This London Adventure: Tufnell Park

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

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.