Posts Tagged ‘food’

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.

Recently, we dined at Kendalls Bistro, a French restaurant on St Peter’s Square. They had long candles in wine bottles, where the way had all hugely overflown and run down the bottle, to the level where you can only assume it is some kind of art.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a photo of it, or could find a uncopyrighted photo that looked anything like it, but it looked something like this. Anyway, you can read my review of Kendalls Bistro over on Know Leeds.

For this month’s Humanist Community of Leeds, we went for meal at Miah’s Kitchen. Next month we’ll be meeting at The Reliant for a meal – feel free to join us!

I hope people in the office didn’t think this was all for one lunch.

Last Friday, myself and Elina went to Miah’s Kitchen for lunch.

You can see my Miah’s Kitchen review over on Know Leeds for a full low down on the food, but the short answer is that I recommend it! But that isn’t what I want to talk about here.

When we arrived, we were the only people there. They had at least three waiters working, but no customers. It didn’t look like they would be getting any either – they only open 12-2, and this was at nearly 1pm.

Yet, as we walked in and I asked for a table for two, the waiter replied “do you have a reservation?” 😀

I almost wondered if he was taking the piss at first. It wasn’t a small place – they probably had about fifty covers, all of which were laid out but empty, why ask if we had a reservation? But I just said “no”.

Then, even funnier, they asked us to take a seat in the waiting area while they found us a table :D. We obliged and soon enough they had found one for us.

They were all very nice, though it did seem a rather formal procedure for a restaurant without any other customers.

It was Wednesday evening and Elina was being too lazy to cook (we take it in turns, and it was hers). So we decided to head out to grab something to eat and eventually settled on La Grillade.

As a French restaurant in the city centre, it has tough competition from Sous le Nez.

We decided to take advantage of their three course set meal. I say set, we went for the slightly more expensive one, from which you can just pick any starter and dessert off the main venue.

I decided to go for the frogs legs as I haven’t tried them before. Turns out they taste a lot like chicken, but not as nice. I don’t think I’ll be having them again, but it was an interesting experience.

For the main we had a rack of venison, that was cooked to perfection and extremely delicious. It also came with a wide variety of side dishes – you wouldn’t think you could do that much with chips and veg, but apparently, you can.

The desserts were excellent too – you know what you’re getting with a mouse au chocolat, and the lemon sorbet lived up to expectations as well.

All in all, a fantastic meal, but comes up at least as expensive as Sous le Nez, so I would expect it to. Recommended, in any case.

Last week, we had dinner at Veritas. It’s a great pub, so we thought it would be nice to try the food.

It was reasonable, though I can’t even remember what I had, so clearly not very memorable. Elina had the special chicken and bacon pie, which she described as “a lot of meat”, which is definitely a compliment. Don’t think I’ll be rushing back there for the food though.

Apparently, in there, every day is Friday. Except for us, it was a Monday. But now that me and Elina work over the road from each other, and TGI Friday’s is just next door, we decided to try it out for lunch (I have been to TGI before, but not in the past 15 years, which is quite a long time lol).

We both went for the ribs, which were good, but then given how close we live to Cattle Grid, it was always doomed to leave us a little disappointed. It didn’t help that they had run out of the beer glaze sauce, so we had to have the regular.

Service wasn’t too snappy either, so ended up getting back slightly late. It is otherwise very convenient for lunch though.

Over on the Know Leeds website, I’ve written a review of Gaucho, the steak restaurant on Park Row. I don’t want to duplicate too much of what I have written here, but it is amazing! If you love your steak, you must pay it a visit, it is easily as good as Blackhouse and they even bring out a meat board, with their various cuts on to show you!

Having really enjoyed Rob Lyon’s Skeptics talk on his book Panic on a Plate, I decided it would be a great topic to give a talk on at Toastmasters. Turns out it worked quite well, and I was lucky enough to pick up my second Best Speaker ribbon.