Roger le goéland

Baslow Hall sounds good for the end of project meal. 39min is not too far. Driver might get annoyed at not being able to drink with his meal, but that's par for the course. Will try Masa. Ebi Sushi is exactly what I'm looking for. Even at £4 for a roll if it's as good as the review makes it (and the review makes it sound like Hiro) we'll be regulars for the next month. Perhaps not for dining forum but is there anywhere to buy decent meat & veg for cooking?

I'll be in Derby for a few weeks. My colleagues who were fortunate enough to work there before tell me great stories of the wealth of entertainment available in the region. Is there anything within 20min drive of Derby where one can enjoy decent food, preferably not too hard on the wallet? If there's a really decent place which happens to be cheap and not too far from where we'll stay, it would be fantastic. More expensive options also welcome although we'll probably head South for weekends. As per my previous St Asaph/North Wales thread, last time we spent the two weeks scouting about Wales not realizing there was a fantastic pub just 500m from the hotel until the last night...

So far this is the only e-shop I've found selling beans they've just roasted, delivery within 48h (so they claim): http://www.graindecafe.com/boutique_cafe.htm (roast on the day of sending for freshness) I firmly believe the origin of the coffee doesn't matter a tenth as much as how well and how soon it was roasted. I will give it a try and report back. I was considering starting my own shop (selling cheap Columbian beans roasted to order and also cheap blade grinders which should allow the layman to substantially improve their coffee experience).

I don't know much about pu-erh either (other than it's delicious). It's for a Chinese acquaintance. Thanks for the recommendations, will try them and report back. Any ideas re: online coffee shop?

Rather than start a new thread, I'll post mine here: Do you know where I could find either an online shop or one in Annecy/Annecy-le-Vieux/Veyrier du Lac which sells just roasted coffee beans? In the UK I was fortunate enough to find a fantastic website (now defunct, they have switched to selling shoes?!) which roasted the beans to order and dispatched them first class, ensuring a steady supply of wonderfully aromatic caffeine. My lazyness made me switch to the market guy in Cambridge who serves decent if somewhat staler beans at an acceptable price. Switching back to internet next year. Honest. I have come here and my parents drink the same terrible Robusta coffee mentioned earlier on this thread and others. I am trying to convert them. Last summer I convinced them to buy a grinder, but they just bought overroasted, stale beans by the kilo and are still making the same terrible coffee. I just bought 250g of Columbian beans for 5 euros in a town centre shop selling loads of machinery. It's a medium roast (on the strong side) but has been sitting about for at least a week or two. But I would love to find a place where they could source cheaply some beans of simple Columbian coffee roasted recently and to a mild or medium level only. Thank you in advance. R. edit - similarly, if you know where to find some decent 15yo+ Pu-Erh, either in Annecy, online or Paris, please do let me know!

Phil, even in a far-out sushi bar or noodles takeaway place? John, thanks for the heads-up. For that pre-NYE period, it is very useful and I'll look into it for the 29th and the 30th. However, I'll probably spend NYE and Day with my family, so would be most interested in the first week of the year - any existing threads on this?

We'll be visiting Paris between the 29th of December and the 5th of January - where should we eat during that time? Are there many places still open? We're looking for cheap, interesting stuff that we can't find in London rather than full-blown, Les Ambassadeurs/Arpege/Grand Vefour-style super-cuisine. Maybe 20 euros pp per meal max. Any cuisine from anywhere, from Lyon traditional fare to cool new things with sushi. And of course decent cocktail bars, but I'll be checking the martini thread for that. However, we will aim to have one extremely good set lunch at one of the multi-stars. If you could only have one set lunch in Paris, and you had just under 2 weeks to book it, where would you go? Food is the only criteria. We're happy to be sardines for a night. I've visited the other cheap good places thread and am checking the various restaurants but they don't often have a website, so any info would be much appreciated! (it will save me a few phones calls) Thank you in advance. R.

