Posts Tagged ‘restaurants’

Grillmarkaðurinn, Grill Market in English, is a sister restaurant to Fiskmarkaðurinn. As you might be able to guess from the names, this one is a little less focused on fish and a little more focused on meat. However, there is still a lot of crossover.

They make a good seafood soup for example and can cook a decent steak too. The real winner of the meal was Elina’s grilled redfish. It came with a crab roll that could have been a main course in itself. I did not enjoy it as much as Fish Market, but it was still a fine meal.

Fiskmarkaðurinn, known as Fish Market in English, is a restaurant in downtown Reykjavik.

They were fully booked when we rocked up and asked for a table. However, they said we could eat in the bar area. This was actually a stroke of luck. The seating was comfortable, and even a pregnant woman can eat at the little table. It was screened off from the main restaurant, giving us some piece and quiet.

We created our own tapas by ordering four starters and sharing them all. Each dish was carefully prepared and presented with it’s own unique accompaniments. These do not always get the attention they deserve in Iceland, but this was not the case here.

It was, in my opinion, the best food we had in Iceland.

They even have a cookbook, which I purchased a copy of. It is full of ingredients I think I will struggle to find in Leeds, so it’s even more impressive that they can source them in a country whose entire population is half that of Leeds.

Nestled away on a residential street in Reykjavik is a small restaurant named Þrír frakkar. This translates to “Three Coats” in English. It was listed in the “cheap eats” section of our travel guide, but certainly is not. If you have the budget though, it is well worth a visit.

We started with smoked puffin and shark. The puffin came with the best mustard I have ever had. I am not a fan of English mustard because it is so strong. Whereas American mustard is so watered down it might as well just be labelled “yellow sauce”. This was the first I have had that has a wonderful flavour without being overpowering.

The shark was less good. It was cubes of shark meat, and a liqueur to go with it. Despite not being a drinker, I thought I would give it a go. It turns out that liqueur meant vodka. I couldn’t even finish the thing; I was smashed: I had to go outside for a breath of fresh air.

For my main, I had horse tenderloin. It was superb. I am not sure it was better than beef, but it was certainly just as good. Cutting in and taking a bite was every bit as pleasurable as tucking into a beautiful steak at Blackhouse.

It came with a béarnaise sauce, like every meal I have eaten here in Iceland. Another thing I noticed about Iceland is that they all come with a pub-style side salad of lettuce and tomato too. No matter how fancy the restaurant, they all seem to do this.

Elina had a gratin, which she actually ordered this time.

After a week of eating fish, we were in the mood of something different. Realistically, there is only so many times you can walk past a place called Chuck Norris Grill and not venture in.

The decor did not disappoint.

Disappointingly, the food itself was not Chuck Norris themed. They could manage a reasonably-well cooked steak however.

Having been battered by Icelandic prices for a week, it was nice to go somewhere a little cheaper. I do not have a desire to go back, but it is a reasonable joint to visit once.

Icelandic Fish & Chips is a restaurant located near the old harbour in Reykjavik. It is pretty crammed given the amount of tables they have in there. The services is friendly and attentive.

I don’t think much to their fish & chips. It has made a name for itself as doing something different. They make their own organic spelt batter. This is fine if you like that sort of thing, but being from Yorkshire, I would have prefered a proper chippy.

Elina had better luck with our seafood soup. Although, it wasn’t actually a soup. Indeed, it did not really fit the definition of soup on any level. It was more of a gratin. But what a tasty gratin it was.

The price was pretty reasonable.

It has been two and a half years since we launched the Leeds Restaurant Guide. It originally came out as an eBook. This is a natural format for it. You can search it, index it and update it. It works great as an eBook.

However, there is something magical about a physical book. Something that you cannot replicate with an electronic copy. I always wanted to do a print edition alongside it but the logistics of it were sizeable.

One of the great things about the eBook edition is the speed we can put out updates. In its basic form, the guide is not a book: it’s a database. In fact, that is how we store all the information. I wrote a custom content management system to handle it all. This takes all the reviews in and spits out an eBook in a matter of minutes. If we wanted to publish a new edition, we could do within an hour.

The print route is more difficult. Print books do not have the fluid content support that eBooks do. You have to design for a fixed layout, fudge pages and spend a huge amount of time getting it all right. Then if you want to make any changes, you have to re-done everything. Possibly the entire book. That would cause a huge time-lag and that just did not cut it for me. The guide evolves and the print edition needed to be able to evolve with it.

Thankfully, after several failed attempts at getting the system correct, we finally have it in place. It is not quite as fast as the eBook, but gives us the ability to publish a new edition within 24 hours. This means that the print edition will not be a second-class citizen in comparison to the eBook.

Initially, the book is available on Amazon. In the future: who knows where else!

Following on from my previous post looking at statistics we can pull out from the Leeds Restaurant Guide dataset, I wanted to look at how the restaurant scene has changed since we first published the guide.

