Cafe Melodrama

  Jamaica Patty Co. Both spicy and bland. 29.7.25 New Road, Covent Garden.       Not quite London Chinatown/ Soho but close enough that I feel it doesn’t matter. Restaurants and takeaways offering West Indian food is rare enough that when I passed by this Jamaica Patty Co. outlet in Covent Garden, the decision to stop there for lunch was not difficult to make. Much as I love noodle shops and fried chicken, it was refreshing to see something slightly more niche. Jamaican food does not get a lot of love in the mainstream media and I think that’s a shame. I don’t know enough about Jamaica or its cuisines to say much more than that. So, let’s get to the eating.   The outlet was one among many in New Road. There was an impressive array of patties on sale as well as some hot meals – thinks lie saltfish and Ackee, curried goat, and the like. All served up with beans and rice. I settled on a curried goat with rice and beans. All washed down with a Old ...

  Mr Wang Hot Pot. It feels like cheating. Brighton. 25.6.25.  60 Queen’s Road, Brighton BN1 3XD.     Now I know I’m meant to be writing a food blog set in London   Soho/ Chinatown but for a whole host of reasons, I need to write about somewhere else from time to time. These Taiwanese hotpot restaurants have been popping up like heat rash on a blazing summer day and I’ve always viewed them with some suspicion. It’s part of the current trend of East Asian food joints popping up in the UK. I would say that Britain has had a long love affair with Indian food (and long may it continue) but the East Asian thing is new. Growing up in Singapore, Chinese food and its local variants were mainstay. One of things that I ate growing up in Singapore was steamboat. The family sit around a table with the centre cut out. There is a cauldron filled with boiling stock into which various raw ingredients are unceremoniously dumped. Pieces of meat, fish, vegetables and...

No love for the chicken gizzard. Yari Club. 21.6.25.         Once you start writing a restaurant blog, you start to realise just how vast the subject is. This is one of the reasons why I chose to blog primarily about eateries in the London Chinatown / Soho area. As someone on a modest income who does this as a labour of love, it made sense to restrict the guzzling to a smaller area. If you’re living in London, it’s hard to beat London Chinatown/ Soho – there’s plenty of restaurants offering diverse cuisines to pick from. Sometimes, even in the same restaurant. Not only that, given that the average restaurant has a lifespan that fruit flies would describe as brief, the churn means that you could eat at several different restaurants in succession that occupy the same site. I’ve been to Sichuan hot pot restaurants that transmogrified into something similar but not exactly the same. There is now a German Doner Kebab in St Martin’s Lane where there was once ...