UK trip- restaurants
 

I have booked my accommodation for my UK trip. Now planning where to experience great dining experiences. Foodies, can you suggest some great restaurants? Will be staying in Edinburgh, Northumberland, Bath and London.

Thanks

What type of food and what price range?

We use www.toptable.co.uk for reviews and to book restaurants in the UK. You can get specials and read reviews as well as look at sample menus.

Thanks for the website. Not looking for gourmet every night- rather the freshest and indicative of the particular area

We are big foodies - One that we like is Roast at Borough Market (and of course we love Borough Market: http://www.boroughmarket.org.uk/)

http://www.roast-restaurant.com/

Yum! Looks like Roast is worth a visit. Now for all the rest of the nights!

Just ate at 101 Thai near Stamford Brook tube station and Chilli Cool in Leigh Street - both good.

Now planning where to experience great dining experiences>

Well for great dining experiences you may want to do a typical British pub lunch or go to one of Britain's plethora of ethnic restaurants - Indian and Pakistani and Chinese restaurants abound and for a real typical thing the British cafe, serving typical food locals eat albeit greasy - now you may only want to do this once for the experience as well as pop into the iconic British 'chippie' for fish and chips. You need not spend a ton of money to have a great dining experience IMO.

Here are my recommendations:

London:
Excellent gastropubs
Harwood Arms:
http://www.harwoodarms.com/
Hawksmoor Seven Dials
http://www.thehawksmoor.co.uk/sd.php

Asian:
Yauatcha (Dim Sum)
http://www.yauatcha.com/
Dinings (Sushi)
http://www.dinings.co.uk/
Roka (Sushi)
http://rokarestaurant.com/
Bn Shan (Chinese)
http://www.timeout.com/london/restau...:21319/ba-shan

French
Cafe Boheme:
http://www.cafeboheme.co.uk/
La Petite Maison
http://www.lpmlondon.co.uk/
Electric Brasserie:
http://www.electricbrasserie.com/all-day-menu/

Misc:
Have one of the famous martinis at Dukes Hotel:
http://www.dukeshotel.com/
Have breakfast at the Wolsely:
http://www.thewolseley.com/
Browse cookbooks and sample lunch in the test kitchen at Books for Cooks:
http://www.booksforcooks.com/

Edinburgh's best IMO :

- Michelin starred restaurant - 1) Martin Wishart - the best
- Michelin starred restaurant - 2) not as good as MW but still vg and uses more quirky Scottish ingredients
- Michelin starred restaurant - 3) mad, unique food
- pub food - King's Wark
- gastropub type British food, casual style restaurant & surprisingly cheap - The Dogs
- cheapish casual cafe style seafood especially mussels - Mussel Inn.

There are various mid to upper priced specifically 'Scottish' restaurants - haven't been to any for quite a while but Stac Polly always used to be reliable.

Not recommending any ethnic restaurants as you say you want 'indicative of a particular area' so assume in Edinburgh, you want more or less British or Scottish food ?

Where will you be staying in Northumberland? - it's a big county.
For my birthday this year (May) we are having dinner in the treehouse at Alnwick Gardens, so looking forward to it.
www.alnwickgarden.com/eat/eat-in-the-treehouse
My food bible is Hardens, it's never yet let me down.
www.hardens.com/restaurants/uk

Meant to mention Craster, famous for its kippers - you can smell them smoking all over the village. The Jolly Fisherman does a cheap and cheerful lunch using local produce. The crab sarnies are famous!
www.silk8234.fsnet.co.uk/

The best fish and chip place I tried in London was Masters Super Fish on the south bank of London near the Old Vic. They're closed Monday, from all reports.

In Bath, my favourite restaurant is Raphaels...

http://www.raphaelrestaurant.co.uk/

It's just across and up from the theatre on Upper Borough Walls.

I also like the Lebanese help-yourself-to-all-you-can-eat place which is on the upper floor of the Podium centre - just look for the Waitrose supermarket, the Podium shopping centre is right next to it and also leads off Pulteney Bridge, and take the escalator up to the food court.

If you're looking for real old-fashioned British standards (steak and kidney pudding, steak and oyster pie, game dishes, sticky toffee pudding, and such), Rules is a good place to go for this. Porter's isn't bad for this cuisine and costs less, but I liked Rules better.

For Indian food, I liked both Moti Mahal and Veeraswamy. The latter has a pre-theater two course meal that was very reasonably priced.

Sorry, correction to the above after consulting some notes taken later. The Indian restaurants I went to were Moti Mahal and Mela -- did not go to Veeraswamy. But the pre-theater meal at Mela was very good. My error.

Oops, seem to have missed out some important details from my list of 'Edinburgh's best IMO' - sorry, I did it in a hurry. Here it is filled out :

- Michelin starred restaurant - 1) Martin Wishart - the best
- Michelin starred restaurant - 2) The Kitchin - not as good as MW but still vg and uses more quirky Scottish ingredients
- Michelin starred restaurant - 3) 21212 - mad, unique food
- pub food - King's Wark
- gastropub type British food, casual style restaurant & surprisingly cheap - The Dogs
- cheapish casual cafe style seafood especially mussels - Mussel Inn.

