Like in France, McDonald’s menu in England is pretty boring. It’s mostly the usual suspects, though they do have something called Cheese & Herb melts that are basically just mozzarella sticks, but in nugget form.
I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone bellow with quite the impressive room-filling intensity of the order-taker at the Regency Cafe, but holy crap. I wish I had taken a video of this because there’s no possible way I can adequately describe it with just words. She sounded like a pretty normal person when she was taking orders, but then when they were ready and she called them out? Her voice got two or three octaves deeper and it was like she had a megaphone embedded in her larynx.
After spending a couple of months in non-English speaking countries, there’s something oddly comforting about removing that struggle.
I’m a pretty huge fan of stuff like pastrami and Montreal smoked meat, so when I found out that they have something similar in England called salt beef, it instantly shot to the top of my list of things to try.
There are roughly seven billion pubs in London, and a good chunk of them have long and storied histories.
One such pub: the Lamb and Flag, which has been around since 1772, and which was reportedly a favourite of Charles Dickens.
I’ve had some pretty great fish and chips back home. Plus, it’s a pretty simple dish, so how much better could it be over here?
It turns out: substantially better.
Thanksgiving was last week, and thankfully there’s one Canadian pub in town that saved me from going sad and turkeyless (and considering that it’s called the Maple Leaf and it’s absolutely festooned with Canadian flags, there’s no mistaking it for anything but a Canadian pub).
Here’s a pretty big bummer: Big Ben is currently under a pretty substantial renovation, which means that the outside is almost completely covered in scaffolding, and its iconic bonging has been silenced.
You wouldn’t know it from this blog, but I’ve actually been in London for the last couple of weeks — I had a fairly substantial backlog of posts that I’ve been working through. Which is a good thing, because up until a few days ago I was doing pretty much nothing but watching movies at the BFI London Film Festival and then writing about them.