Places I love in London: Gelupo

So, a while back, I said that I'd write - as the  mood struck me - about my favourite places to eat and drink in London.  Today:  Gelupo.  I love Italian ice-cream.  It was love at first taste.  Italian ice-cream somehow managest to taste more like its flavour than the actual flavour does - Italian lemon sorbet is more lemoney than actual lemons, Italian blood orange sorbet tastes more like oranges than they do..  Above all else, Italian ice-cream tastes like Italy - like sunshine.

I have sampled a lot of Italian ice-cream in London in a quest to find this experience closer to home.  It was a tough job but someone had to do it.  There is a lot of lovely Italian ice-cream in London.  Marine Ices is reliably tasty and has a great range of sorbets, especially.  Gelateria Danielli once served me some truly extraodinary blackberry sorbet.  Cafe Chai, down the road from where I used to work, was a great source of "I've had a bad day, I need some Italian ice-cream" pickmeups (and, again, is particularly good for sorbets - I used to particularly enjoy their pink grapefuit sorbet).

But the winner has to be Gelupo.    The first time I had their blood orange granita, I spent the whole weekend talking about it to everyone I met.  Yes, I was a granita bore. But it actually was that good.  I actually don't usually like granita that much, too icy and not enough fruit, but Gelupo's granitas are amongst the nicest things I have ever eaten.  The sorbets are delicious too - the blood orange one is lovely but so too is the clementine and..  well, basically, they're all good.  And, then, the ice-cream itself - I had the peanut butter ice cream yesterday with a scoop of bitter chocolate and.. well, suffice to say, I just want to talk about it for the rest of the week..

Places I love in London: L'art Du Fromage

I was going to do some kind of list of "my favourite five restaurants in London" or some such but then I got indecisive about how to rank them and it all seemed needlessly numerical. So, as the mood strikes me, I'll write about my favourite places to eat and drink in London.


Today, L'art du Fromage.  I know I said I wasn't going to get numerical about this but this might well be my favourite restaurant in London.

I first went there during their opening week, when I spotted it on the "new restaurants" page of London Eating.  I've been back at regular intervals, so regular that the staff recognise me, I've taken various friends there and, every time I visit, I love it more.

The lovely co-owners, photo from The Guardian

It's a French restaurant focussed on cheese.  I could just stop there because, frankly, that was all it took to get me there the first time!  But that's not all it is, it's not a restaurant with a gimmick, it's fundamentally one of those lovely places that you find in France so often where they keep it simple but stylish:  the décor is all warm wood, it's comfortable but still feels special, the staff are attentive but calm and unobtrusive, the wine list is carefully chosen, and - crucially - the food is delicious.  If you like cheese, the place also smells terrific.

I often have the Bleu D'Avergne fondue (which is mysteriously not on the menu on the website but there when you go in person), like all the fondues, you can get as much as you like - including switching to a different type of fondue - and they serve it with a flourish, setting some brandy alight and pouring it in.  I've tried all the fondues (I did say that I've been there a lot!) and, while they are all delicious, the Bleu D'Avergne is the one I always come back to - it's just the most interesting of them and the one that I suspect would be hardest to re-create at home.  I have also had various of the cheeseboards - the only real difference between them is how much of the tasty cheese you want.  They are all beautifully presented and with a real attention to detail - every single cheese is clearly handpicked and is at exactly the right stage for eating.  Sometimes, you'll order a cheese board at a restaurant, even a good restaurant, and find that - say - the brie isn't quite ripe enough or the camembert is disappointingly ungooey.  That does not happen at L'Art du Fromage.  Ever.

I think the only negative thing I can find at all to say about the place is that, location-wise, it's a bit of a faff to get to - it's about as far from a tube station as you can possibly get in central London, but it is on a couple of convenient bus routes.  Also, the location stops me from spending ALL MY MONEY ON CHEESE.