I’ve been bad, found a few drafts of restaurant reviews that I hadn’t gotten around to finishing or published lurking amongst the others, thought it was about time to start going through them and finishing them. It was made easier for Abeno Too because I went back there for the second time just this week!

I read about Abeno Too on Great Newport Street when I was looking for something similar to the kind of experience you get with Teppenyaki, something that’s fun to take a group of friends out too, so I went in not really knowing what to expect other than a “Japanese omelette”.

Okonomiyaki has a batter made with grated yam, eggs, shredded cabbage or spring onions, and can contain all sorts of other ingredients. Abeno Too have  a great selection of different ingredients selected for you. We chose the London mix, which contains salmon, pork and cheese with bacon layered on top.

It’s a wonder to watch, not quite the same as Teppenyaki where it’s all about the show, but there is definitely skill to it. From the way they bring the ingredients out and introduce them to you to the mixing, pouring, shaping, cooking, flipping, stomach growling, and finally the decorating before finally letting you dig in.

The smell whilst your okonomiyaki is cooking is tantalising and leaves you wishing you could just hit a fast forward button, but it’s really worth waiting for your server to dress it with a spiral of Japanese mayonnaise, a spiral of okonomiyaki sauce (similar to Worcestershire sauce),  seaweed flakes and bonito flakes (dried smoked tuna flakes). The bonito flakes wave and move in the heat which almost make them look alive, it gets people every time!

You can also get a variant of the dish with a layer of crispy noodles on top, I haven’t tried this or the noodles inside a rolled omelette (similar to a traditional phad thai) yet but there were frantic nomming sounds coming from people that did have those dishes.

It’s worth trying some of the smaller dishes too, the asparagus and goats cheese baked gyoza are a tasty vegetarian option, or you can have chicken gyoza fried freshly at your table. If you like tofu make sure you try the agedashi tofu, it’s some of the creamiest tasting tofu I’ve had other than at Haozhan.

Overall Abeno Too can come in a little more expensive than some other Japanese restaurants, but the quality of the food and the experience makes it well worth it.

What’s this you say, a sushi restaurant opened by Lady Gaga? A restaurant that serves Lady Gaga rolled in rice? No it’s not either of those as humorous as that concept might be, but they are definitely going gaga about sushi over at the just opened Sushi Ga Ga on Lisle Street.

As an incentive to draw people in, they currently have a fantastic deal offering 50% off of the food bill, I’ve tried to get a table three nights this week and been met with 30 minute or more queues of less than happy patrons, tonight though I was in luck and managed to get a table whilst the offer was still on!

The menu is mostly what you’d expect for a Japanese restaurant in town, there is a fair amount of high quality sushi, along with some “small dishes”, ramen, donburi and a list of house specials which are hard to tell if they should be ordered as a main or not.

We decided to play it safe and order some of our favourites, then some of the more adventurous sounding things on the menu which all feel a little bit like they’ve taken inspiration from the well established and ever popular Hakkasan  or Haozhan.

Our sushi arrived first all on one immaculately presented board. The soft shell crab wasn’t as good as you can get over at Kyoto but it was still pretty tasty, but the salmon rolls and the crispy duck rolled in rice and cucumber with plum sauce were lovely.

The folks sitting next to us were eyeing our sushi with that predatory food-envy look, when our next lot of dishes began to arrive.

Agedashi tofu - the two sided sneak, crispy on the outside and soft and squishy on the inside, followed by scallops in a wasabi sauce, prawns also in a wasabi sauce, and some vegetable gyoza.

The dishes in wasabi sauce definitely looked like they were taking a page out of Haozhan’s book, but didn’t quite hit the same level of flavour, but overall it was all pretty good.

Great value, good quality sushi with the current discount, but even without the discount it would have been under £20 a head, well worth a look if you’re a sushi addict like me.

It has been almost a year since I discovered Leong’s Legend perched on the edge of China Town and got my first introduction to Taiwanese food, I had a bit of a bad experience with what I believe was called Oyster Congee that ended with both my friend Chris and I being violently sick not long after we made it home from the restaurant.

In retrospect, it was a bloody stupid idea to order something so rotten sounding anyway, but that’s the price you pay for being adventurous with food, even if you do get to try some absolutely amazing dishes, every now and then there will be one that teaches you a lesson.

