Category: Food & Drink
The Joy of Bees: London Installation Proves a Seductive Honey Trap
It was a Thursday night in Soho, and a hip little townhouse on Greek Street was buzzing—literally. Just inside the door, approximately 20,000 bees (I tried to count but kept losing track at 19,933…ish) were flitting about inside a slab of glassed-in honeycomb. It looked like Bee-TV, or maybe one of those gumball machines where you put in a coin, and out pops some small sweet—although in this case, it would have been more of a trick than a treat.
Bee hive on display at “The Joy of Bees.” Do NOT break glass in case of emergency.
Welcome to The Joy of Bees, billed as “a gastronomic tasting and art installation exhibition” helping to raise awareness of the beleaguered pollinators that are dying by the millions across the globe. (more…)
London Cocktail Week…or Zombie Apocalypse?
It’s that time of year again. The dazed and confused wander London’s streets in rumpled, slept-in clothes, cradling their heads, clutching their stomachs, and uttering agonized groans. Are they extras auditioning for “The Walking Dead,” or…could it be…the actual ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE?
No, my friends. It’s something far more dangerous. It’s London Cocktail Week.
Through the 9th of October, 250 bars around the city will be offering £5 cocktails to folks who have purchased a £10 wristband—and that’s not even counting all the free samples. If you’re familiar with the usual prices in London’s bars, you’ll recognize that’s a small price to pay for a very big hangover.
One of the key venues is Old Spitalfields Market, which has been transformed into a “Cocktail Village” with nearly 40 stands. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a village where I’d like to live FOREVER…which might not be that long, considering how quickly my liver would give out.
Here are a few of my favourite discoveries.
How an Evening of Chablis Made a White Wine Lover out of Me
I have a confession to make. Well, quite a few, probably, but only one that is relevant to my purposes here.
I’m not a wine expert. There, I’ve said it. My ignorance is not for lack of “research,” mind you, but what little I do know mainly revolves around the world of red and can pretty much be summed up in three sentences:
- Nothing good can come from a £4 bottle of Cotes du Rhone.
- Do not, under any circumstances, drink red wine on your friend’s new white couch. That second bit I learned the hard way—as did my friend.
- I’ve never met a Chateauneuf-du-Pape I wouldn’t drink to the last drop. Then again, I’ll drink most anything to the last drop, as evidenced below.
The current contents of my liquor cabinet. When I say there’s nothing I wouldn’t drink, I mean NOTHING. Well, except maybe my bottle of Spisska Borovicka, which I’m fairly certain is Slovakian for “liquid death.”
Years ago, however, white wine was my tipple of choice. Of course, back then, it generally came from a box. That all changed when a friend of mine vowed to turn me into a red wine woman by uncorking three beefy bottles in one night. (No, that’s not a euphemism). But anyway, it worked.
Now, over the course of an elegant evening at the Andaz London Liverpool Street hotel, my oenophilic education is about to come full circle at an event dedicated to the veneration of pure Chablis.
My host is sommelier and restaurant critic Douglas Blyde. Clad in a velvet blazer and burgundy tie, he paces the room like the love child of a fevered poet and an evangelical preacher, passionately, extemporaneously extolling the virtues of tonight’s favoured French region.
First, though, the bad news. “Chablis has had an annus horribilis,” Blyde admits. The region has suffered hail, floods, frost—nearly every tragedy you can image, aside from a Biblical plague of locusts. Up to 50 percent of this year’s crop has already been devastated.
“But that doesn’t mean that what does come out will be troubled in taste,” Blyde maintains. “If anything, it will be the golden child, the survivor.” (more…)