I went to L’escargot Blue in Broughton Street Edinburgh on Saturday night to celebrate a good friends 40th birthday. We had intended to eat snails for starters & horse steaks as a main, but neither were on the menu that day. This, it turns out was not such a bad thing as the dishes we did have were delicious!
Importantly as well, all the ingredients were organic and ethically sourced which is annother important issue when choosing a fine place to eat.
The restaurant was very busy & quite load with happy chatter from other dinners. The service was attentive & friendly & the dishes were served at a good speed.
The decor was perfect for the place. Huge french posters, quaint table decor & fabulous lights made from old wooden wine boxes.
I chose a starter of pork head croquettes with a salad & mushrooms & my friend ordered rabbit & duck pates. All were very nice. The only thing that I would have liked in addition would have been a fruit jelly or compote for my croquettes as they were slightly dry, but good portion sizes and tasty none the less. A huge basket of bread was also served at the bread was really nice.
For the mains I chose something which I had not tried before, but would not hessitate have again. This was a wonderfully tasty & rustic braised ox cheek dish, with pancetta & mushrooms that was very tender & delightful. Jay’s main was my favourite of the night, a dish of pike with a squid sauce. The dish was cheesy with the pike made into a kind of mousseline with a cheese & squid crust. 10/10 for this dish.
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My ox cheeks were served in this dish and the amount of meat was more than plentiful. I asked for one of the cheeks to be taken home in a doggy bag, as I could not waste such good food and would have had no space at all for dessert. I also knew my greyhound would very much enjoy the other ox cheek but alas my friend ate it when I had gone to bed. Oh well, it was his birthday, so I took it as fair.
If I had not been so full after my starter & main I would have chosen the bread & butter pudding with prunes & armagnac but chose a a pineapple & rum frangipagne tart with creme englaise & ice cream with a lovely 1976 armagnac to help the digestion. Jay had the chocolate torte that was sublime, nice & light, bitter and dark. He could not manage to finnish his which was such a shame, so I wolfed it down with no hessitation at all.
This is a restaurant I would very happily go back to & as their is a sister resaurant L’escargot Blanc I think that is going to be visited soon. The prices were very reasonable & all in all a very good dining experience. I would give this restaurant an overall 8.5 out of 10 for the evenings meal. Everything was exceptionally well cooked, with good service & a bustling ambience. It is good to have found a restaurant that sells offal & creates wonderful dishes from it.
I hope they do very well as I would like this restaurant to thrive and trade for a long time to come.
This is a fabulous place, situated in Abbeyhill is a gem of a place to have a slightly different dining experience in Edinburgh. When I first heard of this eatery, run single handedly by an Armenian monk, I had to try & book a table for a group of friends & myself to see what it was like.
Initially, I called to enquire about costs & how many were needed to make the evening worth wile for him. I called and left a message & got a reply about 3 weeks later. He was calling from a telephone box & said he only had 20p. I said to hang up & I would call back & he seemed very surprised at the technology of me being able to call back to a phone box!!!
He was delightful to talk to & we arranged an evening for me to take 9 quests. I think it was £20 a head & he would not disclose what would be served.
When we got there, ( on time, as we were warned that late commers were normally refused entry ) we were led through a dark & cluttered hallway, full of old bicycle parts, carpets & fishing nets, to the dining room with the most dusty, ecclectic collection of Armenian posters, more carpets, fishing nets & parts of bicycles.
Were served dish after dish after dish, each one fairly rustic, & very delicious.
Unfortunately I cannot find the photographs that I took that night, but that does give me more reason to book there again. For great food & unusal & brilliant service I give this quirky eatery 10/10. It was just like I had imagined except for the fact that the said monk was a total sweet gentleman & not the grumpy individual that we were expecting after seeing other reviews prior to our fantastic dinner date. I hope to add photos to this blog post later in the hopes that I can find them sometime.
Below is a review by one of our friends who was dining with us that night.
The Armenian Aghtmar Lake Van Monastry in Exile is a place, once eaten at, never forgotten.
