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).
Seeing as how I’m a reasonable person who spent some time in Paris, I ate a lot of croissants. Do you want to hear about them? Every single one? No? Okay, here they are.
Le Relais de l’Entrecote is so admirably single-minded about its dedication to steak frites that there’s literally no menu. The only questions from the waitress are what you want to drink, and how you want your steak cooked. That’s it. If you want to eat something other than steak frites? Get the hell out.
Never mind what I said about the käsespätzle in Germany being the cheesiest thing I’ve ever eaten — it’s already been superseded by this insane bowl of French onion soup from Au Pied de Cochon in Paris.
If there’s one thing Ikea is known for (aside from vaguely flimsy but very affordable furniture), it’s the Swedish meatballs. They’re cheap, satisfying, and pretty tasty.
I’m in Sweden now, so obviously meatballs were very high on my to-do list.
Seafood is huge here in Hamburg — aside from the fact that the Elbe river runs right through the city, the North Sea and the Baltic Sea are both super close. Notwithstanding a tragic incident involving a dropped fish sandwich worth 12 Euros, this was my first time eating seafood here.
And oh man, it was so good.
There’s a dish they serve in Berlin called käsespätzle, and basically it’s spätzle — a German version of pasta that’s normally served as a side dish — cooked with soft fried onions and a ton of gooey, stringy, super-melty cheese. I think they fry the whole thing around, because there were brown crispy bits of cheese throughout.
The oldest restaurant in Berlin is called Zur Letzten Instanz, and it’s been around since 1621 (so, not quite as old as the bakery I visited in Austria, but still pretty darn old).
Pretty much everyone seems to be in agreement that when you come here, you have to order the grilled pork knuckle (also known as a roasted ham hock — basically a huge chunk of pork, bone and all, from just above the pig’s foot). I require very little encouragement to order a huge chunk of pork, so obviously that’s what I got.