Best Eats in London

London is fabulous. It really is. The shopping is great and, even more importantly, so is the food. In the four days we just spent there it was impossible to try all the places I had heard and read about since my last trip to London in 2007, but we did find five places that definitely deserve to be mentioned:

1. Spaccanapoli

2. The Grocer on Elgin

3. Ottolenghi

4. Princi

5. Coco Momo

1. Spaccanapoli

We passed this restaurant while searching for food on our first night, but I wasn't in the mood for Italian. Fortunately we decided to check it out on our second night and, man, was I glad we did! We had some of the best Italian food I had ever had (outside of Italy). 

We started out with an avocado mozzarella salad. The mozzarella was heavenly: creamy and smooth with a real mozzarella taste and not stringy or plastic-y (if you know what I mean). As a main course we had penne all'amatriciana and pizza rucola. Both were outstanding, especially the pizza: the dough was thin with a perfect balance between spongy and crusty, and the chunks of mozzarella were perfectly melted on top so that with each bite your teeth sunk into luscious layers of dough, tomato sauce, mozzarella, ham, arugula and finally parmesan. After all the food (the pasta portion was huge!) I really didn't want any dessert, but the charming waiter (who surprised us with good German skills learned by dealing with endless, and probably annoying, numbers of German tourists back in Italy) convinced us to try their housemade tiramisu and we were not sorry. It was one of the best tiramisus I have ever had. 

Just a side note: a specialty of the house is pizza by the meter. It is served on a long wooden board set on top of a raised wooden contraption so that you can reach the pizza from all sides of a table. Quite nifty! 

Another side note: get a table upstairs, if you can, as the tables in the basement are really close together so that when your neighbor chokes on their food, you get scared that their spittle will land on your food (this really happened!). 

2. The Grocer on Elgin

On our second full day in London we decided to go to Notting Hill. I thought we could have breakfast at the Hummingbird Bakery, a well-known bakery I had visited two years ago. But the urge to try something new took over and after trying to decide between three possible places for breakfast, we finally landed at The Grocer on Elgin. This place sells ready-to-eat and ready-to-heat-then-eat foods as well as drinks, sandwiches and pastries. After taking what seemed like ages to decide on a pastry, I finally settled on a hazelnut brownie. Brownies featuring walnurs are common, but I had never had the hazelnut version, so I just had to try it. By the way, hazelnuts seem to be the rage in London right now as there were other places selling pastries with hazelnuts, such as hazelnut croissants at Patisserie Valerie. Hazelnuts and chocolate really go together well. Hazelnuts have quite a bit of flavor (compared to walnuts) so that you get an intense flavor experience when eating them with chocolate. As a drink I tried the raspberry lassi, which was good because it tasted like raspberries and wasn't too sweet. 

3. Ottolenghi

I had already heard of this place before coming to London as my sister had found their cookbook with delicious looking recipes at Orell Füssli's English bookshop in Zürich. Ottolenghi has four locations in London. Since we were already in Notting Hill on Day 2, we went to the Notting Hill location for lunch. From outside the cafe you can see towers of sweets in the window. Once you enter you encounter a salad buffet, each one looking better than the next. But you can also order some meat and fish dishes. We settled for plates of three salads each. Everything we had was great. You probably can't go wrong with any of the salads. For dessert we shared a strawberry cheesecake. The texture was great, but it was a little too salty for my taste. I should have tried something else!

Just a side note: I would check out the other Ottolenghi locations as the café in Notting Hill has only a tiny room for eating crammed with one big table that sits 10. In general I really like the idea of sitting at a big table, but the room was a little claustrophobic.  

4. Princi

Late on our last night in London we passed by Princi and saw the rows of delicious sweets, which made our mouths water. But we were too full after having had dinner and trying Chinese pastries from Kowloon Bakery in Chinatown. So, we decided to definitely go back to Princi for breakfast on our last day. And that is exactly what we did! It was really, really hard to decide what to get, but I finally settled for a chocolate cake with nuts and raisins (second photo on bottom left). Mmmmm. It was delish. 

Just a side note: the interior design of Princi is really cool. There are long tables to sit at (love the communal feeling) and the back wall has water fountains coming out of it. Even the bathrooms are nice and scented by burning incense. 

