London Dining - Borough Market / New Tayabs

The following is a summary of my culinary adventures in London last November (2004). There are scattered travel, site seeing and theatre notes as well, but mostly it is all about the food.

Borough Market
Unbelievable. I was blown away by the variety and quality of offerings. In addition to the tid bits we sampled from the stalls, we purchased a ham & cheese coissant (brilliant - would have been better had we been patient enough to take it home and warm it, but we had been up all night and needed something in our belly). We followed that with a coriander pancake stuffed with chicken curry which was delightful. The little Indian woman who was selling them claimed to have been up at 2AM making them - and I absolutely believe her. Next we picked up some blueberry cookies from a woman who also had a deep dish blueberry pie that looked completely sinful, but impracticle for munching on the go. Finally, we finished off a visit to Neals Yard and one of the highly touted cheese toasties. Wow. I had been made fun of all morning by our hosts who hadn't heard of said toastie and thought my quest for it somewhat quixotic. One bite of the crunchy, creamy, cheesey slice of heaven and they all stopped asking questions. In fact, one of our party asked - what other recommendations did your friends make?

We grabbed a pint in a pub afterwards and shared some chips and bangers and mash. Nothing notable here, but good comfort food when it is in the 30s and rainy outside.

New Tayabs
Our party of three arrived around 7:00 and were seated immediately in the "garden" room next door. At first we were slightly put off (and cold) but in the end I would highly recommend sitting out there - it was much cooler and less smokey, plus, you don't have throngs of people waiting to get a table looking over your shoulder.We began with meat samosas, the lamb chops and a fish masala, all of which were excellent, but rendered the Sauvignon Blanc we brought with us about as flavorful as tap water. The samosas were a brilliant juxtaposition of crispy outer layer and doughy inner layer and the meat filling was an earthy cinnamon/allspice/lamb blend. The lamb chops were coated in a deliciously spicy layer, albeit slightly tough. My favorite was the fish masala, which was took on a remarkable depth that belied the initial spicy outer layer. For mains, we ordered various chick pea, lamb, and chicken dishes (I forget all of the names - we opted to order multiple "small" portions to maximize the variety). All of the choices were excellent, but the stand-out was the lamb bhuna. While incendiary, it possessed multiple layers of flavor that made each bite more enjoyable than the previous one (somewhat akin to the feeling one gets when eating a really good Mexican mole). We uncorked an Australian Chardonnay to pair with these dishes - it fared much better than the Sauv. Blanc. We finished with mango lassi which were terrific, but HUGE. Seriously, we could have ordered just one of them and three straws! All-in, the bill came to just slightly over 10 pounds per person - and it would have been a bargain at 2-3x that price.