Yet I've managed to walk in and get a table at 6.30 or 7.30 at Yauatcha on Fridays and Saturdays, upstairs, for the past 2-3 months. It used to be "here, come back at 10.30pm and we'll give you this tiny little table in the corner". This is also true for most places visited. I guess people make their nights out sparser and focus on the highest quality (perceived or real) for that occasional one.

I'd also like to add that if you are googling the address it is called Bocca DI lupo. R

Thanks for the heads-up Nikkib! We went there yesterday night, to see whether it could compete with Yauatcha as a "last minute we need cheap but good quality dinner" spot in central London. The bread and olives were ok. Similar to what you'd get in an Italian deli. The chestnut and cep (porcini) soup was divine, easily the best dish. Bone marrow risotto with barolo tasted like a risotto with barolo. Maybe my taste buds aren't good enough to detect the bone marrow (which I haven't tasted in about 10 years now). The foie gras sausage was decent although a bit more foie gras would have been nice (again we had trouble detecting it, a faint hint of foie gras smell if you concentrate on it) although the barley served with it had a lovely texture. Finally the spaghettini of lobster was just that - pasta al dente with lobster in a light tomato sauce, with four mussels. Tasty, exactly what we expected, and totally worth it. Desserts were disappointing. Ice cream with brioche does not work especially if the brioche is that salty and too tough to easily break apart with a fork. The ice cream on its own was brilliant especially pistachio and chestnut. Bitter chocolate ice cream was intense and beautiful (too much for my dining partner so I got to finish it hehehe) but the burnt almond granita was quite dull. I think the problem is that you eat the chocolate first and by the time you get to the granita your taste buds and nose are overwhelmed with fantastic, intense cocoa leaving very little chance of you actually tasting the almond. Maybe the sanguinaccio was worth it. However, the desserts we had really weren't worth £7 each - especially since Scoop is really close by and makes similar quality ice cream for a lot less! £51 for two inc. service for 4 small dishes and two desserts (we drank tap water). A bit expensive, but if you have the cash and you enjoy simple slow food, it's decent. We'll stick to Yauatcha although we might come back just to have a large bowl of that amazing chestnut and cep soup! Edit - atmosphere: simple wooden tables, paper napkins, cutlery was very nice. The place was full of students. There are paintings on the wall of food (mainly meat) which are simple and pleasant to look at, it does really make you hungrier. Especially the large piece of beef being sliced with the quail on the side. Friendly Italian waiter with a voice from the depths of the Earth. I am a bit afraid to have offended the maitre d' as I had trouble understanding his strong (Scottish?) accent!

ulterior epicure, how did you get those times? (assuming the 17.23 is a typo) The shortest time I can get is about 2h15, which sounds about right considering Cheltenham is twice as far as Oxford (which takes maybe 1h). If there's a fast option that I have overlooked please do let me know, very interested in visiting the CS too!

I've been to a few places around here where service is not included in the bill, and, because we are Brits, it is written in large letters "PLEASE NOTE SERVICE NOT INCLUDED". All the places with this policy have had immaculate service (an oxymoron in these parts even with stars attached to the name...). Capitalism works!

Is there a good restaurant in the city that does NOT serve pigeon? Not complaining, it's superb. But I see it come up in every review.

Alas, the argument was lost in advance. We did visit the mussels place (Moules a gogo), whose "best mussels in Europe" were a fifth of the size of normal ones you get in France or Belgium. Expensive, but at least it was edible. Unlike the Talardy, whose Chestnut Tree restaurant was both overpriced (£6.95 for a shot of Lagavulin, costs me £4 in Cambridge and I consider that expensive!) and remarquably bland. It says a lot that I enjoyed the previous evening's Pizza Hut more (can't believe I complained about Pizza Express on the other thread!) However, we did visit the Plough in St Asaph, and despite its lack of any decent spirits (except perhaps Bombay Sapphire), it did stock two nice ales and cooked decent if unimaginative food at an affordable price. If only we had discovered it earlier - it was 2min walk from our hotel! Goodbye Wales. I'll be back.

Same. What are those strips of red stuff?

