a Camembert Blue. The hamburgers were beautifully moist and the meat was incredibly tender. This burger is probably not for you if you do not like your meat to be well done, but there is still a lot of taste in this meal because it has been cooked in the gravy from the stew. The cheeses were both delicious and creamy, unusual for a hamburger, but they set off this particular one very well. The chips were nice and crisp and the béarnaise was divine.

Once again, being from a street food stall, there was no knife and fork, but I guess we knew this would be the case when we came. The burger was delicious but if you are a person who chooses to have their meat rare, or even medium, you will not have that option here. A great meal, lovely friendly service and for a tasty variation, I would certainly recommend it. If we were looking for the best burger in Paris it might be the one, but its a bit too sophisticated for the best burger in London.

Mac & Wild, Great Titchfield Street, London W1W

Mac & Wild is a restaurant that markets itself as serving the highest quality ingredients in its dishes – with a Scottish bias. It is known for its venison, steak and salmon. It is listed in the 2018 Michelin Guide and the Evening Standard named it in their “5 best places to eat game in London”. In 2016 it won the award for the best burger in the UK and it is in Time Out’s list of the best in London.

It opens for dinner at 5.30pm and we arrived, without a reservation, before 6. The place seemed pretty quiet, but they told us they would be able to squeeze us in at a table near the window. It was a damp autumnal Tuesday so I was a bit sceptical, but sure enough, by twenty past six they were turning people away and the restaurant was packed by the time we left at 7pm.

The room is long and narrow, decorated in a rustic style, with plain walls, rough hewn wooden tables and chairs and monochrome photos of Scottish countryside on the walls. There is a cellar room too, the same shape and decorated similarly. Even the bathrooms continue the rustic theme, with an old fashioned overhead ceramic cistern and a chain pull flush.

The menu is basically steak, venison, salmon, cod or hamburger. The sizes and cuts of steak vary according to their stock, they have a list on the wall and cross them out as they are sold. There are vegetarian starters and one main course on the list.  We ordered the scotch egg and fish bites to start. The fish was delicious as was the egg. We were here late October and the Scotch egg came Halloween style – stuck with a syringe and oozing blood! Very funny, but possibly not for the fainthearted.

The burger has two patties, one beef and one venison, it comes with caramelised onion melted cheese and béarnaise. The taste is good, a nice meaty flavour, juicy and with a lovely texture. Be aware that it will come rare unless you ask for it to be well done, unusually they did not enquire when we ordered. The bun is a nice toasted brioche and the chips are skin on and tasty.

It is served on a tin tray, with the chips in a small metal bucket by its side. For a restaurant that is proud of its Scottish heritage, a plate seems like an odd thing for it to forgo. At least it did come with a knife and fork. The lager was quite pricey, a hair under a fiver for a small tin. There are a number of wines served by the glass and the Pinot Grigio Rose was good. The service is excellent, the waiters are likeable and honest, they seem genuinely invested in making sure we had a good time.

All in all we had a really good experience. Mac & Wild are proud of the provenance of their ingredients and this shows in the quality of their burger.  If you plan on going, I would certainly recommend that you book – even as we left there was a couple standing outside in the drizzle waiting for us to pay the bill, so they could have our table.

 

Burger and Beyond, Unit 62 West Yard, Camden Market, London NW1

The hunt for London’s best burgers in unlikely places has brought us to a petite market stall, hidden deep inside Camden Market. When we arrive, we find that it is not quite as strange as it sounds, there is a street food section of the market, nicely situated just by the canal, which has lots of very trendy stalls and vehicles selling quirky upmarket indie food. Even at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon this place was packed to the gills and finding a seat at which to eat our burger in comfort involved some sharp elbow use.

Burger and Beyond occupies an internal corner of this little enclave. The menu is tiny and your food is cooked to order. It basically does a hand pressed burger, you can have it with cheese, bacon, onion, jalapenos and mayo or any combination of the above. It does fries and something called Tater Tots, which seem to be like griddled or fried rosti potatoes. There is also a choice between one or two beef patties.

They sell their fare well, we don’t just have a beef burger here – we have hand pressed patties made with 45 day aged beef from rare breed cattle. According to their marketing, the same people who own the stall are the ones who run the farm, so there is no ambiguity in the provenance of their food.

Whatever the publicity says, the truth of the quality of their burger is in the taste, and this is good. The beef is succulent and tasty, you can tell that the meat is good quality. The toppings are good too, the bacon is crispy and slightly smoked, the cheese has that just on the edge of runny condition. They obviously train their people to cook their burgers just so. In terms of their menu, the adage small is good, works very nicely here. The Tater Tots were satisfying too, an interesting change from regular fries.

My one quibble is that they are difficult to eat. They are not served with a knife and fork, it is a street market stall, so I did know what I was getting in to. They are too large to fit in your mouth without dripping bits everywhere – the double patty ones must be truly messy. I managed to procure a knife and fork from a different stall nearby, but it would have been nicer to be able to get one from Burger and Beyond itself.

Obviously, word of the quality of their food is spreading, because I believe that they are about to open their first permanent restaurant, in fashionable Shoreditch no less. Their burgers really are good, so if this restaurant has cutlery, they will certainly be in the running for the best burger in London!

The Bad Egg, Barbican, London EC2Y

This diner turns inner city dystopia into a design concept. Set in the corner of a tower block the dual aspect dining room overlooks concrete pathways in one direction and a 1960s brutalist car park on the other. Plain wooden tables, leatherette banquettes and wood and metal chairs seat the customers. The look is finished with matt metal grilles and a neon WC sign to guide you to the toilets. It has the feel of a set from a scary 1980s film about street gangs in New York.

The food is basically classic diner fare. Breakfast, brunch, burgers and hashes. They do a bottomless brunch at the weekends which are reputedly very good and very boozy. We were here for a meal before going to the theatre, so tried a burger; the G’Ambal and a hash; the Bad Egg Burger Hash.

The G’Ambal consists of 2 beef patties, a spicy hash brown, caramelized onion, mustard and liquified cheese – all inside a burger bun. It was huge, messy and delicious. We also ordered a side of chips, these were good too, thin shoe lace fries, but to be honest the burger was so filling that we did not need to get them.

The Bad Egg Burger Hash is basically a broken up burger, fried potato, onion, spicy nduja melted cheese served with a fried egg on top. This was also a large portion, nicely spicy and the meat was really good quality. The food here is very good, but I suspect that this would not be the place to come if you are on a diet. They do have vegetarian options, the bean burger was so nicely described that I almost ordered it, but remembered just in time that it is the burgers and boozy brunches for which they are famous.

They have a number of Korean inspired dishes too that look interesting. The service was good, our waiter appeared genuinely interested in our opinion of the food. The music is kind of retro urban, and a good level – conversation is still easily heard. The choice of wine and beer is limited, they had no beer on tap when we went, but they did have bottled Heineken and Corona.

The atmosphere was good, we enjoyed our meal. If you are looking for somewhere a little bit out of the ordinary to have good quality comfort food, The Bad Egg is worth looking up. It is very close if you are going to something in the Barbican or near Moorgate. A nice burger and an interesting restaurant. Sometimes its good to be bad!