Usually when I have a bad experience at a restaurant I won’t go back, and technically I’ve stuck to that rule… by going to their sister restaurant, Leong’s Legend Continues which opened last year on Macclesfield Street.

This time we avoided the Oyster Congee, in fact to be safe we avoided all Congee, sticking to the nicer things we’d had last time and a couple of other choices from the dim sum menu. Also excluded from the list were the pearl teas, I know lot’s of people love them, however I simply cannot be doing with squishy black pearls at the bottom of an ice cold stale tea.

What we did have though, was absolutely lovely and we polished it off in somewhat record time, which turned our rather frumpy waitress into quite a happy waitress (though who can tell if that’s because we liked the food, or because “those darn English are leaving”…)

The braised pork belly is to die for at Leong’s Legend, you can get it in a broth, or as we did you can have it with sticky rice, I don’t have the balls to eat the fat (though my colleague Olive swears it’s the tastiest bit) but it’s still really full of flavour.

Shredded turnip parcels are addictive, they don’t sound like they should be, but it wasn’t long after the plate arrived that we were staring at crumbs and asking if we could have more.

Schezuan style wontons packed a punch, not for the faint hearted but I love the flavour you get from the roasted chilli in the chilli dressing, coupled with the charred onion and garlic.

The Siu Long Bao still baffle me, large nipple shaped dumplings that have pork in and a tasty lemon grass and ginger broth, I’ve seen people eat them in different ways, squeezing the broth out onto a spoon for example, but we just ate them whole. Messy but tasty.

So all in all, maybe it is worth giving restaurants a second chance, one item on the menu might be your worst enemy, but what’s it going to do if you eat all of it’s buddies?

If you’re working or wandering near Brick Lane it’s worth going to check out the new art event hosting a collection of art by students, first timers and professionals across the country at The Rag Factory on Heneage Street.

The concept is based around producing an atmosphere of a growing visual noise, composed of a mixture of literature and visual artwork with pieces ranging from poetry, performance art, film, sculpture, painting, illustration and creative writing.

My highlights at Scribbles and Murmurs would have to be Emma Bridgeman’s “Weight Of The Subconscious” (which unfortunately Emma can’t bring herself to part with), and work by Rokia Begum and Jack Coffin.

It’s great to see young talent making a name for themselves, if you want to see the work for yourself make sure you get down there on Friday 25th for the closing night.

Remember to chip in a small donation towards the artists, these events always involve a lot of time and effort on their part, and not forgetting The Rag Factory who are a non-profit organisation designed to support the creative fabric of London.

Our whole media world is busy going digital, we’ve seen this have a huge impact on some industries, especially the music industry which has been slow to adapt to the changing way that consumers behave. If the consumer wants it, they want it immediately, so digital music makes a lot of sense as a platform.

Logically it should be the same for books. Amazon released the Kindle, Sony followed closely behind with the Reader which has been heavily backed by Waterstone’s in the UK, Apple are late to the party but are claiming to revolutionise the way we read books with the iPad (who wants to travel with lots of books when you can take a sliver of aluminium and glass that you need to charge constantly).

On the London Underground this morning a business man was sporting a flashy new iPad, I was half expecting that he’d be nose deep in a novel or checking his email or some such, but no he was heavily stuck in a maze of menus, quickly realising with a pained expression that he had no connectivity to the Internet so anything that he didn’t already have on his iPad, he couldn’t get access to.

In the digital industry we’re always chanting content is king, and we’re always going on about the importance of simplicity, so at the very basic level I think those are clear reasons that the trusty paper book could continue to beat it’s electronic equivalent, but I can’t help thinking there is something just a little bit magical to them as well.

Books seem to have personalities of their own, they’re compact and happy to be carried around with you, letting you dive into the world they create for you whenever you want. They’re try not to be complicated, other than the alluring cover it’s no frills and no distractions.

We can’t seem to part with our books when we’re done with them. What is it that makes us cling on to them even though we might not read them again for years? We’ll might lend them to our friends, we might go as far as swapping them for other books, but we just won’t part with them for money alone.

Maybe they have some hidden cosmic value that we simply can’t put a figure on once we’ve been taken in by their story, or maybe I’m just crazy. Either way you have my colleague Ray, the random business man on the tube, and a client I’m working with at Waterstone’s to blame for this rambling!

