Thursday, February 11, 2010

The Hub of London

A site I've recently become aware of is http://www.qype.co.uk/ . It's a very useful resource if you're over in Great Britain and looking for restaurants, pubs, or any thing of that sort in London.

This site is very extensive. It provides information about events and occasions occurring all over the world. Whatever you're interested in, you can find it on this site.

What I hadn't realized until I found this site was that you can get Kentucky Fried Chicken in Great Britain. That's pretty awesome. And apparently you can also get Subway. Now, if they get a Jimmy Johns, they'll be all set.

So now I'm curious as to what British pizza is like. So I go over to this site and type 'pizza' into the search field. What do you know? They have Domino’s and Pizza Hut pizza in Britain, and some chain called Pizza Express, and even something called Clever Wally's Raw Pizza, which sounds more interesting than appetizing to me, but still, it’s knowledge I didn’t have before, which can’t be a bad thing.

Apparently they don’t have much barbecue, though. A search turned up only one place: www.JollyHogandSausage.co.uk. I’m not sure I want spare ribs from a Jolly Hog. But then, I usually get them from a feed store (Mark’s, just down Bardstown Road from me) so maybe it wouldn’t be all that bad after all.

There are, however, 55 Latin American restaurants in London, which is about 55 too many, in my opinion.

But what do you know? I do a search on ‘steak’ and I come up with Bodean's Barbecue in Clapham. So maybe the barbecue places are just hiding.

Also, apparently a lot of places in London are called “Gaucho” something. My guess is, if you want to open a business there, you could make a killing selling sombreros.

Restaurants
Pubs London
Restaurants London

2 comments:

  1. A place I've not been since '83, I'm virtually certain that the press of the U.S. markets and the general global blender has made many brands familiar to us fairly easy to find. Usually there end up being some odd differences as items are tuned to regional tastes. Even something as seeming basic and ubiquitous as ketchup varies with local appetites; we would tend to find the ketchup in the U.K. to be rather more vinegary than we're used to, though that could be gradually changing with so many people moving about.

    Back then outside of pub food most of the fast food ("take away" as they generally referred to it, compared to our "take out") were things such as their homegrown burger chain, Wimpy, and a great deal of Pakistani/Indian (what I'd automatically associate as East Indian cuisine but which they generally seemed to refer to as "Paki") places with most dishes made with curry spices.

    As you've seen from the site, it's come along considerably since I was over there, when it seemed that almost anything served on a plate had a side of peas with it. The only slice of pizza I had over there back in the day tasted as if they hadn't gotten the crust quite right, reminding me of some ill-advised attempts I've seen to use Bisquick for such purposes.

    The closest to a travelogue I've looked at since then is a piece I saw a year or so ago where a tour of London is set up to follow places covered in chapter four of Moore and Campbell's FROM HELL, where Dr. Gull and Netley go on a tour through the city.
    http://ayankeeinlondon.blogspot.com/2008/09/from-hell-chapter-four-walking-and.html.

    Should I ever get back there, I'll likely try to remember to take a day and try to see it from that vantage, too.

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  2. I appreciate the comments. This post is a paid commercial thing, like Tony C. used to post on his blog from time to time, except that I'm not supposed to tell anyone I'm getting paid to do them. But they don't pay me much, so, you know, they get what they get.

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