London calling - who's in the flat?

This was the menu for the restaurant where we had dinner the first night in London.  It was at a restaurant called Flatiron.  

So, there was flatiron, a burger, and a special Ribeye.  And the sides.  We ordered the flatiron and every side except for a salad with blue cheese and candied pecans.  The steak came with a little salad in the mug - it was just greens and a simple dressing but really good.  The steak was the lowlight of the whole meal. It wasn't seared very nice on the outside, so it looked grey and didn't have that seared taste that you need on a steak.  Otherwise it would have been great.  The sides were all great... creamed spinach, flat beans, fries, and a casserole thing that was like eggplant parmesan.  The sauces were béarnaise, horseradish, peppercorn & Fred's sauce.  I am not a big fan of béarnaise, but in this situation I kinda liked it....

the knives were little cleaver shaped butter knives

Here are the beers we had.  

This was the dessert.  Carmel chocolate mousse with sea salt on the side so you could sprinkle it on as needed.  We didn't think we would eat it all.  I ate almost all of it.

Here is a framed art piece that was in the airbnb flat that we were staying at.  Why is the one guy just sitting on the side and not helping the man with the cane get up?

Here's the menu at the pub that I wished we would have eaten at.  We were meeting our friends before The Cure show, and we ran out of time!

This was the bar at the pub that we didn't get to eat at.

Here are some pre pride parade photos.

Food at the Cure festival. Crab fries.

Salmon poke.  It was hot out, and I was wary of eating this, but it was actually pretty good.  So we ate as much as we could for about 5 minutes.  Then it was too warm to eat it.

Slowdive was the first band that we saw at the festival.  They sounded great.  They seem like a band more fitted for night time rather than bright daylight.  This was a part of the Hyde Park Summertime series.  The Cure put this show together as a 40th anniversary show.





Editors were next.  They were also really good.  They played mostly older hits, so I knew almost all the songs.  I forgot how good they are live, and I also forgot how many people really love them.

Interpol.  There's not much I can say about this band.  We've only seen them once before, but 2 for 2, they put on an amazing live show.  They are so tight.  I feel like you could make them speed up or slow down or change the key of a song and they would adapt as one entity.  I don't know what it's like to play with such confidence and accuracy.




Then there was the Cure.  The sound for a couple songs was just messed up.  Which is weird.  The previous bands had great sound.  But something happened with the sound mix.  It just seemed so unCurelike for something like that to happen.  Anyway, they still put on a great show, of course....

Here is The Cure playing Grinding Halt

The sign by the exit read: Thanks for coming you were just like a dream.  

😃😘

After the show, TFP's friends came back to the airbnb and they drank all the beers and reminisced and caught up and stuff.  They left just before 3 am.  As soon as they walked out the door, TFP ordered Indian food from uber eats.  I'm not going to look up the name of the restaurant.... but it was pretty close to the flat.  

Naan bread (TFP makes better)

chicken and chickpeas curry - so hot.... lots of whole and rough chopped peppers

I don't know what this was - but it was even hotter than the other thing.

this rice would have been pretty good.... but once again it was so hot..... I think they were punishing us for ordering so late at night!

I don't know why I didn't take too many photos the next day.  Here is one of the gates to Chinatown.

We went to an English pub near our flat called The Jack Horner.  We got the steamed veggies... which were delicious.  We also got the mini beef pie made with Fuller's London pride.  The crust was thin and flaky, the filling was flavorful.  A really good little pie.  The black pudding croquette was pretty bland and soft.  I thought the apple sauce would help it but not really.  The English brown mustard helped it a little bit.









For dinner, we met my best friend and her boyfriend.  They live in Macau, but he is from London, so he picked the restaurant.  He picked a classic English pub.  Which it turned out, that is really the only type of bar or restaurant we went to the whole time we were there - besides Flatiron, which was more of a modern English restaurant.  The name of the pub was The George Inn.  BTW, if you look up The George in London, there are a lot of places with those names.  You definitely need to know what address or neighborhood you are looking for The George in....  We had been wanting a scotch egg, so we ordered one here.  But.... they were out.  So, the server suggested the fried whitebait.  So we took it.  We never turn down deep fried little fishies!

This was the sausage and mash plate.  You can't really see in detail here, but the sausage all squirted out of one end of the casing during the cooking.  Which was interesting.

This was the potted ham hock.  Which felt wasn't mushed up enough and a little too cold and hard.  I wanted it to be more like that deviled ham texture.

This was the clotted cream ice cream that my best friend's boyfriend kept going on about.  So, of course we had to order some.  It was good and creamy.  It was very yellow!

We called it a night pretty early.  We said goodbye and went back to the flat.  A little while later we ordered Indian from uber eats.  We tried another restaurant with a good yelp star rating.  Unfortunately, I don't have photos of it.  It was chicken tikka masala and lamb vindaloo if I remember correctly.  Anyway, the tikka masala tasted like tomato water and sugar.  No curry, no flavoring of any kind.  The vindaloo was just some brown tasting sauce.  This was possibly the worst, THE WORST Indian food I've ever tasted.  It was really quite fascinating.

Here were our lunches on the flight back.  Nothing to write home about but not the worst airplane meal.  I saw that there was a stuffed zucchini, so I was confused when the flight attendant asked if we wanted chicken or pasta.  So, I guess he was interpreting the zucchini as a pasta sheet.

Here's a close up of the butter.  Lakeland butter.  But not from 

Lakeland, Florida.  From Lakeland, Ireland, I guess.

This is the chocolate bar I bought at the organic grocery store the day before.  It was avocado and chocolate.  Avocado.  One of my favorite foods of all time.  And I like chocolate a whole lot also.  There were little chunks of avocado in it.  It wasn't just pureed avocado and chocolate .  And it was so good.  I could go for some of this right now.

Anyway, that was the end of our European vacation.  Not as slapsticky or kooky as the Griswolds, but we still had a jolly old time!