Despite absolutely stuffing myself to the point of bursting with delicious Indian food earlier on this afternoon for a colleague’s leaving do, I’d already arranged to have dinner with Chris tonight at a Vietnamese restaurant so out I went again.

Unfortunately I’d forgotten the name of the restaurant that had been recommended to me (it’s pretty much a running joke that I forgot almost everything) so Chris had to do some last minute restaurant picking, he came up with the goods though!

After a short walk from work down to Shoreditch and a quick stop for a few relaxing drinks in Casita Bar (plus a free shot of Jäger, thanks guys), we carried on to Old Street and found ourselves at Cây Tre.

From the outside Cây Tre is a colourful little place, though on the inside the two floor restaurant is quite small and minimalist, packing many people quite efficiently into the space. We were lucky we got there when we did as not long after we arrived the queue for a table was out the door and along the street.

Smells coming from the adjacent tables spoke wonders about the food, so I was adventurous and went for the “swimming crab” to start with and then Phở satê for my main. Chris ordered some prawn summer rolls and sizzling seafood.

The crab was good, mixed with prawns, noodles and mushrooms, however the crab was swimming in what was apparently a crab broth… despite actually not tasting all that bad it was pretty unsightly and reminded me of something else that I really didn’t fancy eating!

Snuck a bite of Chris’ summer rolls as well and they were lovely and fresh, served along with a hoisin sauce mixed with a chilli paste that gives you a kick of warmth under the sauce.

I knew my Phở was going to be spicy when I ordered it, it’s usually a given, but perhaps I underestimated *quite* how spicy it  might be. My eyes started watering slightly immediately after it arrived at the table.

Despite putting me into a full on sweat and turning my face and lips an interested shade of purple that I really hope nobody other than Chris noticed, the Phở was absolutely delicious. The broth was packed with flavour and the hit of the spices wasn’t too harsh to the palate, the noodles were fresh and soft, the beef had been cooked in the broth making it tender and full of flavour and whatever else was lurking in there was also tasty.

I’d definitely recommend Cây Tre to anyone that can tolerate a bit of spice, though being based in Shoreditch it also helps if you can tolerate Hoxtonites!

Comedy of the touts aside, the few restaurants I have been to with both colleagues and friends in the past have been a mix of experiences ranging from cold curry, hour long waits, to the horror stories of kitchen staff washing themselves in the kitchen sinks (Shampan, feel free to write me and tell me nothing I ate went via that sink).

Recently though I’ve been introduced to Muhib by one of our client directors, we ate some take out from there on one of the evenings of the epic 12 day stint on trying to get a project launched, and despite them getting the order a little confused it was all pretty good.

Said client director is now taking the smart move to grab a month of well deserved rest before the next client comes along and to celebrate the occasion a good bunch of us headed over to Muhib for an Indian banquet.

First off it’s worth saying how friendly and accommodating  the guys at Muhib are, they weren’t caught off guard by 18-20 people wandering in off the street (whereas Las Iguanas in Spitalfields couldn’t even cope with 10-15 the other day).

We all munched on papadums with various chutneys whilst working out what to feast on from the menu (clearly I’d forgotten at this point that I was meant to be going to dinner in the evening too).

I opted to keep it simple and ordered a peshwari naan and the house biriyani.

Pleasantly surprised by what arrived, the house biriyani has a thin egg layer covering the mix of saffron rice, chicken, lamb and prawns underneath, and comes with a vegetable curry to mix in.

Packed full of flavours and spices and was so filling that I was literally at bursting point. May have had to stealthily pop a jean button after eating I was so full!

I’ll be going back, what more can you ask for than friendly service and good food?

I first bumped into Kitchen Italia at Westfields whilst hunting out some pre-gig grub near Shepherds Bush Empire. First impressions weren’t all that fantastic and I have to say with chain restaurants that really does put a dampener on visiting others in the chain. The service was pretty much non-existent, though the waiters did make extra sure that everyone knew where the toilets were (have they had some disaster story we should all know about?!)

The food was reasonable at the Westfields branch, however for the price I find myself poking around amongst the pasta wondering if they couldn’t have been a little more generous with the spicy sausage that seemed somewhat lacking in my dish.

