It's Greek to me: Saganaki or how to put on a pound in one meal

In the late 1970s my parents took lil'sis & myself everywhere as infants. Babysitters were expensive & we were good sleepers, so we would be popped upstairs fast asleep at dinner parties and posted under the table at restaurants, snug in a carrycot. They like to tell me that at six months I made my first visit to Milou's Kebab House, amongst a plethora of Greek restaurants on Charlotte Street in London's West End.

Although we moved to Kent when I was three, we still ate at Milou's on our frequent day trips to London, and grew up adoring Greek Cypriot food: taramasalata, grilled pitta bread, juicy pork kebabs were our favourites. Xanis & Yanis, Milou's sons, knew us all by name and I can remember every detail of the restaurant. I ate my first persimmon there and discovered that I didn't like bahklava.

Then one day we arrived for Sunday lunch and the restaurant was shut down. We moved across the road to the great Venus Kebab House, but things were never quite the same again. Since lil'sis & I settled in North London, Lemonia in Primrose Hill has become our go-to Greek Cypriot place and I miss eating there.

After our beach outing on Sunday, we looked for a place to eat that wouldn't mind us trailing two damp, sandy, floppy eared hounds behind us.


(Gratutious wet dog picture)

We settled on a sidewalk table at It's Greek to Me, & I crossed my fingers that it would live up to my expectations.

It may look like a doner/gyro joint, but thank goodness It's Greek to Me is more than the sum of its parts. The menu doesn't just pander to populist tastes, and there is a very good spanakopita (a spinach, feta & filo pastry parcel), and a dish I hadn't eaten before: saganaki, a shallow dish of baked cheese.



Whilst Halloumi, or squeaky cheese, is a fixture on English Greek-Cypriot restaurant menus (& in my fridge), Kefalograviera was new to me. Wiki tells me that Kefalograviera is a traditional DOC Greek ewe’s milk hard cheese from Western Macedonia, Epirus, Etoloakarnania and Evritania, and is the traditional cheese for saganaki.

Utterly delicious, salty, chewy, crispy around the edges, it's great eaten with grilled pitta.

The culinary equivalent of spreading lard on your thighs.

It's Greek to Me, Pier Village, 44 Centennial Drive, Long Branch, NJ 07740
(There are 7 branches in NJ,)

Eating & dating: My first week back in Manhattan

I’ve been back in New York for ten days, & it’s rained every one of those ten days. Fortunately, as wellies are obviously impermeable, they are one of things that weren’t ruined in the employee-caused flood at Manhattan Mini Storage in Chelsea, so I fished them out of my locker and have been wearing them every day to splash around the streets.

That said, I’ve also been dating and, whilst my wellies are certainly practical, I’m not wearing them to dinner. This has led to several near arse over tit, knickers in the air moments as I’ve picked my way Downtown over wet, slippery cobblestones in stilettos.

Date number 1 was through my online dating site, & was the first person who’d got in touch with me for several months that I wanted to meet. We’d arranged a drink in New York whilst I was in Lausanne, which I then promptly forgot.

Still, I’m glad that he reminded me on the day as we had a hilarious conversation, fuelled by rather too much Pinot Noir, and I actually lost track of time, so much so that I ended up dashing from our date at SHO Shaun Hergatt's bar at The Setai by Wall Street to Café Select on Lafayette to meet a charming & brilliant English architect friend of a friend for dinner. I arrived a shockingly rude 45minutes late. Fortunately he had a friend from London in tow, and managed to recognise me when I finally pitched (I didn’t have a clue what he looked like), and we ended up having a hilarious evening of beer, perfect rosti and god knows what else.

A group of girlfriends & I convened at Double Crown on the Bowery for dinner on Tuesday. I gave the restaurant a rave review for a US publication when it first opened but it’s gone steadily downhill since. Sometimes the food is good, but the service is execrable, which takes the shine off the whole experience. Notable ballsups have included a two course meal which took 2 ½ hours to be served and was cold when it did arrive last November, and the sloppy, graceless service and tasteless shredded green bean salad on Tuesday. The whole sorry affair was rounded off by this episode at the bar afterwards.

(I should add though that I still believe that Double Crown’s interior is one of the best in NY. The bar is great for drinks, as is its sister bar Madame Geneva next door. Just order carefully in the restaurant and maybe take a good book & a sense of humour for the longueurs in service.)

