London visit

Last night our friend invited several people over to feed them steak: inch-thick steak, to be precise, cooked sous-vide and then seared for colour at the end.

It was an experiment, and one that we concluded was not entirely successful: the steaks were a bit too chewy, really, though they were delicious (pre-marinated in various sauces). But thankfully there was plenty of other food to sustain us -- fries, fried mushrooms, and fried onions. And a very impressive cake from Caffe Concerto.

Today my wife and I went into Chinatown for a lazy two-person dim sum lunch at the Feng Shui Inn.

Pictured from left: green tea custard buns, satay beef tripe, beef congee, XO-flavoured turnip cake and roast pork cheung fun.

Everything here was very strongly flavoured, and that made the tripe in particular a bit bitterer than I'd have liked. The congee was a really good texture, though, and the cheung fun was delicious.

And the custards buns. Oh.

I have a strong weakness for custard buns, especially the sort with really runny centres. And I have an even stronger weakness for green tea anything. And this was pornographically good.

(My wife's family inform me that I have the same taste in dim sum as my 7-year-old nephew, who would also quite happily order a meal consisting entirely of custard tarts and custard buns. My nephew clearly has excellent taste.)

After that we did a little shopping, and ducked into Joe and The Juice for a drink. We started with juice mixes: I had a Pick Me Up, my wife had a Hell of a Nerve. Once done with those I had a normal coffee.

I like their coffee: my opinion of coffee places is merely that I should be able to drink their standard filter/americano coffee with a little milk (no sugar) and it should not make me think they have burnt their coffee. This is rarer than you'd hope.

(We stayed here quite a while just chatting and reading while it rained outside.)

Afterwards we wandered around Chinatown and popped into various shops and then into Wonderful Patisserie. Everything here -- as in many asian bakeries -- looks so toothsome I always want to take home armfuls. I mean, look:

 We took home a small armful, I admit -- any more and it'll spoil before we get to eat it. But I did get a green tea melon bun and one of the green tea wrapped rolls, and my wife got a bamboo custard bun and a taro melon bun. These look so good just lined up in a row that I need to show you:



And after this we met up with friends and went off to Superstar BBQ, a Korean barbecue place that we've been to many times. They do delicious fried battered chicken in various sauces (I recommend the kimchi mayo even if you don't like kimchi), and they offer varieties of kimchi pancake and rice dishes too, but the main event is grilling your own meats.

Dipping hot meat strips in the miso sauce and wrapping it up in the lettuce is great, but towards the end of a meal I tend to just snaffle meats off the grill and eat them without sauce because they're delicious just as they are.

(I also recommend hot plum tea!)

You'd think this much food would be enough food for any one small human in one day, but I'm now at home nibbling at Glico 'pejoy' tubes, sort of an inverse pocky with the flavour on the inside. They, um, are also green tea flavour. I also like other flavours of sweet snack, probably? But it's hard to go wrong with green tea flavouring.