Despite initial apprehension I also gave the Covent Garden branch a go.  Things are a similar story for the most part, they have the same long social tables (you know, the ones where everybody glares as anybody else sits down at the table), mostly empty too so the atmosphere was a bit dull.

Food was of a much better quality though with very fresh tasting pasta and lots of flavour in both mine and Josh’s dishes. I had aubergine and goats cheese tortellini with cap0nata  which was really nice if a little small, along with some arancini because the main wasn’t filling enough. Josh had some angel hair pasta with black truffles which he swears was delicious.

All in all not bad, but if I was to be blunt, it is only a pasta place, the food is fairly expensive, the wine is ridiculously over-priced, and the service wasn’t all that in either branch.

Seems if they’re going to expand further it’d be worth evaluating price and service before doing so, get it right at the restaurants you started with and all that.

The Curve at the Barbican has been taken over by flock of zebra finches that like to rock out, they seem to have expensive taste too - £1,500 Gibson Les Pauls for the lead guitar loving finches and £1,000 Gibson SG Standard Bass for the finches that like it heavy.

The installation by French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot is supposed to draw on the rhythms of daily life  to produce sound in unexpected ways, with the finches freely able to fly between the electric and bass guitars, microphone stands, and cymbals filled with either seeds or water.

Some of the guitars seemed to be open game for any of the finches to fly to and use as a perch, but others had two finches attempting to build nests on them and any other finches that tried to perch there would be shooed off.

The nesting finches seemed to lay down a rhythm, as they would frequently fly off to root out something to use to build the nest, then fly back and land on the guitar stings in a number of places. Other finches would crash loudly onto the bass guitars but not stick around for long.

The cymbals were an interesting idea, as the finches peck at the seeds they bash the cymbal, depending on where the cymbal is bashed you get a slightly different sound.

Overall with the various guitars sounding (with some reverb and delay), alongside the cymbals sounding and of course the finches own bird song, you get a strong ambient vibe from the installation that essentially is just nature doing it’s thing, not composed and completely unique.

Despite really enjoying being in an environment where sound was being created in such a unique way, I have to admit I came back with mixed feelings. Guitar surfaces are lacquered and as such the finches that were attempting to nest efforts were in vein; anything they built up eventually slipped off onto the floor. The finches were slipping around on the guitars too.  Seems a tad cruel, I’d expect more from the Barbican.

Admission to the installation is free and it’s open until 23 May 2010; due to the open nature of space there is a limit of 25 visitors at a time, so expect a bit of a queue (30 mins roughly) if you’re going during peak times.

I’ve been privileged to be working alongside a bit of a musical buff the past few months who has been challenging and broadening my taste in music, even branching me out into Jazz which I have touched on but never really given much time.

It’s through this colleague that I found out about Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin, a quintet from Switzerland that describe their music as somewhere between zen-funk and ritual groove music, and what better way to get to know a band than to see them live and in person.

I’m not sophisticated enough to describe Bärtsch’s music in the terms that he rightly deserves and frequently earns from passionate fans, but the structure of his compositions are really appealing even for someone only just broaching the edge of interest of this genre of music.

You have an intertwined mixture of Kasper Rast’s delicate approach to the drums (stroking even a finger over a drum to get a texture of sound from it), Björn Meyer’s versatile array of styles on the electric bass that plainly left me with my jaw hanging, Andi Pupato on a variety of bizarre percussion instruments including the wonderfully obscure hand crafted Skin-Udu, Sha’s beautiful sax and commanding bass clarinet, and of course Nik Bärtsch himself on (and in) and number of pianos squeezing out any number of sounds.

As individuals it’s clear that each of the band members have strong character, though each play a balanced part in each of Bärtsch’s compositions for the most part, as they progress through the composition the intensity builds and each gets to become the focus of play, absolutely shining.

Aside from their sheer talent as individuals I truly respect how much they appear to be enjoying themselves and I’m amazed at how they do not ever veer off from the complex polyrhythm that Bärtsch has laid out for them. Though I have to admit that I did find that I kept trying to find a beat within the organised chaos, and quickly ended up confused as the time signatures changed and shifted and I was left bopping to the wrong beat.

Nik Bärtsch is nothing short of a musical genius; you’ll see this for yourself if you ever see him live just by reading the expressions on his face; as he watches his Ronin play he looks almost franic following every little tone like a hawk. His passion is addictive.