Wednesday had one of the few sunny interludes of the week, and was warm enough for Francoise & me to take to the roof deck at Soho House. I live two blocks away & there's wireless access, so we’ve decided that it will be our summer office, and, when it finally stops raining, will be found most days under the third umbrella from the left, by the pool, in our bikinis, with laptop (me) & sketchpad (F). Was also very pleased to bump into charming architect & friend from Monday on adjacent sun loungers.

Having spent a large part of the previous days dealing with the aftermath of the storage container flood, I spent Thursday & Friday writing like a fiend, and emerged, blinking, for al fresco drinks with JK on, yup, the roof at Soho House. I know this is getting repetitive, but it is lovely up there, the people watching is second to none, it’s practically next door to my apt, and they do a sublime chili cilantro margarita that knocks your socks off after a hard day. So much so that we ditched our smart dinner plans and retired to PopBurger for burgers & fries instead.

And that was my first week back in Manhattan.

Bobo

I was supposed to be guest-listed for Mansion on Saturday, Manhattan’s new swishy super-club, which has opened on the site of Crobar. Unfortunately my jetlag got the better of me and by midnight I was practically face down in my supper.

I had pottered off to a post Fashion Week birthday supper at Bobo in the West Village. Bobo was briefly hip for a few weeks when it opened last autumn – until people actually tasted the food. With a new chef (make that two: Rick Jakobson & Jared Stafford-Hill) taking over five weeks ago, it’s upped the ante considerably. (There’s not a just a new menu, but a new front of house team too, including the very good Andy Vaughan as GM, newly arrived from Soho House.)

Hidden away on a junction in the West Village, with no signage - and no indication it's a restaurant, Bobo's two floors are shabby chic, lit by candles and seemingly populated by very beautiful, underfed people. (The restaurant has become a firm fashion world favourite, & is currently recovering from hosting Vera Wang’s Lavender label show and umpteen fashion house dinners during NYFW).

Where the old chef, Ducasse alum Nicolas Cantrel’s menu was supposedly Pan-European but read more as American Modern/schizophrenic before, the new carte shows considerable restraint and reads well, with a strong emphasis on seasonality and, frankly, deliciousness. Although our charming waitress said the restaurant was French, it doesn’t read much like any French menu I’ve seen in Paris of late, with more in common with London restaurants like Hereford Road right now.

Having seen the piles of salsify at the Greenmarket that morning, it was especially pleasing to see it here in abundance, especially in a delicate, but sharply dressed salad of winter vegetables. Plump and fluffy ricotta ravioli were well paired with trompette des morts and little pieces of cauliflower, whilst a simple plate of jamon de serrano showed that great ingredients don’t always need bells and whistles. I was eating with girls, so pudding was one textbook creamy and cool semi-freddo with hazelnut macaroon and coffee (I think – I was practically asleep by then), six spoons and a birthday candle.

I’m going back again when I’m not so bludgeoned with tiredness that I can't actually eat a sensible meal. I want to go through the interesting wine list properly, which seems to indicate a sure hand in the cellar on first read. It’s just a shame that so many fashion people eat there: food like this deserves some proper trenchermen.

Shoreditch House

It's been strange being back in London, but not really feeling well enough to do much more than eat my way through a Creme Egg mountain and play with the hound. I've seen relatively few friends, confining myself to the odd supper or lunch in people's homes, with just a couple of outings.

Last week I hopped across town to Soho House's East London outpost, Shoreditch House, for a drink with a friend of a friend. He writes the tell-all, very funny and faintly obnoxious anonymous Cityboy column in The London Paper. I got to hang out with the charming, urbane and generous man behind the construct, rather than Cityboy. Thank God.

SH was crawling with, ahem, celebrities, although I use the word lightly, given that we are talking about Daisy Lowe, Mika and the cast of Shameless. Ms Lowe, in a mini crini and thigh high socks, was being filmed for some BBC documentary at a PR supper in the private dining room.

Cityboy pottered off into the night, & I went onto dinner in SH's Kitchen Dining Room with an old schoolfriend, where we were served some of the worst restaurant food I have eaten in London in years: gluey cauliflower soup (minus the listed truffles), soggy pizza, over cooked broccoli and uncrispy school dinner roast potatoes. The menu was curiously absent of anything that sounded delicious for either carnivores or vegetarians. I thought the whole thing shameful. And expensive.

