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Tradition apparently dictates that we go out for dinner on Good Friday. I’m sure this must be the case, but as I can’t remember when all the Good Fridays of the last few years were, I can’t go back and check.

So anyhow, after a day of being generally limp and lazy, flopping around in the conservatory reading my book while the cat darted around in the meadow, I zizzed over to Mark T’s and we drove into London. Personally I hate driving in London, but you can’t deny that cruising through Docklands at night, and then up the Embankment to Parliament is one of the most visually spectacular journeys you can make. There really is nowhere else like it, and I was quite content to sit in the back and gaze out of the window as the world swept by.

We were booked into a Polish restaurant in South Kensington, but very nearly didn’t get there at all. Ystabub’s directions were from the tube station, and read ‘turn left out of the station, then left again and it’s on the corner’. A more accurate telling would have been turn right out of the station and then right again…

As such, we ended up going down some dark and dangerous alley (if there is such a think in South Kensington) and then retracing our steps to a very tumbledown-looking grotto on said corner.

Very bizarre inside. Reminded me of my first trip to Prague, years ago, before it got so popular. They had a noisy dumb waiter (surely a contradiction in terms) and broken panelling on the walls. The salt and pepper pots looked home made, and the loo was smaller than our understairs cupboard. The food was… interesting.

The ‘mushroom’ dish had no mushrooms in it. Instead, it was rolled cabbage stuffed with mashed potato. Most of the meat seemed to be veal, and everything else was either cabbage or beetroot. Despite that, though, it was all very very nice.

I started with the Ukrainian beetroot soup, which was very sweet and very rich, and seemed to have a layer of grass clippings on top, like it had been blended using a Flymo. After that, the Polish Vegetarian Platter, which was immediately renamed vegetarian splatter in honour of what it was likely to do to your insides. This consisted of a fried potato pancake (very yummy), sauerkraut (less yummy, but not as bad as kimchi), a pancake that had been rolled up and stuffed with cabbage (yummy-ish, and perfectly edible) and three small crumpled things that looked like human ears, which had been stuffed with cabbage (kind of pasty and not very yummy at all).

We finished with ice cream and yet more pancakes.

Overall, it wasn’t bad food. Very basic and very cheap (

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 26th, 2005 at 8:55 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.