dinner at Tamarai: much about “meh-ness”

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Pan Fried Pork Belly, golden lotus root, honey hoisin sauce; Coconut and Palm Sugar Brûlée, elderflower sorbet

It is so weird for me to not have an opinion about something. Usually everything; whatever the thing may be – a restaurant, a movie, a service or even just my new L’Occitane Red Rice mattifying moisturiser – everything leaves me with some form of an opinion. I love it, I rave about it. But if I hate it, wow, I run around the internetz bagging it all over Twitterverse, much akin to social media murder (’tis a good thing I don’t hate very much. Or have any influence).

Drawing an opinion from me (either good or bad) is really not very hard. What’s a more difficult achievement is balancing so precisely on the thread between leading me to like or dislike something that I am left speechless (which is an unfathomable feat in itself) and without an ability to form any opinion.

My dinner at Tamarai left me with one such conundrum. I went, I ate, and I really don’t have much of an opinion about it.

Well, ok, I lie, the pan fried pork belly made my tummy dance in glee, but other than that it really didn’t leave an impression. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t bad, it was just meh. Oh wait, was that an opinion right there?

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girlfriends, scotched eggs and a rainy afternoon at the Harwood Arms

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venison scotch eggs

My girlfriends and I get together for our regular date night once in however-often-we-feel-is-necessary. Away from our taller, hairier and decidedly less intelligent masculine counterparts, we are free to wile away the hours discussing make up, travel, careers, weddings, designer bags, child birth, bling, shoes, eye creams, hair styles,  fashion, and where, on our infinitely long list of places to eat, we should go for our next date night.

This weekend, we bent the rules ever so slightly and at the recommendation of a number of other foodies, we adjourned instead for a date day, at The Harwood Arms in Fulham.

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what do you mean I can’t eat it?

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kiehls-mango-lip-balm

It’s my brother’s birthday tomorrow, and although I’m 110% certain he has no idea this website exists, here’s a birthday shout-out to you, dà zhū. That’s mandarin (pinyin, for the anally retentive amongst us) for big pig, because ever since I was a bub, and probably because I was such an obscenely fat baby (yep, your regular run of the mill two-foot tall michelin man), he’s called me xiǎo zhū. For those of you playing at home, yes the answer is A. little pig. And being the genius of the family, we really should have listened to the prophecies of this little boy, because really, now at five-feet tall and eating my way around the globe, I think I can still be batched, labelled and categorised pretty accurately as xiǎo zhū.

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