We perked up when my NY ex-flatmate, the glam stylist Miss JD, appeared as if by magic at our table, fresh from the meal with Miss Lowe. A lovely surprise. And then we bumped into fashion photographer Chloe Mallett whom I shot with last Autumn. A quadruple friends bonus of an evening, which sent me off home with a welcome skip in my step because, if I had flogged across London purely to eat that rubbish* food, I would have been stomping home (via the chippie).

*High class reviewing term

Market: A new British restaurant opens in Camden, London

It’s easy enough to make a grand entrance at Market, a new-ish restaurant in the gastro-wasteland of Camden. Simply push aside the heavy curtain and fall down the hidden step into the dining room as did I and several following customers through the course of the evening.

Fortunately the low key restaurant, with its metal topped tables and salvaged wooden school chairs (watch out for the authentic vicious Wolford-snagging splinters) has attracted a clientele who are far too busy nose down in their troughs of glorious food to take much notice of flailing guests.

Replacing a long-time Chinese restaurant on Parkway, Market couldn’t be more different in approach, with its emphasis on seasonally driven produce and daily changing menu. It’s part of a new wave of London restaurants that ape brasseries with their relaxed local vibe but serve resolutely British food: mackerel paté, pollack, pork cheeks, oysters, offal.

T & I loved our main courses: deeply flavoured beef stew & root mash for her and red curry for me (rather less curry and more fragrant coconut milk with boiled courgettes, coriander sprouts & peanuts), with a side dish of, and here's something I never thought I'd say in a review, stunning January King cabbage, although we weren’t such great fans of the somewhat hectoring owner/server who seems to have froideur as her default mode.

We finished with an ice cream which may be the best I’ve ever eaten, with delicate rosemary notes, served in an old school Duralex glass with rhubarb compote, and a textbook warm bitter chocolate cake before gloating over our very un-London like bill of £48 which included a glass of wine, bottle of fizzy water & service.

Allen & Delancey: Restaurant review

I wrote this review for a publication back in November but, owing to matters beyond my control, it got pushed. This is a more personal version than wld have been printed.
__________

It’s late November, it’s cold, it’s windy, I’m wearing vertiginous heels, and there’s a pan handler eyeing me thoughtfully from his doorway perch on a deserted corner of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The sole reason I’m down here on a grim Monday night is that Allen & Delancey is the new gig of Gordon Ramsey-empire exile Neil Ferguson.

He was famously ejected from the Ramsey ego project at The London NYC Hotel in Manhattan by the irascible Gordon after a series of lukewarm reviews, but there were rumblings that he had been hard done by. Certainly his skill as a chef has never been in question: more his judgement of the requirements of the Manhattan fine dining scene.

I'm having problems finding Allen & Delancey, until I spot the discreet lettering at the bottom of the curtained window, and then see my parents looking lost, and eminently muggable, on the opposite side of the dual carriageway, their cab driver having failed to locate it.

My glamorous mother doesn’t do what she perceives as slumming, not ever. Even getting her down to my East Village apartment from her rococo Midtown hotel is a stretch. If I want to know if Ferguson’s culinary reach and reputation is going to extend up beyond 14th street then my mother's experience will provide the perfect litmus test.

Things don’t start well after her first trip to the bathroom. “It smells of wee, and it’s so dark in there I couldn’t see to reapply my lipstick”. Great. We are apparently to have a bi-level dining experience: Michelin worthy, we hope, in the dining room, and LES dive bar in the loos.

An elegant and dimly lit, narrow bar leads to the windowless two roomed dining room proper, with the prettiest flowers I’ve seen in a restaurant either side of the Atlantic: old fashioned, blowsy roses. The calm and cool jewel box of a dining room at the Royal London has given way to the warmth of bare brick walls, adorned with shelves of sub-pub tat, dodgy paintings and exceptionally comfy banquettes. It’s a clever room with no bad tables, and a sense of occasion about it, even given the downbeat decoration.

It’s just a shame that it’s so dark we can barely read the menus. We grab the church candle from the shelf behind us to illuminate our table, but it barely penetrates the Stygian gloom. Someone seems to have forgotten that the enjoyment of good food requires all five senses: whilst I love The Smiths, the music is way too loud: we have to stretch to hear each other.

