| flanneruk |
Mar 14th, 2004 10:28 PM |
No idea what the restaurants inside this place are like - though why anyone would use a hotel restaurant in a city is pretty incomprehensible.
There are no great restaurants in the area.The hotel is at the north end of the first bit of Edgware Rd, at this point a 400-yd stretch of cheapish, mostly Lebanese, restaurants - though of course there are a couple of dozen other nationalities. These tend to be higher quality - mostly patronised by people used to the cuisine concerned - than the equally long, but from more different countries, stretch of restaurants westward along Praed Street, which are generally of the indifferent quality you expect from the area round stations everywhere.
Practically all will do take away food, though rarely at a discount.
I'm especially fond of the Indian takeaway a couple of doors eastwards along Crawford Street at its intersection with Edgware Rd. There's a basement Malaysian place called, I think, the Mawar on the west side of Edgware Rd at the intersection with Sussex Gardens that does excellent value lunches around £3.50.
The Safeway on the Edgware Road does the usual British supermarket deli counter stuff (ie lots of Indian, Chinese and satay sold by weight), with a mediocre (by British standards) range of chilled, packaged ready to eat food (Safeway UK is now on at least its fourth set of owners since the Americans sold it, and standards vary widely).
The Marks + Spencer on Edgware Road isn't the chain's best, but even so, nowhere on earth offers such a range of prepared, ready to eat, chilled packaged food.
Or just explore the streets between Praed Street and Sussex Gardens. Pretty standard London collection of Middle Eastern and Asian places with a few old Europeans thrown in to reassure our Continental friends we haven't completely abandoned them.
There is no known record either of anyone actually dying from the food round here, or of anyone with any taste recommending any of these restaurants to a food guide. But if I wanted to eat round here and economise, I wouldn't take food back to possibly the most anonymous hotel in Europe. I'd spend the same amount and sit in a Lebanese place watching the Arab diaspora with their hubly-bubblies, or the Indoonesian satudemts in the Malay places. Or anywhere at twilight and watch the parade of holidaying Middle Easterners.
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