Adam S.'s Profile

I don't really want to write a super-long review for this place since it's a while since I went but I felt it could do with some kind of presence on Yelp.

It's got a glorious exterior, really like it's just fallen through the sky from the early 70s and landed outside Putney Bridge tube station, the interior is the same. It treads a thin line between bad taste and retro-kitsch but that's not really important. This isn't the kind of place you come to notice the prints on the wall. It's the kind of place to come if you want to spend less than £5 on your meal.

Busy, friendly, cheap-as-balls. The food's not great but it's edible. I wouldn't go for a coffee, I think it's instant but the tea was fine. I mean, like I said, it's just like it dropped out of the sky from the 70s. Actually; from that Monty Python "Spam, egg, spam and spam" sketch.

Worth a visit if you're skint but probably not worth a special journey.

This is a wonderful café. Subtitled with the name 'the Literary Café' might strike it out as the heart of pretension but actually it doesn't seem that pretentious at all. It's a wet, Wednesday afternoon and I'm sitting on the mismatched furniture typing this on the free wifi. The windows are steamed up and I have to say I was pretty happy to find this little place in an area of otherwise uninspiring destenations and that was before I stepped in.

There's some slightly questionable art on the walls and the table is a bit wobbly but that's part of this charm of this place. The bookcases are stacked with .. well, books and there are posters around for a poetry night (second Tuesday of every month). The tea is served in proper teacups and saucers and I'll write about the food when it arrives. Not terribly cheap ~£4 for a sandwich, ~£1.50 for a cup of tea but not terribly expensive either. Ok, food just arrived. Mmm home-made chocolate chip cookie for 95p was tasty. Baugette was just a baugette which I guess is good since I never eat any of the stupid garnish they put onto the plates to make it look like you've paid for more. No skimping on the goat's cheese or sundried tomatoes, a perfectly good sandwich.

I've worked out where this reminds me of. It's the bakery from 'Stranger than Fiction' and I have always wanted to have that bakery on my doorstep (minus the socialist undertones). There's an element of a shambles here but that's just as it should be in an independent café one of the staff ran across the road to buy Earl Grey teabags for a customer and the lampshades on two of the tables are on the wonk but I'm glad about that. It wouldn't happen in Starbucks and that's a good thing.

I don't want to be the one guy who leaves a bitter and negative review among the sea of positive ones but ... I will be for the wankiness that is the Whitechapel Gallery.

Wanky. Wanky to the core. Wanky is really the only word I can think of to describe this place. Well, that wouldn't actually make for a very good review so let's try and through some more out that. Pretentious, hipstertastic, boring, white, conceptual, dull, wanky. Gah. It always comes back to wanky.

So I'm sitting in a coffee shop with my friends and we're trying to decide what to do. We've done all the big stops like the National Gallery and some of the little ones like the Geffyre Museum so I suggest The Whitechapel Gallery. I read in the paper last year it has been reopened to much fanfare so we decided to try it.

First off, if you must go don't go to Whitechapel tube station go to Aldgate East which this gallery is built on top of. It's quite a long walk down one of London's less desirable high streets from Whitechapel. Once you arrive and step through the door you can feel a kind of ice blast take over you. The woman on the reception desk and the couple milling around by the gift shop really want you to know you're not cool enough to be there. Where are your vintage loafers, canvas rucksacks and fascist haircuts?

We awkwardly entered into a large room containing what was essentially some doors and metal. A gallery assistant glared at us as we tried to walk around it looking for any clue as to whether this was art with meaning or Hackney Council's recycling centre. A couple of equally bemused viewers come in from the other end and made a quiet remark about it being a "piece of ****" which wasn't terribly mature but, to give them credit, was very accurate only for the attendant to chastise them like they were school children. Like I said, icy atmosphere.

We walk through to some stairs at the top of which were some closed galleries then down again to sit in a movie theatre showing some weird and, frankly, childish performance art. We sat in here for a while to discuss what to do next and all ended up laughing to ourselves about the pure pretension this gallery exuded. We vowed to soldier on to see if there was some kind of permanent exhibit to enjoy.

Back through the door room and upstairs into a series of small gallery rooms with some conceptual art that didn't really mean anything unless you read the huge amounts of explanatory text which seemed to take away from the whole point of this being an 'art' gallery. One of the exhibits was a piece made in the 70s from cheese and chocolate. Sick. There was quite an interesting display of illustrations from a book of terrifying fairy tales but nothing special.

By this point we made up our minds up to leave. Everyone there seemed to see something in the art we didn't and they were all looking very self-satisfied to be reassuring themselves that they were cool enough to understand this place. A quick glance into a gift shop which was nothing much then out onto the street feeling bewildered, bored and totally uncool.

