Tom E.'s Profile

Addie's is one of the ten or so Thai restaurants in London that cater mostly for the Thai community rather than for native Thai-food lovers. They have an authentic menu including Isaan street-food, and a downstairs area for karaoke parties. The decor is quite cool and modern with gorgeous little scale models of street-food stalls framed on the walls. The place is frequented heavily by London's Thai students - so much so that booking in advance at the weekend is essential. The whole restaurant is buzzing with cool young Thai kids who've spent their parent's money on Kings Road early that day. You can't move for boutique shopping bags.

But on to the food and drink... the Thai food is great, but not London's best and the prices here feel a good 20 to 30% more than many equivalents. We had the Isaan sausage (gorgeous but I'd give it London's bronze), a fermented fish som tum (disappointing), fried cat fish in morning glory (wonderful), a spicy lemongrass and pork soup (very sharp) and grilled pork neck (very tasty but not stellar). With rice, sticky rice and a beer and Thai iced tea it came to about 45 pounds.

Addie's is definitely worth a try, especially with a big group. Book early and plan to party.

Decent enough Korean in nice digs in Fitzrovia. Their menu has enough options to  cover three of the four classic Korean restaurant themes:
1. Jeon (savory pancakes)
2. BBQ
3.  Hot stone rice bowl

(they do have some of theme no.4 - stews, but not enough to shout about)

With decent decor and service, and good options this makes it a good choice if you're in Central London on a date or with a group of 4 to 8. There will be something for everyone and of course with BBQ you'll get to cook some of your own meat. Highlights from our meal there this week were the cola-soaked rib meat bbq, the seafood jeon and the kimchi.

But here's where it falls down to 3 stars... portions are small, costs are quite high and all the usual little things like kimchi and beans are not free with your bbq but have to be ordered extra. Sad faces.

Now I spot that others have said 'this is about the best you can expect in London, blah blah blah better in US... YAWN' - well that's rubbish. New Malden is a lot closer to home than NYC and has exceptionally good Korean food at lower prices. So based on other places within the M25 like Jee Cee Neh and You Me... Koba gets 3 stars.

Lets start with the service. Not normally what you start with when you're considering a supermarket but Wing Yip is not your normal supermarket. This is somewhere where they pack your bags for you, taking so much consideration as to how you like them packed that the person on the till will sort through your lined-up items to get heavy or frozen ones swiped first so they can go at the bottom of the bag.

It's a far away from 'Unexpected Item In The Bagging Area' as you can get. A great human touch.

So what next after service? Decor. YES! Bright yellow with a pagoda roof and neighbouring pagoda office block. Okay, it's not very traditional Edgware Road but it adds a smile to the bleakness of Staples Corner which is just suicidal grim.

The food range is incomparable for London East-Asian food. They have the lot. What more can I say. They also have everything you need to set up your own restaurant as well - cutlery, 20 gallon pots, chopping boards in packs of 20. It's pretty tempting in the final section not to just say 'fuck it! I'm going into business!'

For me the best section of all is the fresh seafood counter. Lobsters, Clams, Pomfret, Crabs all at very good prices and many still alive. I can imagine this is the fall-back for many chefs who don't get to Billingsgate on time.

I wish I lived closer and could swap Wing Yip for my local Tesco. Speaking of which... this is very close to where the first ever Tesco once was. How things change!

Pretty disappointing for an antiques book store. Perhaps I've been spoiled by all the lovely ones in Cambridge and Oxford but Fosters is not my cup of tea for three main reasons:

1. No obvious organisation - books are literally piled up everywhere and in some cases if you were to take one out to flick through it you could literally destabilize half of the shop and have 4ft high piles coming down all around you.

2. High prices. Gah... well this IS London I guess.

3. Lots of framed maps and illustrations for sale. You know what this means? It means old books have been cut-up so that the map and picture pages can be sold individually in frames. This is my major hate with a lot of the antique book industry. Whether Fosters are doing it themselves or not, I'd rather they didn't sell these and keep this book-butchering business going.

