European food

Riding House Café is a wonderful brunch restaurant. Located north of Oxford Circus on the corner of Riding House street and Great Thichfield Street it offers wonderful classic breakfast dishes before 12 and after 12 serves lunch specialties (at lunch you can chose smaller plates and share them or a bigger plate just for yourself).

I went to Riding House Café for brunch/ breakfast, and we had a table booked for 5 of us for 10.45, as there was no later table. This place is very popular and you can either book a table (half of the tables there they let you book), but you need to book a lot in advance as these tables get taken very quickly or you can just turn up and try to occupy one of the walk-in tables but chances are you will have to wait around 1h for them.

There is one thing that I would never do when eating in Latvian restaurants - book a table, as you could always just turn up and there will be space for you, that is before Koya came along. Koya is a restaurant that looks bizarre from the outside, like a black painted shed, but it is these days the coolest place in Riga where you always have to book a table especially if you want to go there for brunch on a weekend. Brunch never used to be very popular in Latvia and this is a trend that has very slowly been introduced to Riga and brunch at Koya is what the locals love these days. 

I am very very annoyed with this restaurant. I went there hoping I will eat at the famous Russian chef Anatoly Komm’s famous Varvary restaurant but the waiter gave me the menu of Varvary Brasserie which serves every day European and Russian food and did not even give me the menu of Anatoly Komm’s famous molecular cuisine dishes. Which leaves me in a silly position, as I have been to the premises of Varvary, experienced the atmosphere and the service and also the food, but just not the food I was expecting to have, which means I will probably have to go back to try the molecular cuisine dishes, about which I am actually extremely annoyed, as I did not really like Varvary at all.  

I was in Luxembourg with my girlfriends and we wanted to get some lunch, and one of my other friends Christian had recommended this place, so we decided to try it out (he did recommend the restaurant though not the café where we went and for dinner, not lunch). Chiggeri is located in a manor house in the old city of Luxembourg. From the outside it did not look like much but when we walked in, there was a beautiful, in a sort of Moroccan type of style, courtyard with Moroccan lamps hanging from the ceiling and bright colours, called Le jardin d'hiver. We also checked out the brasserie located inside but that was very dark, so we decided we wanted to stay in the nice and bright courtyard. There is also a restaurant that I mentioned Christian likes with white tablecloths and with a different menu, but we did not see it. The main chef of Chiggeri is Gilbert Welter, and apparently they have one of the biggest wine list in the world with more than 2,200 wines.

John Salt is a pub in Islington (no idea if it is named after the English artist called John Salt) and late last year a new chef, Ben Spalding, was invited to cook food there. After only a few months during which he attracted a lot of positive reviews, he suddenly left and now the main chef is Neil Rankin. Neil used to work in Pitt Cue Co in Soho, the amazing meat restaurant, and people say he has an obsession to grill things which you can see in some of the dishes he creates in John Salt. All their fish comes from Newlyn Fish Market, meat from Warren & Sons in Cornwall and greens from Keveral Farm (on the menu they even have a dish called “Keveral Salad” which just has greens from this farm)