StephenT

Beware, I'm about to post an almost on-topic posting on this thread... At lunch today I said I didn't want crap pub slop. So in search of cheap and fairly quick lunch we went into a small restaurant on Garrick Street. We had their lunch special of baguette with steak, grilled chicken, brie or BLT accompanied by fries, salad (aka garnish) and a beer or glass of wine... all for £6.95. Much better than reheated pub "food" and cheaper too, or at worst the same price. Hopefully it started a trend of going to more interesting places. Of course, the Real Ale Police weren't with us this time and I don't know what they'd have said about having to drink Kronenbourg or wine on a Friday lunch time.

This is definitely true. The first time I had Thai food I thought "what am I supposed to taste other than PAIN?!?" as I was not at all used to eating hot food. After a while I found myself really enjoying the depth and complexity of jungle curry which is usually quite hot and would have floored me if I'd had it without being used to it.

Well given the practice of only giving menus with prices on them to men and menus without prices to women, how are they going to know how much things cost?

There is definitely a whole new distinct genre of "modern pub food" emerging which attempts a fusion of modern European and Thai food presented in easy-to-prepare packages. Take a look at the menu next time you walk past a Slug & Lettuce, it's fairly typical. While some places might pull it off with some degree of competence, the general trend is for it to be badly (or at least sloppily) done. Of course, traditional pub food can be really bad too. Especially in the dire West End pubs in which I usually seem to find myself for lunch because work-mates want to go there due to it serving moderately acceptable beer. Steak pie with dried-out "steak" and soggy crust, or bangers with really nasty mash. And it always arrives slowly and haphazardly too - we usually joke about us having overloaded their only microwave but it's probably true.

I apologise in advance... this is going to be a rant. Has anyone had any Greek wine that they'd consider at least drinkable if not actually good? I have a Greek restaurant near me in London and went there tonight with my wife and mother in law, having been there a few times before. An acceptable neighbourhood sort of place place - large portions, some dishes are good, some average, but a wine list straight from the cellars of the devil himself. Anyway, having previously had Othello and Naoussa and been impressed by neither, I went straight to the most expensive bottle on the list (all of £14.95) - Hatzimichalis (sp?) 2000. Very tart, very light and no fruit flavour to speak of. I could have made better wine myself by mixing equal amounts of cheap red wine vinegar and water. Never again I tell you. From now on I shall choose the generic Australian wine from the "continental" (!) section of the wine list. Or I shall just not go back there.

Ron, thanks for the recommendations. With this new knowledge I shall venture forth and rediscover my faith in Crozes Hermitage!

I finally drank this. It was, as Fat Guy said, not Sherry-like... sweeter (than Fino) and very aromatic. I enjoyed it more after dinner with some cheese than I did beforehand.

Ron, do you have any that you'd particularly recommend (and how much they're likely to cost)? I ask because of my recent experience with the wine: I've had four different bottles of Crozes Hermitage in the recent past that I remember. The first I really enjoyed and the other three have been attempts to recapture the enjoyment of the first but have failed. They seemed to lack the complexity of the first - I'd describe them as "inoffensive but boring". I'm afraid I can't recall the particulars - I really should write these things down. Admittedly I did pay the most for the first bottle but not by a huge margin.

Low carb diet is a useful way of training yourself not to eat too much that you don't need. If you eat enough vegetables and meat to meet your energy requirements then you get all sorts of useful things like vitamins and minerals with your calories (okay so you get some of that from carbohydrates too but it's probably outweighed by the large number of calories). As macrosan wisely said, you need discipline. A low carb diet (not necessarily the rather OTT Atkins diet) is a good way to instill that and generally make you think about what you eat. After doing that for a while, you're better able to make choices about what to eat and what not to eat.

Scott, I assume your avatar is representative of your and Sam's relationship?

If I was in Texas I'd probably opt for one (or possibly all) of T-bone steak, cheeseburger, fried chicken or Mexican as it appears that that is all that's usually on the menu!

They are indeed busy almost every night now, according to Francois. I dropped by on the way home on Monday to apologise for our rather unruly, drunken incursion into his otherwise peaceful restaurant on Saturday and it turned out to be mostly him saying he was sorry he hadn't had a table for us. I think he feels bad that he can't give tables to people who used to go there before it was that way. Pity, as it was a good place to head on the spur of the moment after a few drinks.

