Amici

We found a real gem of a place to eat last night.

Amici is on Holloway Road, about 15 minutes walk from our place. After the festival yesterday we went for coffee with a friend and ended up staying there until 7pm; by the time we got home we were really, really flipping hungry. Garry wanted pizza and we were perfectly fine with the idea of just getting a takeaway...but then we found this place.

 It serves pasta, meat and fish dishes and pizza, as well as specials. I was sorely tempted by the special of the trout with orange butter, thrice cooked chips and butternut squash, and the beef ravioli with a butter and balsamic dressing, but in the end I had to have a Mexican pizza.

And Garry had a pizza with pancetta, spinach and goat's cheese. Both were, quite frankly, amazingly good, and served with a bottle of olive oil that was flavoured with chilli and goodness knows what else. Completely delicious.

I was so full I didn't want dessert, but then they brought these over...

That's a brownie pie with vanilla ice-cream at the top and a creme brulée on the bottom. Amazing.

It's not particularly expensive, the atmosphere is nice, the staff are friendly and it's just delicious. Probably my favourite place we've eaten so far.

June 9th 2012

Something we're discovering about London is that there's lots of free things to do if you look for them. Garry was looking around on the Internet and found this — The London Green Fair — at Regent's Park. We walked up and had a look round.

Chickens!

These guys were weaving sticks. Not entirely sure why.

Herbs to buy. If we had had space I would had bought them all.

Garry and his brolly

Big chicken. Not entirely sure why.

Regge band

Stalls selling lots of very pretty, very expensive things

SO many different types of food

Eco-friendly stalls with The City behind

Iron Man! *boo domp chish*

Garry and I

The main reason we'd come, however, was to see an 80 piece Dutch Wind Orchestra who were absolutely brilliant.

Regent's Park itself is lovely even without the festival. And there are lots of dogs, which is always a good thing in my book. Will be spending quite a lot of time here when it's sunny, I think. Especially since we only saw a small slice of it.

The park

June 8th 2012

I was reading a local paper when I saw that there was going to be a biscuit festival in the centre of town. A whole festival for biscuits. AMAZING.

It was held at the Brunswick Shopping Centre, which is almost directly opposite Russell Square station. When we got there, two very excited people called Gary Baldi and Connie Crumbs were dragging people up on stage for contests to win biscuits.

In the adverts I'd seen for the festival it promised...well, a lot more than it delivered. I imagine that because it was a Friday it wasn't as busy as it would be on the Saturday. However, there was a biscuit decorating stand...

Garry had a vanilla biscuit smeared with red wine buttercream and sprinkled with nuts, meringues and a dollop of caramel.

Mine was far simpler — a lemon biscuit with vanilla buttercream and caramel. It looks a bit like an egg here.

They were, admittedly, very nice biscuits but there wasn't a great deal to keep us occupied here so we went for a wander. And that's how we ended up at Camden Lock.

This is a 30 minute walk or a 10 minute bus ride from our house and it is, quite frankly, amazing.

It's a total labyrinth of stalls selling everything from food to clothes to toiletries to stationery to artwork to second hand books to vintage items, all in some really quite beautiful settings.

I couldn't take many photos inside here as many of the stalls have "No photograph" signs on them, but it used to be a stables and each stables is made into a little stall selling beautiful things. It's incredible.

The only problem is I am really, really not cool enough for Camden Lock. I'm going to have to come back with several more piercings before I feel like I fit in...

There will almost certainly be another post on Camden Lock at some point. I just didn't have enough time to see it all and I missed so much out — I think it needs a whole day devoted to it.

How to get there

Le Croissant D'Or

We’re only staying in this room/house for the next four months. As we didn’t know the area we decided that it would be best to get a short let so that we could get to know North London a bit better first and decide where the best place to live was. With this end in mind, we popped into a letting agents yesterday and asked to speak to someone about flats to rent.