Uming and ahing between 3 or 4 stars here so don't judge me unkindly BC. I do like this place but I thought it could be somewhere I loved and it just didn't work out for me. I went on two consecutive days; once on my own then again with friends for brunch but, due to tube nonsense, brunch turned more into lunch as I didn't actually get there until 12ish on both occasions.

The location is great, the cute and cosy little café fits right in in this cute and cosy little alley. As it is so cute and cosy seating is a bit of a sticky issue, I think there's less than 10 tables all together and the first time I went I had to wait 10 minutes to get a table, second time 15 minutes and there's nowhere really to stand except for; in the way, by the door.

Once you're seated the menu is really good. I had the Fully Monty breakfast and the American breakfast which were both dead tasty. Sausages and bacon were a little tough but excusable, the eggs were amazing, I've never, ever been able to scramble an egg to make anything but rubbery mess so I'm always impressed when that goes right. First time I ever put syrup on breakfast but, my god, you Americans have it right. Sugar + fat is always a winning combination.

Good coffee, very good infact although I prefer the mint tea which is actual mint leaves in boiling water. It just never crossed my mind that it was possible to make mint tea from .. mint but now I know I fully intend to exploit this to show off my "indie" tea credentials. Who needs teabags?

Service seems .. inconsistent shall we say. First visit got a lovely waitress who was attentive and I got my food and tea straight off the bat and had a chat with her afterwards. Second time around the service was friendly but slow; we were going to have dessert but by the time the waitress remembered to bring us the menus we decided to go.

Price was ok I guess. £8 for a big breakfast, under a tenner for most stuff and you can get various breakfast items for under a fiver. Tea for £2 was pushing it a bit but they had nice mugs so .. what the hell.

The worst thing about the experience was having to sit next to the world's wankiest graphic designers talking very loudly about implementation, facilitation, engineering experiences and creating a user-guided feedback system but you can't really blame this place for it's hipster clientèle. Well, maybe you can a bit since it does appeal to the hipster but I'll let that slide.

3 stars because I would go again and probably again and again but that's more because I'm a creature of habit than because of the place itself.

Just one gear on my fixie bike, I've got a plus one here for my gig tonight.

Oh, sorry, what? Oh, I'm writing a review .. right.

The Book Club somewhat suffers (well, actually, benefits) from being smack-bang in the middle of that swathe of East London that has been colonised by the Hipster. There's no doubting that this place is firm hipster territory, there's a lot of them here but it doesn't mean you have to be a hipster to enjoy it. I came for lunch here with my friend on a weekday afternoon and we managed to get a decent window seat with no wait. The décor is very nice, wooden furniture, exposed brick walls, there's big black and white prints up all around and the large windows ensure it's nice and light.

The menu is pretty solid, I had ham, egg and chips. Sorry, I mean I had hand-cured honey ham, free-range egg and home-made crispy chipped potatoes. And my friend had vegetarian lasagne which was, actually, advertised as just "vegetarian lasagne" in their credit. Ours both came in around the £7-8 mark for a main meal and it arrived really quickly, literally about 10 minutes after we ordered. I have to say it was really good, solid food. The chips were amazing, properly crispy, the egg was cooked perfectly and the ham was in big slabs and they weren't short on portions either.

I can't say anything about the drinks as we had tap water from the iced jugs on the bar (extra kudos for that) and neither can I say anything about this place in the evening. There's a ping-pong table at the back near the toilets which I gather is home to a tournament and there were paddles and balls out so we could have played if we'd wanted to. I loved the way the seating was arranged with tables and communal benches but plenty of room to move around so you're not smacking people in the face with your uber-trendy canvas bags when you're trying to leave. I also thought the staff were quite friendly for a hipster-orientated establishment.

All in all I'll give this place 4 stars based on this one visit. I think we might have been lucky or maybe it's always this good. It's somewhere I want to take people in the future and be all "oh yeah, I heard about this place from a friend" about.

I've been here quite a few times now and I've never had any problems. It's in a great location at the back of Covent Garden and on the edge of Nine Dials. It's a whole-in-the-wall job but it does have a long bench at the front  which I usually sit at and people-watch.

The sushi itself isn't amazingly great but it's nice enough, I thought the rice was fine but then I like it to be quite solid, the fish was also nice but it didn't really taste as fresh as it should have been, the california rolls were tasty even if I don't usually like them with raw vegetables in. There's always a good selection though and at between £2.50 for a set of California rolls and £7 for a big bento box it's very reasonable for prime tourist-country. I can never restrain myself and always go for a big bento box.

The staff are friendly and if you go after 5pm there's a 30% discount on all the un-sold stuff. The selection of drinks if fine if you're a big fan of weird Japanese drinks but I'm always too scared to try Aloe Vera drink and plump for a bottle of water instead. If this place was round the corner from where I worked I'd be here every other day I think, I am a real sushi addict.