Although the barman didn't know how to make an Old Fashioned, the wine list is compact but beguiling, with clever choices including a delicious Gruner Veltliner by the glass. We waver over a very well-priced $100 Amarone, but settle on a $66 Ayres Pinot Noir from Oregon. Ten out of ten for offering tap or bottled water, but we are less impressed to discover that the sparking water is the overly fizzy imported Hildon Water.

Eating in restaurants is tricky as a vegetarian. As a fully paid up member of the awkward squad, (no to fish or meat, yes to dairy & eggs) my diet is a source of derision to many chefs. I certainly know that I am unwelcome in Bourdain’s Les Halles and, although I like and admire Fergus Henderson enormously, I’m not beating a path to St John.

If I check out the carte on-line and there is no vegetarian option then I always ring in advance. At Allen & Delancey I am assured that vegetarianism is no bar to entry: speak up, and “Chef will prepare you something off menu. It’s really no problem at all for both courses.”

I am expecting something quite special now. Not least because before he took the Ramsey shilling, Ferguson did a stage at Alain Passard’s thoroughly amazing L’Arpège in Paris, which has brought the humblest of vegetables to the forefront of modern French cooking, earning three Michelin stars in the process.

Sea scallops, celery root cream, braised cipollini onions, verjus and Raviolo of sweetbreads, bolognese, parslied carrots, savoy cabbage arrive. My parents start to look longingly at their cooling plates, as my place remains empty. I call over the waiter who looks bemused: she hasn’t ordered me a first course, explaining that the vegetable plate is ‘very large’. I look at her like she is insane: maybe she is. But hell, I’m English: I eat my way through menus, vegetarianism not withstanding.

The parents are happily troughing away, liking the contrasts of consistency and taste that chime together on their plates. I eventually get leeks vinaigrette with truffled fingerling potatoes, minus the listed proscuitto garnish. It is good, the baby leeks providing a textural balance to the smooth potatoes, whilst the dressing is just the right side of sharp. Unfortunately, the lack of lighting is such that I actually fail to spot the truffle puree at the side of the plate until I have eaten everything else. I call for more of the delicious warm bread, swish it around the plate, and lick my fingers. Although I had to fight to get fed, it’s an admirable start.

And then, after a lengthy wait (bear in mind it’s a quiet-ish Monday night), our entrees are plonked down. I get a vegetable medley: someone in the kitchen has had fun in the various stations, raking over the mise en place, picking out the vegetable garnishes and cobbling them together over an excellent smear of cauliflower purée.

Peering through the crepuscular murk, I start the name game: I spot trompette des mortes and some fat porcini; a tatty sliver of preserved lemon lurks alongside an olive, an artichoke heart, a piece of parsnip, and a little squash. There are some more of those fingerling potatoes, carrots, and rather too many onions, - pearl and cipollini are my best guess – but it’s just too dark for a serious identification parade.

There isn’t a cohesive note on the plate. (Maybe he should be taking a note from Rowley Leigh’s new Café des Anglais in London whose vegetable plate is a thoughtful selection of roast beets, squash, onions, radicchio di Treviso and a little polenta cake, dribbled with sauce vierge.)

It is also not ‘very large’ but rather small, and I polish it off in a few minutes. Still hungry, I remonstrate with the waiter who hops it to the kitchen and returns with an offer of ‘Chef’s risotto’.

Whilst I wait, the parents engage variously with their main courses: slow roasted pork belly, pickled pear, parsnips, fenugreek syrup for my mother and Beef, cabbage, onions for my father, which he ordered purely because it sounded so unprepossessing. What arrives is a roundel of aged beef; a savoy cabbage parcel contains chopped beef shoulder, and a cabbage wrapped onion. He makes small groaning noises which are slightly disconcerting coming from a parent, but apparently indicate extreme appreciation. The beef is cooked perfectly and, what sounded like heavy peasant food, is actually refined and hearty all at the same time.

The autumnal risotto is sensational, similar to one I had back in March at the Royal London Bar, and certainly one of the best I have eaten. There are various schools of thought where risotto is concerned: some prefer it in the Venetian manner, all’onda, or wavy, where the dish is slightly soupy, rippling when you attack it with a spoon.

This is a stiffer version, with a perfect bite and the lack of soupiness works well with the vegetables. It is studded with chunks of butternut squash, topped with sautéed chestnuts and hen of the woods mushrooms, with a creamy truffled foam around the edges. I try to ask the server about the foam’s composition; she nods and says truffles. I give up, and bury my head in my plate, stopping only to emit small squeaks of pleasure as I shovel it in. I stupidly press some of the delicious mushrooms on my parents. We fall silent in homage. I wonder if anyone will notice if I lick my plate clean.

