Posts Tagged ‘food’

Yes, it’s real.

Today, I’m proud to announce the launch of the Leeds Restaurant Guide. It is, in our opinion, the finest guide to restaurants in Leeds city centre that has ever been created. Years of relentless eating, reviewing and indexing have come together to provide a complete guide to where to eat in Leeds.

• 188 restaurants and food pubs reviewed
• Covers every restaurant we could find in Leeds city centre
• Five star rating system
• Unbiased, independent, consistent

The book will be made available in e-book format through all major retailers – Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Ingram, Kobo, Google Play, OverDrive (Waterstones), Sony, WH Smith and Gardner’s (Tesco). It is also available online at LeedsRestaurantGuide.com. At a later date, it will be made available in print also.

It will be priced at a very reasonable £3.99. The exact time listings will appear on each retailer can’t be determined, so follow me on Twitter for updates.

I would like to say a big thank you to everyone who helped with the book, especially Elina for her eating and proof reading, Gijsbert for his feedback and advice, and James, Norm and Michelle for their proof reading.

Given Elina’s hate of onions, I’ve occasionally joked I wanted to go to an onion restaurant that has a giant onion for a logo. Turns out there is one in Helsinki.

In celebration of Gabrielė’s birthday we headed down to one of the best Chinese restaurants in Leeds – Red Chilli. Most of us settled on the Courtship menu that came with three starters – soup, a platter then shredded duck – followed by a main course of many dishes.

Elina opted for the baby octopus and it was exactly as it sounds – lots of little baby octopuses.

We also got Gabrielė a “everything tastes better with cat hair in it” mug on a count of her being a crazy cat lady.

Suf and turf with an extra large king prawn.

Recently, I’ve been making more of an effort to get down the fish market every Saturday to pick up some fresh food.

Recently, we went to the Handmade Burger Co in Trinity.

Can a restaurant that only serves chicken and lamb produced a mixed grill? Yes, apparently they can.

Last weekend, I had the parents over for dinner, which seemed a good excuse to do something other than meat and wedges, thrown in the oven for 20 minutes and then consumed. So we headed down to the market to pick up some fresh fish.

Langoustines, which are used in scampi, were dead easy to prepare. All I did was drop them in a pan of boiling water and leave them for four or five minutes until the flesh turned from a translucent colour to an opaque white.

We got a whole red snapper, that we had cleaned when we bought it (which means removing all the guts) and then rinsed it when we got home. I then stuffed it full of ginger cut up into small cubes, several slices of lime, dill and a block of butter.

We also got a whole trevally jack, which was probably the nicest one of the two, again had it cleaned, and then stuff it with lemon slices, parsley and another slab of butter. I then cut a few slits in the sides, rubbed a little salt in the wounds and wrapped them both in tin foil and stuck them in the oven for about thirty minutes. Seemed to work quite well.

Last week, the Atheist Society organised a dinner at Veritas. We gave them fair warning, booking out their back room so we would have the place to ourselves.

We’ve eaten there before, and it’s been reasonable.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case on Tuesday. We arrived at 7pm, and after a bit of a delay in just taking the orders – the food didn’t turn up until 9:30pm! We got some snacks and a round of drinks to say sorry, but two and a half hours is just incredible.

Worse, when the food did turn up, a lot of it was burned and badly cooked – Elina’s pie seemingly the only meal that came out of the kitchen as intended. By the time our main courses had arrived and we had eaten, it was going on until 11pm, so we skipped dessert and gave it up as a bad job.