You have some great options in Bath. It would make a good contrast to your city restaurant focus if you were able to get out to Combe Hay - it's a little village about 5 miles from the centre of Bath - if your trip is in summer you could make time for a great short walk around this lovely little village - I grew up in the next door village and when I was a kid we used to cycle to Combe Hay to the most lovely little sweet shop that was run by a very old lady - it was so old fashioned and from another age even back in the 70's and now sadly gone. The object of your visit though is the Wheatsheaf http://www.wheatsheafcombehay.com
The food here is now rated as being very good and the setting is quintessentially English.

Another great option is Olive Tree. We've eaten there twice and it gets very good reports. The location is great too for either a pre or post dinner stroll along the Royal Crescent and around the Circus - so some of Britain's greatest architecture as well as a great meal.

What does "the freshest" mean? It's like Miller beer saying it has more flavor than Bud -- yeah, but bodily waste has more flavor than water. And "indicative of the particular area"? London has 7.7 million people, is a complete melting pot, and is the largest city in Western Europe. Would you consider Polish or Slavic food "indicative"? After all, other than Warsaw, Chicago, and Krakow, London may be the fourth-most populous city ranked by people of Polish descent.

You want indicative of the particular area, go Indian. The national dish of the UK is chicken tikka masala. This applies in Scotland as well as England (yes, I know they're both part of the UK and some Scots still bang on about getting screwed by the Treaty of Union, point remains valid). Kerala in London off Regents Street was good.

The other national dish of the UK (at least to those of us whose country revolted from Mother England's yoke) is fish and chips -- the Gorgie Fish Bar in Edinburgh would work for that if it still exists because the portions were huge and everything is fried (the menu was like the State Fair of Texas only it was a storefront outside the playing ground of one of Edinburgh's allegedly professional football sides). There's also a pub under the DLR Tower Gateway station overpass on Minories (that's the street name) in London that had great fish & chips too but the name escapes me.

That said, in Scotland you ought to be able to get EXTREMELY good salmon in many a place.

Sadly I've never had good fish & chips from a fish & chip shop in Edinburgh and after 18 years here have had to conclude that the natives prefer their chips soggy. I'd stick to sampling fish & chips elsewhere or eat them in a pub here - the King's Wark is good for that as well as for everything else. The Seadogs fish & chips is good but they don't do it with the 'normal' types of fish, i.e. haddock / cod, so is not typical.

P.S. Also sadly, most salmon in Scotland is the farmed, flabby, fatty variety - oftehn not even from Scotland. It is extremely unusual to see Scottish wild salmon in a shop or on a menu and you'd only get it in the more expensive restaurants. For cooking at home I tend to buy Alaskan wild salmon.

"indicative of the area"

In Edinburgh, Northumberland, Bath and London you're going to struggle. In Bath and London, there simply isn't any local cuisine (unless you define Indian as local, but then they can do that everywhere else in Britain)- and there really isn't in Northumberland.

In Scotland, all decent restaurants will feature a number of distinctively "Scottish" dishes - though your fellow diners won't particularly bother.

What all decent resturants in all these places will do is feature the source of the raw materials, and most claim to get a growing proportion of them locally. There's known to be a huge amount of outright duplicity about this, and even if the facts are accurate, it's often hokum: lamb imported from New Zealand uses less energy, and if seafreighted emits less carbon, than lamb eaten at the pub opposite the English farm it's been reared on, and mutton and beef taste all the better for ageing anyway. As Caroline points out, Scottish farmed salmon is just as boring as frozen Chilean salmon, whether it's served on the edges of Loch Fyne or in the middle of London.

However the hearts of the "local food" fad, though muddled, are in the right place. What REALLY matters - and what they often get right - is eating food in season: by and large the kind of place that claims "local" ingreds really will serve you Cox's, asparagus, raspberries, Jersey Royal potatoes, game and rhubarb when God, not Frigidaire, intended you to eat them.

C_E -- Really??? Wife is a BIG salmon fan and she had good Scottish wild salmon in a resto that was not too expensive in Aberdeen. Not a clue as to the name, tho'.

Well BigRuss,I'm glad your wife found some good wild salmon ! Just pointing out that it's not the norm.

OP, what Flanner says about eating food which is locally in season is a very good point and is is often tastier. If you are interested, when in EDinburgh go to the framers' market on Castle Terrace (Saturdays 9-2, best to get there early to have space to browse, see everything on offer before anything runs out and maybe even chat to the farmers & find out which restaurants are using their produce). It will give you an idea of what's locally in season and good to eat (excepting the main fish stall which does import stuff like tuna). I have for example enjoyed asparagus and fresh tomatoes much more since I started *only* buying them from the farmers' market when they are in season here, eating lots then and not buying them at all the rest of the year, plus there's the excitement of waiting for things to appear like the aforementioned asapragus, tomatoes and also game. When will you be here ?