Archive for March, 2011

Continuing our theme at Buzz of mixing and matching between high-quality restaurants and all you can eat buffets, we followed the previous work social at Red Hot World Buffet with a trip to Piazza by Antony.

They had a reasonably well-stocked bar with a range of good vodkas and knowledgeable staff too. The barmaid suggested I followed my Kettle One up with a Belvedere Intense. Given I drink Belvedere at home, I thought it was worth a shot, and turned out to be an excellent recommendation.

Unfortunately, the rest of the night was rather disappointing. I began to feel really ill after having my starter (I don’t think there was anything wrong with the food as other people had the mussels and everyone else was fine) and ended up barely touching my main and heading home straight after the meal to get some sleep.

Having decided to stage a curry night to discuss some of the pressing issues for Leed Skeptics I set about trying to find us a nice restaurant to enjoy said curry. I eventually settled on Cafe Guru – but they were full so we went to Chaophraya instead.

Luckily, they didn’t disappoint either. The service was excellent and the restaurant was well fitted out. It was however very easy and the place itself was quite cramped with the amount of tables they were fitting into the size space. In reality though, it’s hard to fault a place with does a Thai curry sauce, in a Yorkshire pudding, on a steak.

James gave the place a similar thumbs up though having later spoken to Gijsbert about it, he said that he had a good experience the first time but since then it has been poor – maybe we need a second visit to get a more well rounded view, which definitely sounds like an excuse to go back.

Having finished up with the Perspective Citywide session on Zoroastrianism, we headed down to Livebait to grab some dinner.

I’m always dubious of sea food restaurants because they seem very lazy. They present you with food that it still in it’s shell and then expect you to get it out for them before you can eat it. This seems incongruent with other restaurants where it is traditional for the chefs to prepare the food for you before serving it.

I started off with the salmon which was good, but I prefer my salmon to be very well cooked and this definitely was not. The bread that came with it was very nice though.

Following this, I decided to give lobster a go. It’s not something I have ever really had a desire to eat but I do have a desire to try new things and given that I’ve never had lobster before and it didn’t seem too much more than the other mains I was looking at, it seemed worth a punt.

Overall I have to say I was disappointed. Not only was it tricky to get the meat out, but the meat itself just wasn’t that tasty. Opinions since have disagreed about the cause – Nicola suggests it is because lobster simply isn’t that nice, while Rebecca suggests I simply got bad lobster (having not been Durham educated, I’ve never had good lobster 😉 ).

The atmosphere in the restaurant was pleasurable – it’s a small place and having only sat down at 9pm, we found ourselves with the place to ourselves by the end of the meal. Service was acceptable – friendly but a little inattentive, especially given we had the place to ourselves. I wouldn’t go back in a hurry, but that is mainly down to me not being a huge fan of sea food.

For the seventh session of Perspective Citywide, we were joined by Malcolm Deboo who traveled up from London to talk to us about Zoroastrianism. London boasts Europe’s only Zoroastrianism centre and Malcolm presented a fascinating look at a religion which very few people are familiar with.

Recently, Atheist Society has really taken to fusing it’s events with steak nights. It’s a winning combination.

So recently we all headed down to Stick or Twist for a pub quiz created by the defacto quiz master Michael who did an excellent job of coming up with a quiz, despite the usual Italian bias. Craziest of all as people’s spirits began to run high, I even heard Elina shouting at one point – turns out she does have a volume other than quiet 😉 .

While wandering around, trying to find an open pub at 11am on the Saturday morning we found a place which described itself as the “home of beef”. We decided this was something we really couldn’t ignore and so headed back there in the evening to check it out and grab some dinner.

The food was good but not great – it was very reasonably priced given that it was 400g of steak which was very well cooked but nothing compared to the great steaks I have had in Leeds. So worth checking out but no replacement for a proper steakhouse.

Despite only packing up from All Night Debate at 3am, we were all up bright and early the next morning to head down to Conway Hall in London for the AHS 2011 convention.

The day started with stalls from various related organisations and then moved into speakers starting with Lord Warner who is chair of the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group talking about his experiences as a humanist, in politics.

Second up was Gerard Phillips, vice president of the National Secular Society. His talk was disappointing, it seemed to be an hour talk compressed into twenty minutes, I’ve literally never heard someone speak so fast when delivering a talk. It was also pointed at the wrong audience a little I think – given we’re all at the AHS conference, we don’t need to be told what secularism is and why we should advocate it – you’re preaching to the converted. Never the less, Gerald is clearly a passionate secularist and having had a chat with him later in the day, he seems like a great guy who really wants the best for the freethought movement.

He was followed by BHA chief executive Andrew Copson who, despite a lack of organisation with getting the slides ready, delivered a concise, informative and educational talk which made for one of the best of the day.

After a break, we welcomed Robin Ince to the stage. Jonni was hugely impressed with his talk and although it was evident he had, as he admitted, written it on a series of postcards in the hour, I really enjoyed it. Robin is also forming part of the line-up of the Enquiry 2011 Conference.

He was followed by Johann Hari, who, for my mind, gave the best talk of the day, reminding us all that despite we have all this nonsense such as faith schools often overly vocal religious people, when it comes down to it – we’re winning; more and more people every year declare themselves as non-religious.

The day was closed off by a speech by Professor AC Grayling and a performance by the BHA Choir. I have to say I was somewhat disappointed by Grayling’s speech – it was good, but then it was good when I heard it two years ago at the AHS press launch and it hasn’t really changed since then.

Afterwards, we all headed to a local pub for some well-deserved relaxation.

On the Tuesday night of Reason Week we dropped by Elettra’s place to drop off some equipment. She is living in Charles Morris which was recently renovated and is the poshest student hall I have ever seen – automatic doors and gates, automatic lights in her en-suite room, the masquerade ball and a 24 hour concierge desk!

I had some more photos from Reason Week on my iPhone, some of which are actually better than the ones I took on my DSLR lol, so I thought I would share them as well.

Having announced the Humanist Library Project in December, we have slowly been building up quite a collection of books for it which have until now just been sat around in piles of the office, waiting to be dealt with.

Thankfully, our volunteer David (or Fonze as he is better known) was finally able to spare some time and do a little construction work for us. So after a few cryptic texts about “building a library”, he turned up hammer in hand to start building some book shelving for us.

If you haven’t heard about the project yet, the idea is to build a Humanist Library, right here in Leeds. We’re currently building our collection so if you have any appropriate items you are willing to donate to the project, do get in touch!