Here it is:

In this graph, I have plotted each cuisine type against the number of restaurants. This is shown for the 1st edition (2013), 3rd edition (2014) and 5th edition (2015). As we learned in the last post, the number of restaurants has risen, so in general, we would expect most categories to have grown between each addition. I have not included pub grub as the size of it makes the rest of the data difficult to see.

For the most part, this holds true. Some cuisines have grown faster than others though. We have seen a rise in restaurants serving American, British, International (those that serve food from all over the world with no real speciality) and steak.

In other areas we have seen a decline though. Buffet, French, Indian and seafood have all seen a decline. Persian has too, but this was always a small market. The biggest change is possibly Chinese restaurants. In the first edition we had seven Chinese restaurants, now we have only four.

In terms of the most popular cuisines, Italian remains king. When we first wrote the guide we even considered splitting Italian into two categories, one for general Italian and one for restaurants that specifically did pizza. Latin is also very popular thanks to the growth of tapas bars. It used to be equally as popular as Indian, but Indian has since fallen away.

We can draw the most popular cuisines in a table. I have omitted hotels and casinos, and international because these do not really tell us anything about people’s tastes.

It is a pretty consistent story. The only change is that Indian has dropped off from a joint-second spot in 2013 to now being 5th, behind British and American. Much of the growth in these categories is down to meat places such as burgers and BBQ so it could be people are looking towards more meat-heavily dishes in recent years. Or it could also just be random chance. The sample size is not that big after all.

Earlier this month I launched the 5th edition of the Leeds Restaurant Guide. Now, with five editions behind us and several years of data, I decided it would be interesting to see what we could mine from that information.

Number of restaurants

You might expect the number of restaurants in Leeds to be going up. It is, but only slightly.

This graph shows the total number of restaurants. Over the past two and a half years the number of restaurants has increased 10%. These are not the same restaurants though. It is a case of them opening faster than they are closing.

This graph shows the number of new restaurants opening and old restaurants closing between each edition. Restaurants have consistently opened while closures have been more sporadic. It is worth noting though that the release of each edition of the guide has not been equally spaced, even though it is shown this way on the graph, so that distorts the picture somewhat.

How we rate

Most restaurants are likely to be middle-of-the-road, with some not so good restaurants, some very good restaurants, and a few poor and excellent restaurants at either ends. So what happens when you plot frequency against rating?

Ah, just what we wanted: a beautiful bell curve! Two is a little low for a perfect curve, but normal distributions are often imperfect in the real world. This suggests to me that our ratings are consistent with what you would expect from restaurants running in the free market.

That only shows data from restaurants that are still open. What about restaurants that have closed?

What we would expect to see here is a little less clear. Perhaps that 1-rating is the highest as poor restaurants should close the most. But given there are some many 3-rating restaurants, this might not be the case, and you may have to adjust it for frequency to see such a result. As it is we have another bell curve.

There is a clear asymmetry in the graph though. Far more 1-rating restaurants close than 5-rating restaurants, and far more 2-rating restaurants close than 4-rating restaurants, indicating that our ratings are broadly consistent with where the market chooses to spend, or not spend, it’s money.

What type of food is the best?

What cuisine produces the highest standards? Can you provide any correlation between the type of food and how good a restaurant is?

This graph shows each cuisine type and the average rating it receives. No category can maintain an average rating lower than 2 or higher than 4 because no range of restaurants can be that consistent.

I was not surprised to see Thai so high up. Steakhouses are also typically on the higher price range, so score well (though we do factor in price to an extent when awarding ratings). Chinese scoring to high is mostly a result of the less nice Chinese restaurants closing down.

The number in brackets after each cuisine indicates the number of restaurants in that category. So the ratings for Persian, German and seafood are pretty meaningless because it is based on a single restaurant.

What useful information we can draw from this is less clear. Just because the average restaurant scores well or poorly does not mean that all restaurants will. There are bad Thai restaurants for example (actually, there aren’t, but there used to be one) and good Indians (lots of them!). However, if you were to avoid eating at new hotels, casinos, fast food and pubs based on it being unlikely to be a good meal, few people would fault you for that.

I am pleased to unveil my new book, Finland Restaurant Guide.

It is a very short book. I have not visited every restaurant in Finland. Believe it or not, we are not even close. However we have reviewed twelve of the restaurants we visited while in Finland and will be expanding the guide over time.

It is available on Amazon now. I had intended to give it away for free. However, the Kindle Store does not support giving away free books, so I have set it at the minimum price possible – 99p.

After our final tournament day of the season, we (Leeds Samurai) stopped off in Skipton to visit the pirate-themed restaurant Calico Jack.

It was okay. I go the steak and ribs combo. The steak was over-cooked. I asked for it medium and you might be able to argue that it was medium-well if you were being generous, but I would not have argued if you had called it well done. The ribs were reasonably tender, but not a patch on Cattle Grid of TGI. Similarly I thought the coleslaw and potato wedges were just very average.

It’s a cool place to go, and everyone seemed to be happy with their meal. I feel there is definitely room for improvement food-wise though.