Another side note: after hearing my American English accent the Chinese woman behind the counter said "Don't people shoot each other over there?" while pointing imaginary guns in the air. The USA needs an image change...

 

5. Coco Momo

For lunch on our last day we really wanted Fish and Chips. We had heard about a place in Marylebone, but it turned out to be closed. We continued along Marylebone High Street and came across Coco Momo. There we had an Aberdeen Angus beef burger w cheddar cheese, tomato & onion relish, home cut chips and Warm, grilled goat's w roasted Mediterranean vegetables on triple corn bread. Both dishes were really fresh and tasty. I also highly recommend the berry cooler made with real berries, lemon juice and soda.

  

One street south of Coco Momo is La Fromagerie, where I had my last sweet in London-a delicious brownie. We were in such a hurry to get back to the hotel to pick up our luggage and head to the airport that I didn't have time to take a picture.

Crazy for Rhubarb

This year I've gone crazy for rhubarb. Until recently I couldn't have cared less for the bitter stalks. But now I'm addicted to their taste and texture once cooked with a bit of sugar and paired with strawberries or raspberries or even better: both. 

The first idea I had when I was picking out my rhubarb at the store was to make a rhubarb compote with just rhubarb, sugar and water. Then I decided I needed to put the compote on something. Vanilla ice cream or a cream made of mascparone came to mind. I decided on the mascarpone cream first of all because it's hard to find Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream (the only store-bought vanilla ice cream in Europe I deem worthy of its title--the US has many more options) and second because you can determine the sweetness if you make your own mascarpone cream. At the store I also found fresh strawberries so I decided they would round off the whole recipe. The following photo is the delicious result of this first attempt. 

This was already a pretty good combination. A few days later I ended up buying a food processor with an integrated blender (one of my most exciting purchases recently!) and decided that it was time to try a new version of the rhubarb recipe. This time I made a rhubarb compote with raspberries and then put it in the blender. I also blended the mascarpone cream in the food processor (instead of using a whisk). Although this is also tasty, I think I prefer a few chunks in my compote and a thicker version of the mascarpone cream (which you get when whisking by hand). 

Instead of arranging the compote and cream in a glass you can just put the cream in a bowl and top with the compote and fresh strawberries!

Rhubarb-raspberry compote

2 cups rhubarb cut into 1/2 inch pieces

3/4 cup sugar

1/4 cup water

3/4 cup frozen raspberries

Put rhubarb, sugar and water into a pot and cook on high till mixture is boiling. Add frozen raspberries and turn down the heat. Cook until rhubarb is tender, but not too soft. At this point you can choose to leave the compote the way it is or let it cool down and then put it in a blender, blending until you get the texture you want. 

Mascarpone cream

225 g mascarpone 

180 g plain yogurt

2 tablespoons sugar

1 tsp vanilla

Whisk all of the above until the texture is smooth and creamy. You can also choose to make this cream in a food processor (but be aware that you will quickly get a very smooth and less creamy consistency) or alternately use a hand mixer (which I haven't tried yet). 

Lily's Stomach Supply

Ever since the weather got warmer and therefore more reminiscent of California, I have been missing all the places I used to eat at in California. I miss all the ethnic foods, Mexican and Thai especially, and I miss the abundance of fresh produce. Last but not least I miss getting good food for a good price! Here, when I'm hungry but too lazy to cook I don't really have many choices for grabbing a quick bite to eat. We have Döner Kebap places en masse, but I don't really like to eat meat that was wrapped around a rotating stick and exposed to the air and heat for hours!

The only place I have found in Basel so far (besides Tibits, which I already talked about) that kind of reminds me of eating out in California is Lily's Stomach Supply, which sounds more like a place you would go to get nuts and bolts for your stomach. Fortunately for our stomachs, they actually serve food there! Their menu is a conglomeration of different Asian foods from India, Japan, China and other countries. Every time I go I try to order something different, but sometimes I just order the dishes I know I like. 

Following are pics of some of my favorite dishes. I also highly recommend the Massaman Curry, which is beef and potatoes in a peanut curry. I don't have a picture of it, but even if I did I wouldn't post it because it looks pretty unappetizing (brown soup with chunks in it) and you wouldn't want to eat it if you saw it. But believe me, it's tasty!

