Everywhere
EAT - 1 star
Everywhere
Marks & Spencer - 1 star
Everywhere
Stick and Bowl - 2 stars
31, Kensington High Street, W8
Foubert's - 0 stars
17 Kensington High Street, W8
As opposed to Paris, London is a city I remember fondly, although for no good reason. I first visited in 1993, when my girlfriend and I stayed with my sister for a week near Earl's Court and saw the tourist sites. I spent three weeks there in 1996, taking a summer course at the LSE that was trivially easy and living in a dorm on the South Bank across from the Tower of London, and my favorite memories are of running along the Thames, back before my knee broke down during my one and only marathon. But the longest time I spent there was a truly miserable experience, six weeks of a brutal McKinsey study in 1998 working until late at night six or seven days per week, and the kind of pressure that gave me panic attacks for the first time in my life, and living in the Royal Horseguards hotel near Whitehall. (When I left, the bill was well over $10,000, including hundreds of dollars for laundry.) The love of my life visited me for two weeks, and I spent almost no time with her, but I did ask her to marry me one evening in the Victoria Embankment Gardens, and she hugged me and said yes. I believe I went to the office later that night.
So I don't know why London is a city I always look forward to seeing (I've been back a half dozen times since then on various business trips), and why it's even a place I would like to live. (Of course, I realize that I will live in very few of the places where I would like to live.)
This trip was undoubtedly one of the worst, as I was sick for all three days, progressing through the various stages of a severe cold, including sniffling my way through a full-day meeting and a miserable flight back home. But still it was momentarily invigorating to swim in the diverse sea of busy commuters, and to look in at all the wonderful things to buy and eat in a real city, and to imagine what it would be like to be there every day.
This time I was staying in a hotel just off Kensington High Street and across from the Kensington Gardens, an area thickly populated with restaurants. But being sick the whole time, I confined myself to takeaway and casual places. Luckily, London has a restaurant category that is so good and so obvious that I wish we had it in the US: the high-quality, fresh-food cafeteria pioneered (I think) by Prêt à Manger and since copied by many other chains. Prêt was my favorite place to eat back in 1998, in part because I could get more or less as many things as I wanted and still stay within a reasonable expense limit. (Looking back on my McKinsey days, I should have spent and expensed much, much more than I did.) I ate once at Prêt and once at EAT, and each time I had one of those quintessentially English sandwiches, mature cheddar with pickle (which is not what you think of when you hear the word "pickle"), and they were both reassuringly familiar.
My other discovery was a Chinese hole-in-the-wall called Stick and Bowl, where people are densely packed into communal bar-type seating and they make all the standards, with a slight tendency toward Cantonese cuisine, and they bring them to you fast. The spring roll was grayish on the inside (though tasty), but the sautéed bok choy with garlic sauce was just right, and the vegetable noodle soup was the closest thing to chicken soup that I would eat these days. If only we had such a place back home.
The last day I had a couple hours in the morning before I had to leave for Heathrow (which was itself an adventure, since the Heathrow Express was shut down and I had to take a cab instead). I thought about swinging by Victoria Embankment Gardens and ... what would I do? Take a picture of the spot where we got engaged? Instead I had herbal tea and a scone at the Marks & Spencer cafe, took a walk in Kensington Gardens, and sat on a bench and watched the dogs (almost as cute as the Parisian ones) until it was time to go. It was cool but brilliantly sunny, and apart from missing my family I wished time would stop.
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