Sorry Chipotle but I'm just not feeling it. When I saw the hoardings going up opposite Foyles I thought "Oh good", my American friends were pretty excited and I'm always hearing how much certain people miss Chipotle. In the last few years there's been an explosion in places to get a burrito in London but the Mexican food density is still nowhere near as high as in California and there's a big difference between genuine Californian-esque burrito places and terrible faux-Mexican Restaurants.

I felt a bit like this place was a cross between the two, it's obviously part of a chain so I wasn't expecting much character, which was good as there wasn't any, it looked like the whole place had been designed as a cross between a Magnet kitchen and a McDonalds. The first time I intended to go was just after it opened and there was a queue outside the door. We went elsewhere. The second time it was still busy but not quite as bad. I ordered my burrito but had to take some time to explain the system to my confused friends. I felt embarrassed by the price, thinking this was a "fast food" kind of place I told them it'd be quite cheap but at £7-8 for a burrito plus £1.40 for guac I was a bit gobsmacked.

The burrito I had was pretty lacklustre, the meat was tough, the ingredients were all separate so it was a mouthful of rice followed by a mouthful of beans rather than them all mixing up nicely. Halfway through the flimsy tortilla gave up and burst in the tin foil meaning I had to finish it with a knife and fork which is the perfect sign of a bad burrito. Similar things happened to my friends. Even then the resulting, grey mess wasn't that nice, I actually left some and people who know me know I would never abandon a burrito unless it was seriously dire.

I don't know why I'm giving this place 2 stars instead of 1. I mean I guess it wasn't as bad as it could have been, it was at least clean, the toilets were alright and the staff were friendly, it's got an excellent location too. A major but selective gripe is that being a rather rotund person (probably through too many burritos) I found the tables too low and small, the chairs were fixed so I had to squeeze my tree trunk legs in between the seat and table. Uncomfortable.

Anyone who says this is the 'best' Mexican food or anywhere near needs to click that box at the top and search for 'burritos' and 'London' because seriously, people, there are so many way better places out there.

I went here just after it opened a few months ago so this review is a bit out of date, I spent a while looking for it so I could review it but I've only just dug out the business card from the dregs of my bag.

This place was excellent. I am a bit burrito-mad so if I see a new burrito place in London I just have to try it out. I had a carnitas burrito with all the usual; rice, pinto beans, guac, sour cream and mild salsa. When I went I think everything had 1/3 off for their opening offer and when I asked the incredibly friendly woman behind the counter how long it'd last she said she didn't know, "a while". The burrito was fantastic, moist meat, tasty rice, sturdy tortilla (just like it should be). It was good value too at around £5.

There's a good selection of drinks and I think they had some Mexican sodas but my memory is a little hazy and their tortilla chips were tasty. The store itself is mostly take-out orientated for people who work nearby but there were about 4 or 5 tables to sit at, it was a little dark and the décor was a little clichéd. That's why for take-out I'd give this place 5 but for eat in (which I did) it gets a 4. When I'd finished eating I told the woman at the counter just how much I liked her burrito and she seemed genuinely chuffed.

If I worked nearby I'd weigh even more than I do already and that's saying something. This shop is excellently located just by Covent Garden if you don't fancy the usual Pizza Hut, Garfunkel's and Starbucks offerings for lunch.

I went here the other day again and took my vegetarian friend I was more impressed than last time. They've updated the menu and it's looking more inspired, when you're offering only veggie food you have to be more interesting, you can't just do "meat" + "veg" it has to be a whole meal out of the veg.

I had a veggie burger with sweet potato fries and it was really lovely, I don't remember what my friend had but I know she enjoyed it. The atmosphere was great this time around, it is a really buzzy place for lunch in Norwich.

Overall I don't think it's hugely different from when I've been before I just think it changes depending on the time of day and what you pick from the menu. If you're a vegetarian then this place is a must and if you're not it's still worth a look.

I ventured to Reading on an excursion from Uxbridge expecting to find a fairly monotonous, dull town. That's what I found in all honesty except for one or two gems. This place was one of the gems.

More specifically than Oxfam it is an Oxfam Music Shop and it's really one of the best offerings Oxfam has. There are boxes filled with records of all genres from bluegrass to techno and a good selection of CDs and music books too. The prices are much better than you'd find in London and more akin to a charity shop than a record store.

For me the best part was the classical music selection. 10 records for £5. That's 50p for an LP. Insane. I was giddy, I couldn't take too many back with me but I managed to find 10 with some supremely awesome arrangements and wonderfully designed covers. At 50p you can just pick 10 random records and take them home to listen to, if you don't like it you can redonate it at no really great loss and if you do then it's a bonus. I really wish I lived closer so I could go back time and time again.

Also, erm, the staff were supremely hot. I mean it's kind of a cliché that hot indie types would work in an Oxfam music store but they do. Seriously.