tasty morsels of London: when to wear your expandable pants

I think there is a chance (a chance?) that I have an imbalance of something in my brain, because nothing else would explain my ridiculous childlike excitement as the sun peeked out from behind the clouds this morning and I woke up realising that today is Christmas Day is my birthday I win lotto we go to Vegas I get a puppy we go to the Taste of London Festival. Are you as excited as I am? You’re not? It’s ok, I know a puppy would have totally rawked, but food is a worthy consolation.

The day actually had the potential to go pear-shaped, what with the spanktastic top I bought last week turning out to not be as spanktastic as I had originally thought, and the fact that I (who has never once been tardy – retarded yes, tardy no) thought we were running late so I made my boyfriend run to the event with me (closed my eyes, followed the fragrance of yummy). But we arrived (early, as usual, thanks to the pre-eating jog) and so the Eating began.

Stocked up on crowns (the official currency at Taste of London ~ £1 = 2 crowns ~ which I still don’t understand, unless it’s simply a ploy to bank in on the gluttons who purchase too many crowns and don’t end up spending it all, or crazy-spend them in the last ten minutes of the festival) we traversed the crowd, headed straight to Bentley’s Oyster Bar & Grill and slurped down a serve of scrumptious rock oysters. Maybe my super power (cos after watching Heroes, I’m convinced that everyone has some sort of power) is like, I dunno, to eat really really quickly or something because I’d already purchased and inhaled three juicy fat oysters when my friend (who’d been beside me the whole time) says, “so Cat, are you going to get some oysters?” For reals.

Despite the schizophrenic weather (sunny, cloudy, super hot and sunny, rain, cloudy, sunny… you get the idea), we managed to tent hop to all of the good restaurants, sampling the entree sized dishes (too little of a good thing is just too little) for just a handful of crowns each. Most delicious (voted unanimously by me, myself, I and oh, all of my friends) was the soy and honey marinated lamb from Kai Mayfair, so scrumptiously tender in fact that we’re booked in for dinner at Michelin awarded Kai in the next couple of weeks.

Hot on the heels of the lamb were the sizzling wagyu beef on hot rocks from Cocoon (and those rocks are seriously hot, people, they weren’t just saying that for kicks when they hand the parcel over) and the miang crab from Nahm which, dang, carried a crazy chilli punch. Other notable dishes include tuna tartar from Asia de Cuba, lemon tart from Rhodes Twenty Four and the chilli black cod from Dinings. We sampled about three hundred other dishes, some crowns wisely spent, some not so wisely, but overall, I can report that my tastebuds were pretty chuffed with today’s effort. 

Desperately trying to grasp the wisps of sunshine (and an excuse to celebrate the English way), we put our final 20 crowns to good use and bought a jug of Pimms, sat on the grass patchy-at-best brown grass and chillaxed for the rest of the afternoon. The lunch time session was scheduled to wrap up at 4pm, and as we headed home, kristainlondon twittered that the festival was in chaos with crowds of people holding un-used crowns. Such noobs, don’t they know that when you have money to spend on food, you just spend it right now?