Just as we have perked up considerably, buoyed by the Pinot and the thoroughly excellent first two courses, our puddings arrive. The menu had read well, with an unusual (for a Manhattan carte), and welcome emphasis on fruit, but the orange plate is a heavy mess: a million miles from the implied elegant assembly.

The one tiny tangerine segment is flavourless, with no evidence of the promised caramelisation. The clementine has been peeled, sawn in half and presented as a charmless hunk of tasteless fruit, the ice cream has crystals in it, and the two sliced chunks of financier, (an almond flour, ingot shaped cake) although with the traditional crisp crust, are too dry and crumbly to work with the fruit. Maybe a self-contained Madeleine with its lemon hint would have worked better. Paradoxically, the element requiring the most skill, the orange blossom sabayon, is immaculate: delicately scented, and moreish.

My mother’s sautéed fall fruits, hibiscus, Catalan cream, saffron pistils has several large chunks of unpeeled apple and pear with shards of core left in. We take turns in nicking bits from my father’s choice, whilst he tries to stab our fingers with his fork. It's a clever take on apple pie a la mode: a whole Gala apple wrapped in excellent puff pastry with a caramel sauce and rum & raison ice cream on the side: Scrumptious.

Service is charming, chatty and well-meaning - but stuck at café level. The smooth service that usually comes with food of this standard is notably absent here: the busboys don’t know who is eating which plate of food, we have to request fresh glasses for our second bottle of wine, and there are long delays. Empty glasses and side plates are left lurking on the table.

If Ferguson has pretensions to make Allen & Delancey a ‘top dining destination’ then he needs to ratchet up the quality of the elements surrounding his food. A firm hand front of house would make all the difference. At the moment this truly inspired cooking deserves much, much more.

In the interests of full disclosure I should note that my risotto was comped as were the puddings, a very generous gesture.

My quest for the perfect omelette (Bonne Fête Nationale)

It's Bastille Day today, so a blog entry on a French theme seems appropriate, and my quest for a proper omelette in this city seems to fit. This may sounds trivial but when you are vegetarian, often an omelette frites is all you're getting (& should be grateful for), given the proliferation of cod French bistros over here.

Pastis served an omelette aux fines herbes which is on a par with the offering at an English motorway service station cafeteria: a rubbery, three inch high, pallid oval lump of dry solidified scrambled egg, which had clearly never been near a frying pan. It was revolting, akin to one of those microwaveable omelettes in the freezer section. And, worse still, when I called the waitress over to complain that this was not an omelette, all she could come up with was that she wouldn't know as she had never been to France. The manager was rude, implied I didn't know what I was talking about and only very grudgingly bought me a replacement fridge-cold pile of over-dressed salad. It's very, very tempting to send Keith McNally the entry on omelettes from Larousse.

Diners here tend to serve variations on the above theme for breakfast, made on a griddle, rather than a semi-circular, frying pan-made, flipped over omelette, but they are at least edible, and you know what to expect when ordering. I'm just offended by supposedly 'French' restaurants that try to pass off execrable cooking as authentically French. ("Omelette aux fines herbes" does rather suggest one will be getting an authentic omelette experience.) (Felix in Soho is another shocker).

Then today L & I crawled out of our respective beds and to Casimir on B and 6th for brunch, where I had an absolutely perfect omelette: an inch or so high, light, golden, slightly tanned around the sides, obviously cooked & flipped in a frying pan, wet in the middle and tasting of fresh eggs. Finally, a New York/French restaurant that didn't ram its Frenchness down your throat and actually had someone in the kitchen who could cook. Result.

Casa Mono: A perfect take on modern tapas in New York

After a pah! at the Gordon Matta-Clark retrospective at the Whitney, H & I trundled over to Gramercy to find a place to eat before The Kooks. Having rejected Pete's Tavern and its serving platter size plates of fried food, we took a cancelled reservation at Casa Mono, owned by Mario Batali, & billed as a modern tapas restaurant. The tiny space, with tables & chairs rammed up against each other speaks of an operation which care more about revenue than an eater's comfort.