: We were greeted by the proprietor and led through a candle-lit passageway to a cavernous room decorated with enormous flags, rusty bicycles, traffic cones, church pewes and a moose head staring down on our table. The room itself was quite cold but thankfully a candle was provided for us to sit round- when it got really cold, we lit it. The walls were festooned with various images/photos/ of Armenian culture ( sheet music, stern looking soviet faces, “Visit aRMENIA tURISTIC ADVERTS ETC). The toilets were very atmospheric, retaining a kind of ‘never been painted in 30yrs feel’, a tin of ‘VIM’ which had sort of morphed itself to the window sill, beneath the most cobwebbed net curtain this side of the iron curtain itself, completed the scene. Once seated our host appeared & disappeared over and over again, each time arriving with a different course of fayre ranging from traditional Armenian bread to stewd brussel sprouts, an amazing mixed sald, stuffed peppers, chicken risotto, and others before climaxing with a fresh summer fruit ( Armenian style) sorbet followed by (non) turkish coffee. Halfway through the meal our host asked if we would “like to listen to some music”? we agreed and were treated to a medley of traditional Armenian marching music from his impressive selection of old 78’s. Later one of our party asked our host if he would like to listen to some of our music? replying ‘yes’, my friend granted his wish by playing a medley of classic KISS songs on his “flying V” Ukelele! - I’m sure you will agree, a truly unforgettable experience! The possibly 10 course ( I lost count) banquet was washed down with a couple of bottles of Spanish laughing juice, making the whole affair most agreeable indeed. Recommended. PS be patient, it took us half a dozen phone calls to pin him down/agree a date & time, well worth the wait tho!
The article below was on Yahoo news last week. It is not the first time I have come across the theory of seaweed being added to foods to aid weight loss. Apart from the fact that seaweed is a highly nutritious natural ingredient to add to your diet anyway.
As this report below has said that scientists have tested the effectiveness of 60 different natural fibres with an ” artificial gut “, I decided to try it on myself.
I sourced a supplier of dried bladderwrack & I have been adding 2 teaspoons of this + 1 teaspoon of lemon pepper to my basic bread mix.
It is thorougly delicious & all friends that have tasted it so far are in total agreement with me regarding how good it tastes.
As from today:-
I will be eating 1-2 slices of this bread every day for 1 month & sharing my results on this blog. I do not own bathroom scales, as I do not think it is healthy to weigh yourself too regularly.
I weighed in at 150 kilo, at my friends house on Sunday evening & I had been eating seaweed bread then for 4 days.
One observation that I have made so far on this, is that if you are constipated. eating seaweed bread may help to wake up the bowels. Nothing extreme you understand. But if you are an irregular person, eating a slice a day may make you function on a daily basis.
Researchers found seaweed fibre could reduce the body’s fat uptake by more than 75%.
A fibrous material in Sea Kelp called alginate was better at preventing fat absorption than most over-the-counter slimming treatments, laboratory tests showed.
Dr Iain Brownlee, who co-led the University of Newcastle team, said: “This suggests that if we can add the natural fibre to products commonly eaten daily - such as bread, biscuits and yoghurts - up to three quarters of the fat contained in that meal could simply pass through the body.
“We have already added the alginate to bread and initial taste tests have been extremely encouraging. Now the next step is to carry out clinical trials to find out how effective it is when eaten as part of a normal diet.”
The scientists used an “artificial gut” to test the effectiveness of 60 different natural fibres by measuring the extent to which they affected the digestion of fat.
They presented their findings at the American Chemical Society’s spring meeting in San Francisco, US.
Dr Brownlee said the aim was to see if the same effects modelled in the laboratory could be reproduced in living volunteers.
“Our initial findings are that alginates significantly reduce fat digestion,” he said.
The research is part of a three-year project funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).
Nestlé is singled out for boycott action as monitoring shows it to be responsible for more violations of the requirements than any other company. ( Copied from Baby milk action.org )
Last night a friend had put a comment on facebook ” Why have a break with a Kit Kat, when you can have a break with a pint for 8 less calories”. Fair point. But I commented on liking his rationale, & that Nestle should be boycotted anyway & it is far better to support your local brewery.
My brother sent me a link today to a CNN report. “Greenpeace, Nestle battle in kit kat viral”.
(CNN) — A video clip which shows an office worker opening a Kit Kat chocolate bar and finding an orangutan’s finger has been re-posted on video-sharing Web site YouTube, a day after it was removed at the request of food giant Nestlé.
The viral campaign, which parodies a Kit Kat television commercial, was intended by Greenpeace to highlight how Nestlé buys palm oil — a key ingredient in many of its products — produced from the destroyed rainforest homes of the last orangutans in Indonesia.
Here is the video:
“The Greenpeace campaign will continue until Nestle has cut the Sinar Mas group from its supply chain. –John Sauven, Greenpeace UK
After watching this video & noticing that the Kit Kat on the video had a FAIR TRADE logo on the wrapper, I went to my nearest outlet for said confectionery, I found that YES INDEED, Kit Kat wrappers do display a FAIR TRADE LOGO. ABSOLUTELY SHOCKING!!!!!!!
I do of course intend to find out how & why they can get away with this. Perhaps Kit Kats are made using fair trade chocolate ( or some similar thing that would qualify them for the logo useage ),? but using palm oil from grossly deforested area’s is o.k. then?