Peptio is a tiny spin-off from Camino on the other side of the courtyard, consisting of about 6 high-tables with bar stools, some wine and sherry bottles and a counter where the two staff cut up some tapas delicacies.

It feels a bit special in here being so cosy and close, and the wines are fantastic rich reds. You almost wish they had a real fire on the go as well on cold winter nights. The food is a good mix of trusted classics like cured meats and new twists like figs in chocolate. Don't expect the food to come quick with only two staff and no real kitchen. Do expect to drink more wine.

I love my shoes and I love my libraries but I'm not convinced by Shoe Lane Library. It's two floors underground with no natural light and no mobile phone signal. There's barely any tables to sit and work at and the 8 computers you have to ask permission to use seem to be Intel 486s running Netscape or something.

Effectively it's a nuclear bunker with some books and old CDs. If it got accidentally sealed up by misplanned construction at ground level then it'd be a perfectly preserved time capsule of 1990s media. Sign in to Hotmail, put on the Spice Girls CD and flick through some Michael Crichton books.

Best private Taxi service for the airports I've used so far. Very good online interface, with text message updates and email alerts. You can pay online in advance or just select cash and give it to the driver at the end. The prices are consistently the lowest and way cheaper than getting a black cab or the local minicabs near where I live.

I've always got a nice people carrier (MPV) despite selecting the cheaper saloon car. It's a fiver more to get picked up from Heathrow than to go there as the driver has to pay for the carpark and then wait around with your name on a sign.

Of course, the online system has a box where you can put in whatever you want the driver to have on his sign....

tempted to go for 'Amanda Huggenkiss' next time.

Let me preface this review by saying that the waitstaff were apologetic and let us leave with no bill. For that I want to thank Que Viet as we really had a terrible experience there on an early Sat evening after driving cross town in search of wonderful pho. Letting us leave for free after our starter meant we could still afford to get some good pho down the road.

So what went wrong? Well, for us it seemed everything. Other diners seemed to be having a good time so perhaps we were unlucky. It took almost half an hour for our starter of snails to come and it was nothing like we expected, just being a little bit of meat on lemongrass stalks.

After another 20 mins the rare beef pho and garlic beef pho arrived. Just the bowls, some lime slices and chilli. No hoisin sauce, no herbs, no beansprouts. The broths tasted simply of beef stock  - no hint of star anise or aroma of cinnamon - and the meet cuttings were bland, no tripe or tendon to be seen.

I felt let down, so rather than tucking in, I asked for the usual accompanying garnishes to be brought so I could spice things up but I was told that actually this was Hanoi-style and they didn't do it Saigon-style which was what I wanted (wikipedia says they have a point). Kindly, they humoured our requests and out came some beansprouts and mint, but really we just wanted to leave. The lack of taste to the broth would've been the killer, until we noticed that sitting among the beansprouts they'd just brought out was a chunk of raw white fish. Yikes!!

As we left we were told that they were having problems in the kitchen that day. Very true!

Atari-Ya Ealing used to be the much adored and awarded Sushi Hiro, and then Hiro-san apparently packed it all in and headed back to the land of the rising sun.

So what next? A few months later the Atari-Ya sushi fish sellers decided to take over the spot, rename it and get it back going again. How has it changed? The name and the crush to get a reservation. That's it. The menu, the staff, the decor and feel are all identical to the Sushi Hiro days. In fact the fish is the same too, as Hiro-San probably got his from the Atari-Ya sellers anyway.

So this is just the old and much loved Sushi Hiro without Hiro-San and without waiting 2 weeks for a friday night table. It's classic sushi only, with amazingly fresh cuts of the best fish. It's lo-key, affordable sushi that you'd get in the best suburbs of Tokyo, except here you're getting it in one of London's suburbs. Well worth the trip on the District Line.

The best cycle shop on my daily commute. Sure, it's not a five-star independent workshop with local love, but it's good for what it is. The staff know what they're doing and on my last visit they fitted my new free-wheel for... free.

They are packed to the rafters (literally) with day-glo and lycra cycle clothing and accessories. These are obviously the easy sellers with big margins here in London. I really wish they weren't. Why do half of London's cycle commuters treat every day like the Tour de France?