Tag Archives: shoreditch

Hoxton Grill

July 5, 2015 Fork & Talk Leave a comment

Shoreditch, such an eclectic mix of dining experiences with a wealth of different people and trends. Hoxton Grill is a chilled out bar and eatery with a lovely range of cosy seating options, fun activity suites and booths and a fusion restaurant to cater for all.

Saturday is heaving as with all locations here so: book, book and book, especially if you want to eat.

Being processco lovers it’s hard to understand when a place only offers one type of processco so please be prepared to not be able to ponder over the different types and put everything you learnt at wine swigging class into practice.

To start with we had the quinoa, courgette and feta salad and wait for it we had another salad with baby gem, crab and avocado salad. However, the healthy eats stopped here.

I loved the quinoa salad so much that I have made it at home since. The crab was a bit questionable and too fishy for my liking which is odd to say about something with crab I know.

For mains we got a bit dirty, well 3/4 of us did. One healthy bastard got grilled cod, oh la la. My bacon queen Elena naturally had the bacon and blue cheese burger along with our other friend and I sampled the cheese burger.

This had to be the longest wait for food ever. We made two round trips to the toilet, took selfies galour and had time to get up and go to the bar area and try and get our friend a date. An hour wait in totally but we didn’t mind as we were having fun and hoping the food would be worth the wait.

Elena started moaning from the moment the burger hit the table. She had two patties and both were burnt to a crisp. As they were burnt it left a chargrilled taste to everything which couldn’t even be hidden by her bacon love.

My cheeseburger was a simple meaty cheeseburger. The patties were meaty and medium rare which was rather annoying and I would have liked to have been asked how I would like my burger if they were going to do that. The meat wasn’t packed full of flavour which I would expect some sort of jazz hands if I’m expected to pay £12. I was starving and it filled a whole and thats how I should look at it at that time of night. I won’t even start on the bun. Chips were nice though 🙂

We tried to sweeten the end of the meal with a massive smore but that failed to satisfy either, nice idea though.

Hoxton Grill is great for a nice evening out for some drinks and meeting new people. However, it’s not the right place for a tasty, memorable meal that’s served in reasonable time.

Hoxton Grill
The Hoxton, 81 Great Eastern St, London EC2A 3HU
http://www.hoxtongrill.com

Italian

Pizza East

June 11, 2015 Fork & Talk Leave a comment

Shoreditch, the epicenter of ‘cool’ in London. Home to some of the trendiest bars and restaurants, it is the place to be when you want a plod go hang with your amigos.

Pizza East is always heaving with people so you would be quite the optimist if you think you can go without a reservation on the weekend. Pizza East is great if you want to dine with large groups of people because of the ample seating and space to move. It sits on top of a club called Concrete, not our cup of tea but the perfect place to head if you want a place to chill or boogy after your meal and trust us, you will need an after place for Pizza East as like most places has a two hour timer on each table.

The interior is rustic and industrial so very at home with the Shoreditch vibe. They have a wonderful open kitchen and bar where you can sit and watch the action of preparation. True to form for a lot of places in East London prices are cheap.

However, I think the positives that we have mentioned are actually pretty superficial. The food is nothing to rave about and if you love pizza prepare to be disappointed. The menu is Italian fusion so you will see Mac ‘n’ cheese on the menu which from our previous visit was great. The pizza‘s here are majorly lacking in flavour which ever you pick. Elena and I went for an aubergine/pesto pizza and an asparagus and ham (speck) pizza. The pizzas are very tough and the base has no taste which is a shame as there is A LOT OF BASE. Toppings are seriously lacking and not evenly distributed so you end up having a number of slices that are just cheese and tomato.

Service is a tad ridiculous and there is an air of disorganisation. We ordered our starters at 7pm when we had arrived. We were excited to have olives with toasted almonds and prawns with avocado and chilli. The starters were brought to us at 8:15pm once we had eaten half way through our dry and tasteless pizzas. There was no shock or horror from the staff about the forgetting of the starters which communicated that this mess up was a regular thing. The prawn dish was again tasteless and the avocados were over ripped. The olives were the best part of our meal however, it’s not like Pizza East did anything to them but merely served them from the packaging they were bought in.

