Skip to main content

Macaroons and Ice Cream Parlours

My gorgeous macaroons. Courtesy of La Duree. When they first opened in the UK I knew I had to visit but it wasn't until I came across them in Green Park where they opened in Burlington Arcade when I got to try it out. Now they are like my overpriced luxury item of choice. And the perfect reasoning to why I have never tried caviar. I really want to, but I don't think I can afford a £50 a pot habit. If you are ever in this neck of the woods, you may as well do my abbreviated tour. Stop off at Green Park station. Start on the opposite side of the road to the Ritz. Walk towards Piccadilly Circus and you will find La Duree (humanahumanahumana) and for me the must tries are Caramel and salted butter, vanilla, and raspberry. Moving along you get La Maison Chocolat, which whilst the cake I bought wasn't THAT nice, it was the smell of molten chocolate in the shop that made me high. Right next door to that is a japanese shop called Minamoto Kitchoan which sells japanese jellies for the most part. This is purely for asthethic appeal but they do it very well and I'm sure a box of their cakes would go down very well as a dining gift.

If that's not enough, Fortnum and Mason's is opposite. Whilst it lacks the big moon-eyed effect of the Harrods cake section they now have an ice cream parlour on the first floor, called, wait for it, The Parlour. Whilst I would recommend it on the dinkiness - nice decor, tiny coronets of icecream with your coffee and whilst there was nothing wrong with the knickerbocker glory I ordered. It was at least 20 minutes before we were served our order. Put it this way, I was born a restaurant girl. If you see a customer sitting in front of them with nothing, not even a drink, you check. At the very least you serve water or something!! And after we cornered the manager and she said it would be a few minutes (from the looks of it our original order never made it to the kitchen), it took ten minutes more? And they forgot the extra whipped cream my sister ordered. Funnily enough when we didn't pay the service charge but left the exact amount of the ice cream and mineral water on the table, within a few seconds of us walking out a waitress was dispatched to find out why we wouldn't pay our service charge (this is by stalking us round the shop floor) , to which I bluntly replied "because we waited over 20 minutes" and she went back to report that to her manager. Why would I recommend you go there? Well you never know, you might have a good experience compared to me. Plus, there was that appeal of somewhere other than Haagen Daz.

Alternative ice cream places around Leicester Square:
Ciao - behind the capital radio building on Charing Cross Road, whilst I find the stuff a bit sweet, it is worth going just to look at the menu - ice cream forms spaghetti and lasagna dishes or even fried eggs! If that's not enough they do a Ferrero Rocher sundae which could never live up to the name.
Rendevous - right on Leicester Square with huge vats of swirly ice cream. Only problem is: a) the staff get confused if you ask for a sundae, so just ask for number of scoops b) there is no bathroom.
Haagen Daz - hard to miss and hard never to have tried. It's been renovated to a more club feel with cocktails and sofas but what I really miss is the way we miss things in the UK. Whilst we did have the ice cream fondue available, the UK has never had - the Haagen Daz cream tea as featured in Shanghai (multi-tiered ice cream stack with small cakes) and more importantly, the ice cream mooncakes seen in HK. I have never managed to go HK at the right time for these, but just about everyone waxes lyrical about them. BRING THEM HERE!!!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rachel Allen's Chicken Pie

Some things should be noted. I'm not a major fan of Rachel Allen. She always seemed such a poor man's version of Nigella. Some trophy wife of a producer somewhere making a lady of leisure's living of cookery shows playing up the Irish accent in a cavernous show kitchen. Perhaps it was because all her helpful "tricks" had already been touted by others a long time ago - like getting the garlic smell out of your hands... But over the years she's kind of grown on me. The format is a little twee, the pink accessories want to make me barf, but she isn't the spawn of all things faux goddess anymore. (FYI I have no idea with regards to her personal life etc, but like my distaste for Ashley Judd, one wonders how she gets good films with little acting skill.) So here I was, tapping away on the internet last week whilst she was on tv, and there it was. A beast of a pie. It was so beautiful. Her job was done. Out I trotted to buy a huge pie dish (we don't own cera
4 comments
Read more

Low carb diet plan

It's January. I've allowed my weight to grow UP with the Covid curve and somehow it still has not come down. Thanks to a large part to me using up a number of hot chocolate bomb "fails" just before Christmas I think. Wall of text alert - I don't plan on ever writing about this ever again. To be clear, I've never been a fan of carb-cutting. Cutting an entire food group seems wrong. Carbs, as we were taught at school, are cornerstones for growth. I felt like decking a "doctor" at an annual work health check when he told me to cut carbs as a way to get my weight down. The fact he then pushed a blog which was at its infancy at the time felt like a distinct conflict of interest. Anyway, I do absolutely agree I need to cut sugar, and I will never disagree that whole grains are better for you. It is also very, very effective dieting wise on me. We don't know why, I do know I have a lot of water weight which fluctuates a lot in the month and also it does
Post a Comment
Read more

Amazon dependency

Random non-food moment, I am trying to boycott Amazon at the moment. It's monopoly and ethics don't sit well with me. I'm not one who thinks Bezos should be lynched for his money for the greater good, nor do I think taxing the company is particularly effective as they do have choices of jurisdictions and in the case of France, a smile and a "pass it on to the supplier" approach. Instead I'm just going to do my part by not buying from them. Probably not the greatest protest on earth since I'm cutting down on purchasing anyway (minimalism, where for art thou? Buried under two rooms of baking equipment that's where.) Anyway, I still want books. My favourite place in the world is sitting in Waterstones Piccadilly with a pile of books. On a few occasions I have read them cover to cover over a number of weeks like using it as a public library. Much like the occasional homeless guy having a nap in a safe space. (I'd like to say one book was on minimalism
Post a Comment
Read more