He lives beside the back door in a bucket
Thursday and Friday at work this week were a bit of a horror. On Thursday, a public API[*] that an important project relies on abruptly stopped working, resulting in 12 hours of slightly panicky attempts to (a) work out why, (b) work out whether it would start again, and (c) come up with a plan B to achieve the same results without using it. All the unrelated things that I absolutely needed to get finished by the end of Thursday got pushed over into Friday.
On leaving work on Friday, I crawled to a pub, met ChrisC and fell face-first into a pint of Whitstable Bay Pale Ale (would recommend to a friend). I also managed to utterly nonpluss shermarama, who was trying to buy beer in the same pub without being pounced on by people she'd never met. Sorry about that :)
Walking out of work, I've frequently eyed up Amico Bio, an organic, vegetarian Italian not far from Tottenham Court Road. Last night we pottered in to sample its wares.
The menu is all vegetarian, or vegan. And, it turns out, strangely terrifying. There was lots of tempeh and seitan (which I always (a) read as "satan" and (b) hear in my head to the tune of Spaceman by Babylon Zoo) available, and though there were vegetables in evidence not really all that many of them. The descriptions on the menu somehow managed to be unappealing and we both struggled to come to a decision. As ChrisC points out, I am a "tourist vegetarian", and perhaps I want different things from a menu than an actual vegetarian. After all, it I wanted a big slab-o'-protein, I'd probably just have gone somewhere else and ordered a steak rather than a seitan burger.
The mixed antipasto we'd ordered to share was very different to the standard meat-and-cheese platter. Three breaded and deep-fried... objects turned up with a bowl of pickled vegetable salad, and a tiny dish of... yes. Actually, the three deep fried things (potato croquette, cripsy cheesey risotto ball, and other) were all very tasty, as were the vegetables and the... whatever that green stuff is.
My main course of gnocchi with courgettes and mozzarisella turned up, with an unexpected, almost soupy, thin sauce. It tasted... OK. Like something you'd made yourself out of a bunch of stuff that needed eating up. The gnocchi weren't that great, there wasn't really enough courgette, and I file mozzarisella (rice-milk mozzarella) as "something you'd eat if allergies/lifestyle ruled out real mozzarella".
ChrisC's "vegan short pasta with tomato, aubergine and mozzarella" was dismissed by him as "OK for an out-of-the-packet pasta meal". In the end, we slightly preferred each other's mains and swapped. My pudding of affogato (vanilla ice cream with espresso poured over it) was all right, but seemed made with very average ice cream. I guess it may have been dairy-free ice cream, I'm not sure if that was the cause of its adequacy.
We did see some very interesting-looking main courses pass our table, later, so possibly our choices were too tame. Maybe we should have ordered something more adventurous - the starters show that they certainly can cook tasty food. The mains we got, however, were disappointing and surprisingly pricey.
I'd had high hopes of Amico Bio becoming my new favourite pop-out-of-work-on-Friday destination. As it is, I doubt I'll go back. If you're vegetarian in London, I'd recommend somewhere else. If you're vegan... I dunno, it's probably rare to go to a restaurant with lots of choice, so may be worth your while. Amico Bio does also offer lots of gluten-free options so if you're vegetarian and gluten-free it may be of interest. Just go for the more exotic-sounding choices :)
[*] API stands for "application programmer interface". It's kind of a contract between different bits of code - you pass me these values, and I'll take certain actions and give you some values back. When the buy-a-book app on your phone buys something from Amazon in response to you pressing buttons, it's using Amazon's public API. The thing about APIs is that they're not suppose to change, at least not without a lot of warning. They're certainly not supposed to start saying "this is an unsupported operation".
On leaving work on Friday, I crawled to a pub, met ChrisC and fell face-first into a pint of Whitstable Bay Pale Ale (would recommend to a friend). I also managed to utterly nonpluss shermarama, who was trying to buy beer in the same pub without being pounced on by people she'd never met. Sorry about that :)
Walking out of work, I've frequently eyed up Amico Bio, an organic, vegetarian Italian not far from Tottenham Court Road. Last night we pottered in to sample its wares.
The menu is all vegetarian, or vegan. And, it turns out, strangely terrifying. There was lots of tempeh and seitan (which I always (a) read as "satan" and (b) hear in my head to the tune of Spaceman by Babylon Zoo) available, and though there were vegetables in evidence not really all that many of them. The descriptions on the menu somehow managed to be unappealing and we both struggled to come to a decision. As ChrisC points out, I am a "tourist vegetarian", and perhaps I want different things from a menu than an actual vegetarian. After all, it I wanted a big slab-o'-protein, I'd probably just have gone somewhere else and ordered a steak rather than a seitan burger.
The mixed antipasto we'd ordered to share was very different to the standard meat-and-cheese platter. Three breaded and deep-fried... objects turned up with a bowl of pickled vegetable salad, and a tiny dish of... yes. Actually, the three deep fried things (potato croquette, cripsy cheesey risotto ball, and other) were all very tasty, as were the vegetables and the... whatever that green stuff is.
My main course of gnocchi with courgettes and mozzarisella turned up, with an unexpected, almost soupy, thin sauce. It tasted... OK. Like something you'd made yourself out of a bunch of stuff that needed eating up. The gnocchi weren't that great, there wasn't really enough courgette, and I file mozzarisella (rice-milk mozzarella) as "something you'd eat if allergies/lifestyle ruled out real mozzarella".
ChrisC's "vegan short pasta with tomato, aubergine and mozzarella" was dismissed by him as "OK for an out-of-the-packet pasta meal". In the end, we slightly preferred each other's mains and swapped. My pudding of affogato (vanilla ice cream with espresso poured over it) was all right, but seemed made with very average ice cream. I guess it may have been dairy-free ice cream, I'm not sure if that was the cause of its adequacy.
We did see some very interesting-looking main courses pass our table, later, so possibly our choices were too tame. Maybe we should have ordered something more adventurous - the starters show that they certainly can cook tasty food. The mains we got, however, were disappointing and surprisingly pricey.
I'd had high hopes of Amico Bio becoming my new favourite pop-out-of-work-on-Friday destination. As it is, I doubt I'll go back. If you're vegetarian in London, I'd recommend somewhere else. If you're vegan... I dunno, it's probably rare to go to a restaurant with lots of choice, so may be worth your while. Amico Bio does also offer lots of gluten-free options so if you're vegetarian and gluten-free it may be of interest. Just go for the more exotic-sounding choices :)
[*] API stands for "application programmer interface". It's kind of a contract between different bits of code - you pass me these values, and I'll take certain actions and give you some values back. When the buy-a-book app on your phone buys something from Amazon in response to you pressing buttons, it's using Amazon's public API. The thing about APIs is that they're not suppose to change, at least not without a lot of warning. They're certainly not supposed to start saying "this is an unsupported operation".