Pakistani Lamb Curry

Bun Gah (Vietnamese Rice Noodles in Curry)

Tandoori Chicken

Swiss Sweet Tooth Satisfiers

I thought moving to Switzerland would be similar to moving to France, meaning I would be surrounded by sweets left and right. But, unfortunately (or, rather, fortunately), that was not the case. I'm not exactly sure how I got the impression that Switzerland would be a sort of candyland. Maybe because Switzerland is a country known for its abundance of chocolate. And there is lots of chocolate. It's everywhere. But what I was really looking for (and still am!) was pastries and cakes along the lines of those from Sprüngli, which I had already known from my frequent visits to Zürich. Zürich not only has a big Sprüngli café, it also has lots of shops within Zürich. Sadly, Sprüngli only has a small shop at the train station here in Basel. The other day I finally treated myself to some of their mini pastries. I had held off on trying them because who could be satisfied from eating just one? Besides that they are pretty pricey. But nevertheless I decided to try them. What I got was a mini cake with a truffle topping and a mini coffee eclair. Both were very good. However, I decided my favorite eclairs were those with plain pastry cream and chocolate glaze on top. 

After having searched the downtown area  for suitable sweet tooth satisfiers, I finally came across Confiserie Bachmann. Now I find myself going there almost every weekend to get one of my new favorite pastries: a chocolate macaroon (Schoggimakrone), made of what I assume to be hazelnuts, sugar, and egg whites and filled with chocolate cream (that unfortunately sometimes has an alcoholic flavor to it). But their chocolate buns (Schoggiweggli), a yeast dough with chocolate chunks in it,  are very good as well. Both types of pastries are pretty common here. 

Another common pastry is the Osterflädli. It's a little pie with a filling made of cream, milk, eggs, sugar and some semolina. So far I've only tried the ones from the bakery chain Sutter and it was pretty yummy. It has chocolate bits in it!

I have actually seen a few other confiseries and cafés I need to try. So hopefully there will be an update soon. 

Tibits in Basel and Hiltl in Zürich

Finally I get around to writing a new post! I have just recently moved to Switzerland to start my first job post-university. The funny thing is that towards the end of my master's program I started wondering: "Hm, should I look for work in the US or in Germany? US or Germany? US or Germany?" And now, as fate would have it, I am in Switzerland! That pretty much took care of the tough decision of choosing one of my home countries over the other (although I had been leaning towards Germany...). Now I have a new home country. Two weeks ago I went to a conference in Frankfurt, Germany, and surprised myself by looking forward to going home--home being Switzerland. 

Before I even moved to Basel I started checking out its restaurants online. I had never been to Basel save the two job interviews I went to for my new job. The first restaurant I looked up was Hiltl, my favorite vegetarian restaurant in Zürich (and one of my favorite restaurants in the world!). I thought maybe they would have a branch here, but they don't. However, they do have a branch of the Hiltl-owned Tibits. Hiltl has a neat concept in that you can choose between a menu and a vast buffet. At Tibits you only have a smaller buffet and other ready-to-eat foods to choose from, such as sandwiches and pastries. Tibits is pretty good, but Hiltl is better. The photo at the top of this post is from a lunch at Tibits. One of my favorite buffet items are the fried breaded jalapeños filled with cream cheese. Mmhmm! My favorite drink is probably the hot chocolate, although the mango lassi dusted with garam masala (see photo above) was also pretty good. 

Below are photos from a dinner at Hiltl in October last year. The first dish is the fall vegetable platter with spelt Spätzle, mushrooms in cream sauce, sauerkraut, brussels sprouts, chestnuts and stewed pears. The second dish is a selection of curries and I can't remember exactly what the third dish is. I think it is also a curry of some sort. For dessert we shared the lovely brownie with vanilla ice cream and hot chocolate sauce. Mmmmmm! Hiltl also has a wide selection of freshly squeezed juices that are really tasty. Another good thing about Hiltl is that they also have vegan dishes for those who don't eat any animal protein. I sometimes wish they offered meat because I'm sure they would come up with some really tasty meat dishes, but that is not part of their concept.