It’s always fun when you go to a restaurant and either you or someone you’re with knows the chef or someone important at the restaurant. There’s always great service, little surprises and generally a sense of feeling special. However, there are a few rare occasions when knowing someone at a restaurant can work against you, and it was none too obvious that it was a bad idea knowing the people who ran the restaurant at Charcut in Calgary. My friends T&A knew the good folk behind one of Calgary’s finest eateries and I wished that on this occasion they hadn’t for the simple reason that we pretty much ended up tasting 95% of the menu – the chef wanted us to taste everything! Dear god! I’ve never eaten so much meat in my life! It was all so incredibly tasty and well cooked and wonderful but there was no way in Christendom that the 3 of us could, would or should have eaten everything that came before us. Naturally, we did feast on the remains for a further 2 days! But what a feast, what a fantastic feast it was! A case of man vs food, and here, food won!
Patagonian Feasting: El Calafate, Argentina
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Leaving the lush green, red and orange autumnal colours of Ushuaia, a short journey on the other side of the mountains revealed a Patagonian landscape completely opposite to one I’d just left behind. Here there were no tall trees or hills covered in greenery, but a barren landscape only dotted by a few shrubs and the native calafate bush, which lends its name to the town of El Calafate.
Origins – Rungis Market, Paris
There are food markets and there are food markets. Everyone’s been to a food market whether its Borough Market in London, Boqueria in Barcelona, Aw Taw Kaw in Bangkok, Spice Bazaar in Istanbul, Greenwich, London and the list can just go on and on and on. Each has its unique charm and one usually wanders about in a happy daze, tasting this, sampling that…
Barbecoa
There’s one thing you can say about Jamie Oliver and that is that he does it well! Far too often I get asked what I think of Jamie as he never really came across as a chefs chef, but rather everymans chef. To be honest, I think Jamie Oliver is one of a kind. When he first came on the scene, he took the nation by storm with his funky, easy, hassle-free and quirky approach to cooking and hasn’t stopped since. There’s few people who’d take tackle the way we eat and what and how we eat, especially in core public services such as schools and hospitals, old people’s homes and the like. But no! Jamie’s done it all – he may not be cooking Michelin food, but he is a bloody good cook.
Of late he’s been going a bit nuts with opening restaurants. I went to Jamie’s Italian a while back and that was fantastic. This time, however, it was going to be his collaborative effort with American chef, Adam Perry Lang, Barbecoa right next to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.
The whole place has quite a warehouse feel to it and is enormous, to say the least, decked out with a combination of chairs and sofa’s in the resaurant with a couple of high chairs in the bar. And, boy, is it busy! By that I mean, seriously busy with a stream of people to’ing and fro’ing. Fair enough, given the location, most people were city workers, winding down after a hard week of selling, buying, litigating and all that and of course, who wouldn’t want to eat in a restaurant that give you views of St. Pauls?