I will do a seperate blog post on this when I have investigated this issue on what the rulings are for qualifying something to proudly boast an item as being fair trade.
You can’t really blame people for thinking that a Kit Kat, was perhaps an ethically o.k. chocolate snack to buy as bearing the fair trade logo, would OR SHOULD make you think that the ingredients were ethically sourced. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and people will consider the logo & probably see how many calories it contains to help them decide if that should be their snack of choice that they want to buy.
The 60-second clip ends with a play on Kit Kat’s famous slogan: “Have a break? Give orangutans a break.”
Give us a break as well. Give us decent laws on food labelling & advertising & let us then, be able to make an educated & informed choice on what we eat, what is in it & where it comes it come from.
On Thursday me & a good friend ,went to check out the food at the Yum Yum Hong Kong Diner in Edinburgh. I had walked past this place a few weeks ago and it looked very authentic, so I picked up a menu & called my mate Jason. I explained to him that this was not going to be your average UK chinese food experience as they had deep fried pigs intestines on the menu. We agreed a day to check out this cuisene and used it also as an excuse to dress up. Me in oriental silks and Jay, well he is always exceptionally well dressed. I also said that I would probably have something on the menu that was not too hard core, but Jay reconed he would go straight to the most outlandlish thing he could find. When we got there I decided to do the same.
We went for:
Duck egg & pork congee::
The most edible of our choices, a soup with the consistency of wallpaper paste ,and with rice being the ingredient to give it the thick glupiness. It was really nice at first & the smell was enticing. I was unsure at the blackish green ( vegetable ) on my spoon, I guessed it was a type of aubergine and as soon as I put it in my mouth I realised it was a quarter of a duck egg. Of course! Thumbs up for the congee.
Parsnip cake:
I thought that this would be the easiest thing to eat, but to the contary it was not at all. This was cubes of steamed or boiled turnip which seemed to have been fried in pig fat & possibly marinated as the pig fat taste was very intense. I ate a half cube and I don’t think Jay even ate that much. The piece of duck egg at the side of the plate did get eaten of course, but was put there to photograph the colour of it.
Deep fried stuffed pigs intestine:
The waitress was fantastic to us from the minute that we walked in. Very helpful indeed. She pointed to pictures of the items that we asked about, and the picture of the stuffed pigs intestine looked better than I had imagined, so I eagerly tried it when it arrived on the table to the shock of my rapidly kicking in gagg reflex. I had to decant it from my mouth to a nearby napkin. It wasn’t until we had finnished that I found that the stuffing was prawn.I had guessed chicken. I love prawns but did not detect a hint of what the stuffing was as the intestine was so overpowering. I had more congee and then tried again to eat more intestine, I still had to decant it, but less rapidly than the first time. I had not dipped the second piece and then dipped my fingernail into the dipping sauce to see how it tasted and was a stronger piggy flavour than the intestine itself. I wrapped 2 pieces into a napkin to give to my dog. It got yogi’s approval.
Salt and chilli duck tongue:
Again I thought that this would be interesting and easy enough to eat. Oh, how wrong could I be. The plate arrived with a pile of possibly 60 duck tongues with a crunchy coating. I picked one out with my fingers and put it in my mouth, not very much taste ( except the lingering pig!) salt & chilli. But it was hard. It seems that the tongue itself was pretty small and it was the beak that I was trying to eat. Jay was surprised as he had eaten a few yet he had not come accross any beaks. Well, he was swallowing them whole and then continued to eat but extracting the beak before swallowing. I don’t know yet how he got on in the toilet the next day but I am glad I did not swallow any beaks myself. I should have left some stripped beaks at the side of the plate for the photo.
The service was great, portions large, prices cheap & atmosphere like a mini Hong Kong holiday as the huge tv was showing some Hong Kong soap opera and clientelle prodominantly Chinese. This restaurant is on West Regent Street in Edinburgh. It only seats 20 people & closes at 8pm every night. There is no alcohol licence and you cannot take your own bottle. The drinks are sodas and a large selection of teas. Jay’s tea was honey and it made his expression change when he tasted it more than any of the food did. Mine was almond and honey. All the teas come cold in a sealed plastic cup.
The night did serve its purpose. We planned to get dressed up and have some food ,culture shock and we got it. My brother now wants to go when he comes to visit. I think I will have sweet and sour king prawns with noodles next time, my usual chinese favorite. I think this will be a safer way to a full belly but I am sure that it will be unlike any sweet and sour king prawn that I have ever ordered from a take away.
I would recomend this eatery to anyone who wants some true Hog Kong food. My dog would also recommend the cuisene.
