While I take a little holiday from London,
restaurants, and blogging, here are some profiles of other bloggers you
should get to know! I'll be back in June.
Your name and location?
Kavey. London!
Your blog?
Kavey Eats
What was your last meal out? How was it?
I love eating out! One of my recent meals out was to Polpo in Soho. Every London blogger and their aunties went to Polpo in the weeks following its opening, or so it seemed. But I found a fellow food blogger, Laissez Faire, who hadn't been either, and the two of us met for lunch. Being quite geeky, I took advantage of all those fellow food blogger visits and drew up a wee list of some of the dishes that had the best and worst feedback. Sad or not, it worked and we had an excellent lunch of great food (and company!) A review of our meal here!
What's been your worst meal ever?
I'm sitting here doing my best to remember a really bad meal, but I really can't bring one to mind! My brain seems to be wired not to dwell on the crap stuff and so the meals that stick in the memory are the good ones. But that's not a bad thing, I think!
What's been the most commented post on your blog? Why?
The post with the most comments has been my review of Pierre Koffman's pop up restaurant. This was such a hotly anticipated event that everyone was dying to know what it was like – I booked a table at noon on the first day it opened and got my blog post up later that same day!
My second most viewed post, though with far less comments, is my write up of hosting a stall for a day at the Real Food Market in Covent Garden. I have no plans to go into this line of work, but wanted to learn what it was like to be on the other side of the table, as a frequent visitor to markets just like this. It was hugely hard work but very satisfying!
Got any restaurant pet peeves? Things you really wish restaurants would/wouldn't do?
I have many, but I try not to let them spoil the experience.
One peeve that really irritates me is a fixed price menu, with 2 or 3 choices per course, but where some of the choices have a supplement attached! The whole point, to me, of such a menu is a selection of dishes that the restaurant and chef are able to offer at a fixed price point. If a dish doesn't fit into that pricing structure, find another one that does – leave the more expensive dish for the a la carte menu!
When and why did you start your blog?
I'd been reading food blogs for years and idly thought about starting my own but, as is the way with so many ideas, never got around to it! On April Fool's day last year, I went to the Guardian Word of Mouth's Easter Chocolate Tasting event and had a great time – not least because I discovered (and ate rather a lot of ) Paul A Young's basil truffles! I got home that evening and started work on my blog, which just passed it's first birthday recently. I realised I'd actually been stealth blogging for ages, sharing restaurant reviews and recipes on my personal blog, on food talk forums and even by email – so I decided to copy all that old stuff across to Kavey Eats too, where it now forms an archive going back a couple of years!
Any food trends you're seeing that we should be aware of?
None that anyone interested in food hasn't already noticed for themselves!
More people growing their own produce – something my husband and I have been doing for several years, gradually expanding the number of varieties and the volume we're growing year on year.
More people cooking Asian cuisines at home, even some of the more complex dishes – not just Indian but Vietnamese, Malaysian, Chinese, Japanese… I'm not too brave in this arena, though I want to do more.
Fish! We went on a course at the Billingsgate Seafood Training School recently where we learned how to choose good quality fresh fish, and then how to prepare it – scaling, gutting, filleting and more. And a few ideas on cooking too. I noticed a lot of interest in this – many people said they too want to cook more fish at home.