Absolutely. I have yet to find one such critic, that I agree with consistently. I find the eG community to be the best critic! But I really like Hayler's writing and enjoy reading his reviews.

I have eaten in neither. However I have visited at least three places thanks to AH's reviews and have disagreed with him on all three. We obviously have very different tastes.

Phil, I believe the issue isn't in the "quality" of the cooking but the style. I felt that what was there was done very well, by that I mean "fabricated" well. The chocolate sauce with the venison was smoked, very cool concept. And there lies the catch - it's "cool". It's weird, a combination of ingredients that many diners find innovative and catchy, and many others (a group which I belong to) just think "what is the point of this?" I think Bosi does this because he has had experience with the best chefs in the world, and he knows he can produce the most technically intricate classical and near-classical combinations (those that "work" for people like me). So he goes a step further and makes you "think". (thinking hard about it, yes, a slice of raw venison and a smoked dark chocolate sauce do share some flavours at the second or third degree although I think it would work better with raw pigeon) I do agree with you about the wine. I found the BTG choices disappointing. How hard is it to establish a relationship with small growers in interesting areas of France and serve decent booze? When the restaurant owner himself is French? Foliage I feel serves dishes that all "work" as a dish. Smaller portions, you are less full, granted. But again, it's well executed and this time you are not supposed to think about the food, merely to eat it and enjoy good ingredients prepared well. I prefer this personally. I could make the comparison between Schumann's piano concerto and Schoenberg's Verklarte Nacht.

Thank you very much for all your recommendations! Now to convince my colleagues that yes it's worth driving 25min for dinner. We can't really go much further than 20m but I'll keep the starred recommendations (esp. Ynishir Hall and the Plas something) in mind for any future trips.

Dear all, I am in St Asaph for a while, and looking for somewhere decent to eat. We have a car, would like something within 20 miles. Any ideas? Thank you! R

Understood. It was a bad example, since they do attempt to make food, as opposed to defrosting it (at least they did when I last went 3 years ago). I personally dislike it (for some reason their pizzas make me feel quite ill, whilst McDonald's mashed-cardboard-in-solidified-milk-powder-buns doesn't). Perhaps it would have been better to pick one of the "Italian" chains as an example (just yesterday somebody told me how fantastic the food at Cafe Uno was). As for Matt's argument that I clumped all PE lovers together... are my friends representative of all PE customers in the world? It would be nice if they were, so that if I was to start a restaurant, I could do extremely efficient market research. But the set of people I know are not the set of people who eat at PE. There may or may not be overlap. MHO, the logical flaw in your argument, Matt, is that you assume that by "the people I know who eat at PE" I mean "all the people who eat at PE", a set to which you and other posters belong, despite not being part of the first set (as I do not know you). The other "flaw" if it is one as such, is that you assume that there are no exceptions in my statement (or that I imply so). Of course, even in the set of PE lovers that I know, will there be some that also care greatly about food - this does not mean that the majority does. Back to topic now?

Matt, your argument is not particularly logical. Because you like PE, it doesn't mean that it is the place that you would go to when looking for a special place for a special night, nor does it mean you consider it to be one of the temples of fine dining. And THAT was my point. Or one of them. Regardless, I think this conversation is better stopped now before it degenerates any further.

Apologies for the bad wording. I remember reading it on the tube about a month ago. Maybe it was the London Paper/Lite, which would explain the expression being used (as opposed to your far better written online review). I know plenty of people who think Pizza Express is a fantastic place to dine. They are great people, they just don't care about food. To them Arbutus would be elBulli.

You mean the Metro where Arbutus was considered "posh"? Rather undermines the purpose of the restaurant... (yes I know, I know, to somebody who thinks Pizza Express is a romantic evening out, Arbutus is like a British elBulli...) So far the only people who I agree with are the eG posters. When I go out to try a new place it is always based on what people here have said. I think the problem is that by the time I read the reviews the restaurant has lost most of its sheen. Prefer the classics anyway.

Agree with all of the above re-Yauatcha. Except you can park the bike.