They said that someone would contact us in ten minutes, and although that never happened (gits) we did pop into a café next door and find a bit of a gem of a place to eat.

It's not haute cuisine, but as a local café it's pretty nice. The cakes on offer are, quite frankly, amazing and I wish I'd taken photos of them to show you. They do have a rather lovely selection of smoothies, though...

As it was lunchtime, we both went for largeish meals to keep us going.

Garry's burger and chips

My full breakfast; this also came with tea

It was just over £10 for a smoothie, our two meals and the pot of tea that came with my breakfast. That's fairly good value and the café is only ten minutes walk from our house. Garry is completely in love with the place and I can see us going back quite frequently whilst we live here.

Spaghetti House

NOT the chain, before anyone asks...

When we were in Tufnell Park earlier today, we saw a place called The Spaghetti House. We'd seen it online whilst researching the area and thought it was interesting. It's a bring-your-own-booze place that's run by one guy, and if he's ill or on holiday or just can't be arsed to open, it doesn't open. It's supposed to be quirky, tasty, good value home cooking. Sounds brilliant to me.

It's right outside Tufnell Park station and looks from the outside like a greasy spoon. From the inside, it looks like this.

The walls are covered in weird and wonderful stuff. The tables fit the greasy-spoon idea, but it's done nicely — there are little vases with flowers or plants on the tables, and jugs bursting with flowers on the counters.

And the food?

Bruschetta! This photo doesn't show how huge it was, and there were two of these and a pile of tomatoes.

We shared our bruschetta starter, and had a main course each.

Garry's tagliatelli carbonara

My amazing, amazing lasagne

We were so full we didn't want anything else, but the menu is huge and there are specials too.

You can even get takeaway spaghetti.

This isn't the best restaurant I've ever been to or the nicest food I've ever tasted, but it's gorgeous comfort food and perfect for a rainy day like today. For our enormous shared bruschetta, two huge main courses, an orange juice and a diet coke it was £21.50. That's really good value for money and it was lovely.

Where to find it

June 7th 2012

Considering it feels like we didn't really do anything special today, we have a lot to write about...

We wanted to get to know the area around our flat a bit more, so we wandered up to Tufnell Park. It's a really short walk, only about ten minutes away, and when we got there we found the best shop ever.

Yes, that sign does say "Free books". It's an initiative to stop unwanted books going into landfills; you can pop in and just take up to three books. Utterly brilliant. 

We then walked a little further — as in, another ten minutes — and reached Kentish Town.

Kentish Town is absolutely full of little cafés and restaurants that I wanted to go into immediately. I can see myself getting very fat in London.

Beautiful building

This is where things got a little bizarre/hilarious. We popped into a health food shop called Earth Natural Foods where I, after months of searching, found some hibiscus tea. We also bought some almond soap that smells like marzipan and Garry got a bag of cashews.

The nuts were self-serve — there were little tubs and you poured them into bags, weighed them and took them to the counter. As he was filling the bag another guy came over and just started putting his hands into the tubs to take out nuts and try them, talking to us. We both thought this was weird, but assumed that it was just some cool London thing that we were too common to know about.

Or at least, we thought that until he was dipping his fingers into the buttercream of a cake and tasting it.

As soon as we left the shop we were accosted by a guy who said the nut eater was working for him. Apparently we'd been undercover filmed for a Channel 4 show about social etiquette/reserve in Britain and we were "hilarious" (read: at one point Garry called him a twat under his breath). We've been interviewed for the show and it's going to be on in autumn. And this happened on our second full day in London. Sigh.

Anyway. We were pretty tired by this point (it's exhausting being a TV star, you know) so we headed home, stopping on the way at Rustique — The Literary Café.

It was very, very pretty inside, and our coffees and cookies were both lovely. Wee bit pricey, though...

This is what I get when I subtly take a photo of somewhere

Me with my mocha

Our cookies (I'd already eaten half of one)

Books!

Where to go