There was some discussion about the fact that the place looks almost exactly the same as it did when it was Hujo's. To add to that, I recently noticed there are still Hujo's matchbooks on a table near the door.

I have a bottle of blackcurrant wine that my mother in law brought me from Colorado somewhere. I'll drink it at some point probably, not sure when.

According to the 12 or so sites that Google returns, it exists at: 32 North Audley St London W1Y 1WG Tel: 020 7629 5916 But whether or not anyone's actually been there is another story as there are no reviews anywhere. I lie... just found this snippet from an unidentified student who came from Arizona and studied "Marketing and Sales Management" somewhere in London between October and December 2001: "La Genova, near Grosvenor Square, has the best Italian food in the city!!" Whether or not you want to count that as a credible reference is another story.

Well Tommy's right of course. The reason Aussies and Americans drink their beer almost frozen is that they mostly drink lager and warm lager is foul, especially on a hot day. Having only been in the UK for a few years, I'm getting used to drinking not-almost-frozen beer because it's more interesting than generic lagers. However, I am guilty of buying bottles of Hobgoblin, Tanglefoot, etc, from the supermarket, putting them in my fridge at home and then drinking them "too" cold.

Looks like a contradiction in there somewhere. The sugars are there to allow the seeds to grow, and germination is part of growing. So surely the germination while soaking would use up some of the sugars? But that certainly doesn't mean that I think that the "soaking reduces flatulence" argument is true - I'm sure that the minimal amount of germination (if any) that occurs while soaking beans would not use up any significant amount of the sugars.

Can you clarify? I assume he means that in the one-stage version, the "stage" is somewhere between the lengths of the two stages in the two-stage version. This means that when either the opener is really low (such as Ron means when starting with the worm really deep into a cork) or when it's really high (such as when the cork is almost out) then it's pulling at an angle quite far from the ideal. The ideal being straight out of course, parallel to the path of the cork. With the two-stage opener, the first stage allows you to pull straighter when you're just starting and the second stage allows you to pull straighter when you're almost finished.

I had trouble with mine last weekend. It broke. The screw snapped right off while I was trying to open an obstinate bottle. There was no way to get it out of the cork, so I just started using a double-lever type opener on the same cork. It opened fine, but when I removed the cork from the screw, the old, broken screw that had been inside the cork had wound itself very tidily (and tightly) around the screw of the double-level opener, which was one of the "Archimedian screw" type screws. So I had to wrestle with it for a while with a pair of pliers to remove it. At least the wine was open.

I love it when explanations of potentially complicated processes are started off with a sentence as simple, correct and understandable as this one.

And what did the hot dog vendor say to him when handed $10? "Change comes from within."

Erm, are you sure he wasn't just being silly? I'm sure at some point I've said something remarkably similar in a drunkenly misguided attempt at humour. Something that happened to me on a flight (I was the customer in this case and obviously in the minds of the steward, being a picky idiot). I'd studied the menu which clearly indicated that their wine of the month (or whatever) was a sauvignon blanc and when asked what I'd like to drink, that's what I asked for. I was given a chenin blanc and when I pointed that out, the response was "Well that one's also a blanc". Economy class of course.

It is quite possible that the pinotage that Yvonne had is not a particularly good wine but that a pinotage from the next door winery is much better. In South Africa each winery usually grows a number of varieties that are usually bottled separately and the general trend is that the decent wineries produce a range of decent wines whereas the lesser wineries produce a range of lesser wines. So there's no guarantee that a particular variety from a particular region will be good if you don't go for a particular winery. Well that's my take on the situation. I used to live in SA and when I go back on holiday I try to sample wines that are quite expensive by SA standards but are reasonable by UK/US standards because I couldn't afford them before. Of course the prices often rise drastically once they leave the shores and are exported to earn some "real currency".

Banana fritters?

I often eat toast with toppings that remind me a bit of the most recent few posts in here: toast with cream cheese and strawberry jam toast with cheddar and honey Also sometimes in sandwiches. And I don't think either is particularly weird