My weekend
Part II of this exciting series when I tell you what I've done over the weekendI bought a CD by South, called 'With the Tides'. Only listened to it a couple of times so far but basically if you like soaring epic rock songs, mixed with more intimate moody ones then it's your sort of thing. Sort of a more upbeat and uplifting Coldplay, without that Coldplay sensation of every song sounding the same.
Went to two restaurants. Wine Factory ,on Westbourne Grove, is my local pizza restaurant and essentially serves good, tasty and quite cheap (all under ?10) pizzas. Good, but not worth visting for. The big selling point however is that the wine is sold at retail price, so the House wine (by which I mean the cheapest wine, the waitress noting (rather coldly I thought) that they don't have a house wine) is ?7 a bottle, and the list goes up from there. It's the only one, but it forms part of a group of similarly cheap-wine restaurants of similar names around West and South-West London. So in short a good place to drink lots of wine.
Number two is an Indian called Malabar, just off Notting Hill Gate. This is one of those Indian restaurants that tries to get away from the flock-wallpaper and pictures of elephants. It doesn't however (unlike say Veeraswamy ) veer too much away from 'British' Indian cusines, i.e you can still get Chicken Tikka. You also get to eat off odd huge metal plates, which may put some people off. It shouldn't, because the food is beautifully presented and tastes excellent, with much better quality meat and other ingredients than seems the norm, while the wine list, whilst not cheap is also wide-ranging and includes organic wines.
The couple sitting next to me however did leave a little to be desired. After they had sat down the man said to his companion, 'There are only two types of people in London. Those scrounging off welfare, or bleeding-heart liberals who thinks it's ok. Like those in our street'.
On a more uplifting note we went to the Wallace Collection to see the Lucian Freud exhibition. I'd not been to the Wallace Collection before (it's just off Marylebone High Street behind Selfridges) and it truly is remarkable - an extensive collecting paintings including a particularly good collection of 18th century French paintings and furniture, and about a thousand Canalettos. It's also free.
Anyway I hate 18th century French paintings and furniture, and of the opinion that once you've seen one Canaletto you've seen them all. So what of the Freud? Well it's only about 10 new paintings, which are been exhibiting here for the only time before being sent off to New York, and fills just one room. Will you like it? Well if you don't like Freud then it won't make you change your mind. But otherwise it contains some wondeful paintings, including a fantastic portrait of Andrew Parker-Bowles, which Tom Paulin correctly said on the Late Review is an 'extraordinary painting of British decline...absurdity mixed with folly...imperial grandeur and sadness'.
posted by Matthew @ 4/04/2004 03:39:00 PM
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