Still pleasant, rapid service always helps, and the menu reads well. H ordered fried sardines, & we shared utterly scrumptious steamed asparagus with fried shitake & a truffle butter reduction, a new take on patatas bravas with chilli spiked oil and spring onions, very good bread and olives, and clever tiny croquetas of pumpkin with a melted goats cheese centre, which could have done with a shot of chilli, tomato or perhaps something citrus-y.

The wine list is comprehensive & wholly Spanish, but seems designed, like the space, to squeeze the diner. There are no wines available by the glass, bar cava & sherry, although a few wines can be ordered in cuartos, baby carafes which are about a couple of glasses. Was also somewhat surprised to discover bottles of Manzanilla & Amontillado on the list. Who in their right mind orders an entire bottle of sherry?

My current theory is that tapas are wholly unsuited to the American belief that restaurant food must be served in ginormous portions. Casa Mono gets around this problem by calling the dishes tapas, but actually serving raciones, the larger plates of food desgned to be shared by a group of people, and priced accordingly.

In a way, it's a shame, because the combination of portion size and high pricing restricts a thorough roam around the menu. Still, as I generally want to eat my way through most menus, I applaud any restaurant where I can eat more than two dishes in any one sitting without doing a Mr Creosote. Jason Atherton at Maze and Gordon Ramsey's The London Bar at The London Hotel in Manhattan (spot the connection) are speaheading this grazing approach to fine dining, and I wholly approve.

Schiller's Liquor Bar (is surprisingly good)

I'm giving my liver a rest this week. I’ve walked a lot around the East Village, written a huge amount, failed to catch any mice, and discovered that I can download CSI for free on the CBS site. I know all three of you read this blog to hear about just these kinds of thrilling activities.

Monday night we walked down to Schiller’s Liquor Bar on Rivington on the Lower East Side. Another Keith McNally (Pastis, Balthazar) joint it has a rep for being busy, buzzy, sloppy of service, and over rated. The first two, yes but the food was in a different league from, and cheaper than, most superannuated Parisian brasseries ($30 each). Seven of us (nearly all photographers - is this a gd thing?) shared plates of fried calamari & Schiller's Nachos, plus bottles of Sol & lime. Then I ate warm chèvre & sliced potatoes with tapenade and a little salad, and a bucket of skinny crispy fries on the side. Delicious. House wine comes as Cheap, Decent or Good. The restaurant blurb posits that Cheap is best, altho Decent Red was a very acceptable 05 Sicilian.

There are a lot of restaurants in Manhattan that could learn from Schiller’s. I’m fed up with eating in local places (Flea Market Café in the East Village springs to mind) that produce over priced, mediocre food and serve undrinkably bad (& expensive) house wine. Oh and Schiller’s had way over its complement of exceedingly attractive male customers and (A & M tell me) the female staff are pretty hot too. I see no reason not to return.

I wore: blue grey scooped T shirt. An exceedingly short denim skirt. Grey high heeled Mary Janes. Double breasted navy wool cardigan. Over sized slouchy brown leather bag. big hoop earrings. All High Street.

Supper at Il Bagatto

J finished shooting in Brooklyn at 8pm so we ended up eating with L & Little L, who were already comfortably through a bottle of red at this East Village Italian at 10.30. Curious mixture of perfection and downright bad.

The menu is small plates from a menu that, for once, seemed authentically Italian with a refreshing lack of pasta. And no sodding pizza.

Imported burrata (a money bag of mozzarella filled with scraps of mozzarella & cream) was overpowered by an sauce made from basil & minced olives which had been squashed into a bruschetta and poured over the cheese. The buratta's delicate flavour was overpowered into nothingness; the overwhelming taste mouth-puckeringly salty and bitter. A salade composée was dull: the asparagus over cooked, the mushrooms sliced too fine to add taste or texture.

Then the Valrhona mousse shut me up for at least ten minutes. Beating the pud at Gordon Ramsey into a cocked hat. Literally just chocolate and egg whites (I think) it was heavy, unctuous and generous in size. I used my fingers to scoop every last lick out of the glass.

I'm not a fan of maitre d's who present themselves as wine aficionados and then push you to order more expensive wine after the first two bottles, and who put your second bottle straight into the glasses from the first without offering it in a clean glass for tasting.

I wore: black silk Rory Beca tunic, black wolfords, black cardi, vintage gold chains, sheepskin bonnnet & black bubble skirt coat. metallic pink flats.