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Wine Blog

Out and About in London Town

Posted by: Trudy and Rob

Tuesday, March 3, 2009 3:01 PM

Been away awhile...literally and figuratively. We recently returned from London and visited the usual tourist sites and a bit more. Of interest t us, of course, was the food and wine scene. With the British pound worth about 1.5 times what the dollar was worth, we decided to let Gordon Ramsey vend his food to more affluent visitors. We did, however, find a few good places for dining that didn’t break the bank. We stayed near St. Paul’s cathedral at a place called The Rookery and we would highly recommend it. There were several neighborhood restaurants around including French and Italian. The best of these was a French bistro named Le Cafe du Marche at 22 Charterhouse Square. They had a three course prix fixe menu for about 33 pounds, not too awfully bad by London standards. This included a first course (roasted red pepper soup for both of us), a main (I had the venison with red wine mushroom sauce...delicious), and a fabulous dessert. Salad greens were served with the meal. As an additional bonus, there was a jazz duo playing very fine tunes. If you’re in the neighborhood you should definitely go there. It wouldn’t hurt to book ahead. We of course had wine with dinner, a 2007 Croze Hermitage from Papillon that was very good and only ran about 26 pounds. I’ve already checked to see if this wine is available here, but from what I understand it’s only available on the east coast. Oh well...

It was interesting to observe the wine scene over there. There is very little U.S. wine on the shelves. The likes of Harrods has the very high end stuff, Opus One and the like, but there’s not that much else around except for the very entry level stuff such as Kendall-Jackson Vintner’s reserve and the like. There is, however, a wide range of wine that we don’t see over here, relatively small bottlings of French and Italian wines that can be pretty delicious. We felt it our duty to try many of them. Australia and New Zealand are also fairly well represented. The pricing seems reasonable as well, perhaps because London is closer to the source of many wines than we are. Makes sense, I guess.

We did try the local food and some ales as well. Perhaps it’s my own personal taste but I must say that we both thought that the local English food still seemed a bit too heavy on the meat and potato side of things. We need to go back and sample some more. The Londoners were very friendly towards us and it’s a fascinating town with a long, somewhat bloody history (remember all of Henry’s wives?!). Go if you get the chance...you’ll have a great time.