This meal was a real shame as we really were looking forward to some tasty pizza. We read some other reviews of Pizza East to ensure we hadn’t just visited on the worst night of their life but it seems Pizza East have a pretty strong bad reputation amongst fellow foodies. I think next time we fancy some traditional Italian pizza we will head to La Porchetta in Angel to avoid disappointment.

Pizza East
56 Shoreditch High Street, London E1 6JJ
www.pizzaeast.com

Burger

MEATmission

March 14, 2015 Fork & Talk 2 Comments

MEATmission isn’t just a burger joint in Shoreditch, it’s the word I and many of my friends use when the meat craving sets in at weekend. I know many of you may be able to relate to this. I happen to be a vegetarian during the week due to a hectic lifestyle and my minimal efforts to cook anything that takes longer than 5 mins (you would never know how much I love to cook when I’m at work). Come weekend time I turn into a savage meat loving beast and I love it.

My loving Elena and I are very active in our lives and are always out somewhere and doing something. However, when we choose to be lazy, well I think our photos would be used to communicate the word. So this weekend was one of those weekends. We watched Marigold Hotel part 2 and then decided we should chill indoors. But then hunger set in and we wanted a patty but couldn’t be asked to leave the house so started to search for a burger delivery place that was to our standards. YES, you heard that right, we wanted the burgers to come to us!

To our surprise MEATmission a place which has been on our list of places to try did deliveries!!! Whoop whoop!! Not only that, the burgers had brioche buns, wait for it, they even had Bingo Wings or for the common folk, buffalo wings.

Now, truly being at the borderline of eating our own body parts through hunger we went a tad overboard with ordering. We ordered: The dead hippie burger, red chilli burger, fries, bingo wings and fried mac and cheese. Naturally we shared everything to avoid disappointment.

Now, meat lovers out there, the pattie in both burgers was packed tight with meat. The patties in both burgers were soft and tender and just crumbled in the mouth and melted away. Elena really appreciated the fact that the burgers were medium rare. If she could have her way she would have all the meat in the world so rare that it’s still talking to you but even she was gushing at how perfectly cooked it was.

The dead hippie came with a double pattie and was reeling in mustard which made the meat taste amazing. It was subtle in flavours.

The red chilli burger is one juicy burger with a single pattie and beef chilli smothered on top. Yes, you heard that right beef chilli in a burger, soaking the brioche bun and giving a spicy yet tangy flavour. A tad messy so knife and fork this one.

The bingo wings had a lovely crispy skin and the meat just flaked off the bone. The buffalo sauce was finger licking good and packed with that sweet and sour combination. The portion of wings was very generous I must say. There must have been 10-12 wings, it’s hard to recall as we had that disease of wing amnesia when you just stop counting and hope it won’t finish.

Now, our wild card choice of deep fried Mac’n’Cheese ended up being our favourite item. These strange looking things were shaped like rectangles and were coated in golden bread crumbs. You would never think that what is inside was inside. As you bite into these golden bars you crunch through the bread crumbs and enter a gooey and chewy heaven of béchamel and pasta. My brain couldn’t handle what I was eating, it wouldn’t believe I was eating pasta so I had to look at it and there it was, big chunks of pasta in white sauce. So tasty and so bad for you but we loved it.

We can not believe the treat we had delivered to our door nor can we believe it was a burger! We can not wait to now actually visit MEATmission in the flesh and see what else we can eat from their burger list. They have an extensive drinks menu and we wished we could order a hard shake or two but all the more reason not to be lazy and to go in and visit.

We will be ordering from this bad boys again. Number saved!

MEATmission
15 Hoxton Market, London N1 6HG
http://www.meatmission.com/