I’m back in London – hence this is coming Monday morning instead of Sunday evening. As expected, I didn’t get to eat at half of the places on my list and was sad to miss some bakeries and chocolate shops, but here are the best of what I did try this week (it wasn’t the burrito):
- A slice of thin-crust, artichoke pizza from the worker-owned bakery chain Arizmendi was the perfect savoury snack between a very patisserie-filled week! They bake just one pizza a day and the toppings change. I wish I’d gone back from some of their sourdough – especially the chocolate cherry loaf!
- Everything we ate at Statebird Provisions (except, sadly, the desserts) was a perfect flavour bomb. We particularly loved the dumpling, the brocolli with romanesco sauce and the yuba (tofu skin) noodles with marinated oyster mushrooms, rosemary almonds and green garlic oil. You should really book in advance here but we turned up at 5.25pm on a Monday and managed to get a seat at the bar.
- At excellent coffee shop Contraband Coffee (recommended by a former Chocolate Ecstasy Tours guest) we had the best decaf filter coffee I’ve ever had and a mochi muffin made by Third Culture Bakery. Apparently it’s a Hawaiian treat. It was so sticky and squidgy and delicious. I’m going to try to find a recipe to recreate them. A few days later, at a different coffee shop, I tried their Churros muffin which was also wonderful.
- My friend Chloe rated only one bakery as 3-stars so I went by Neighbor Bakehouse and bought four things. By far the best of these was the Chocolate Pudding Doughp bun: a brioche bun that was glazed with chocolate before being baked so had a crunchy, cookie-like trim to its base and was then piped full of excellent chocolate custard.
- I went back to Dandelion to try their Brownie flight: three squares of brownie made to identical recipes but using three separate single-origin chocolates: Ecuador, Belize and Madagascar. They all tasted so different! The Ecuador gave the richest chocolate flavour with a slight nuttiness.
I’m heading to Gunpowder tonight and the new Soho House in White City tomorrow! Let’s see if anything makes next week’s list…