Do you ever have that feeling towards the end of the week that your little internal bucket of happiness is running a bit low, the stresses of the week keep knocking it over and you really just need something really bad for you to slap that smile back on your face and carry you through to the weekend?

No? Oh well I do at least, and nothing seems to hit the spot better than one of the All American breakfasts at the The Breakfast Club; when their Spitalfields restaurant first opened I have to admit I was a bit skeptical that it was going to be pretentious and overpriced, fair enough it is actually a lot more expensive than some of the local cafes in the area that’ll fill your belly for half the price, but it’s worth it.

Start with two fluffy pancakes, lay on some perfect eggs (have them scrambled, fried or poached), stick some crispy bacon on the side that looks like it was attacked by a deep fat fryer, squeeze in some potatoes and onions, a single lonely sausage, and then drench the lot in maple syrup.

Belly busting, works every time, even if you do need someone to roll you back to the office afterwards.

If giant breakfasts aren’t your thing the menu still shouldn’t disappoint; other breakfast options, mammoth burgers, fajitas and wraps, salads and egg dishes fill it to the brim, though if you’re looking for a healthy option it’s worth  noting even the caeser salad is devastating.

It was sometime last year that I heard of Yotam Ottolenghi and the excitement that has been building around his approach to creating with food; though primarily vegetarian these are no ordinary dishes – each one is crafted with respect to the ingredients to make them stand out and compliment each other.

I ordered both of the Ottolenghi books and tried a couple of the recipes out myself, the results were singing with flavour, however I was a little put off by the number of ingredients that every recipe called for and the difficulty of finding some of them locally.

Colour me surprised then after a short afternoon walk through Canonbury scoping the area out as a future place to live, walking through Islington looking for something to eat with my friend we spotted an Ottolenghi restaurant (their flag-ship, it would seem) and having been umming and ahhing about choices for the past half an hour, literally ditched all interest in the others and flew across the road with my friend trailing after me!

Weekends and lunch times are apparently the busiest periods, and the restaurant is laid out with most of the space dedicated to making the experience for seated customers – so queuing for 30 minutes for a table wasn’t the most comfortable, but we did get to try free cake, easy way to win me over really. If you can’t wait you can always get something to take away, but really… wait, it’s worth it.

There was so much on the menu that appealed to the both of us, so we decided the only fair way would be to get a main and three salads because two meant we just wouldn’t get to try enough; the descriptions below really don’t take into account all of the herbs and components of each of these dishes and salads, but its about as close as I can recall:

• Spinach and Roquefort quiche with:
• Burnt aubergine with tahini
• Chargrilled broccoli with chilli
• Fresh green bean salad
• Seared salmon with mango and pineapple relish with:
• Jersey royal potatoes with edamame
• Roasted sweet potatoes with pomegranite and yoghurt
• Basmati and pea herb salad

First off it’s worth saying that the portions are incredibly generous, not that is stopped the hungry two of us polishing off our plates before our neighbours at the table had even made it through their coffee and cake.

The food is clearly good enough to make anybody turn majority vegetarian, everything seems designed to compliment and make the ingredients stand out with a punch; the quiche was full of the distinctive taste of Roquefort, the aubergine was packed full of flavour and melted in the mouth with the tahini and chilli plus other spices (possibly paprika), the brocolli was beautifully charred and the chilli made it pop and the fresh green bean salad was as fresh and crunchy as the waitress had described.

I only tried a little of the salmon but it was something else, the mango and pineapple relish gave it a sweet taste that didn’t really feel out of place – more brought it to life than anything, the sweet potato was also lovely.

This is the kind of inspiring food that makes me (and possibly you) get in the kitchen and start inventing similar dishes, taking fresh ingredients and making them sing.

We also bought some cheeky cakes on the way out to try later (no way any more food was going in at that exact moment) – I hear the passion fruit meringue tart was expletive delicious, I’ve not yet tucked into the hazelnut with ricotta and chocolate tart, or the vanilla cheesecake with cherries that I bought to share with the mother this evening.

Pho (pronounced more like fah) is a traditional Vietnamese noodle soup; the various types seem to have a combination of different broths, meats and additional garnishes, but essentially the goal is the same – a hot flavoursome broth with packed with fresh noodles, meat and some zing.

Pho also happens to be small chain of restaurants that specialise in their namesake – offering a number of combinations of pho noodle based soups, bun noodles, Vietnamese inspired curry dishes, and other tasty things.

I first tried pho at Cây Tre last year and basically blew my head off (and turned a nice shade of purple) with the ‘generous’ amount of spice that had been used in the broth, but still beyond the spice there was a lot of flavour.

The experience isn’t quite the same at Pho, it’s essentially a heavily westernised take on Vietnamese food; the broth for the beef based dishes was a little bland and by my standards needed a fair amount of fish sauce and chilli (plus the squeeze of lime and herbs provided as a garnish.

My friend who hails from Thailand practically emptied a bucket of chilli into his before he thought it tasted even vaguely passable, and even then said it lacked the flavour he would have expected from the broth.

On the plus side the noodles are generally pretty fresh tasting, and you don’t have to have them in a broth – they have quite nice noodle dishes with stir fry vegetables or meats that are mixed in with nuoc cham sauce (at it’s simplest: fish sauce, lemon, sugar & water) which are refreshing, light and tasty.

Personally I’d suggest that if you are looking for the authentic experience, hunt around by Old Street, or if you’re just after a good noodle soup then find a good Japanese restaurant and order a huge bowl of ramen.

Lunchtimes at work often seem like some bizarre holding pattern these days; circling all the usual favourite spots in the hope that they’ve spontaneously rolled out a new and exciting menu that will inspire the palette, only to be disappointed in the same old choices and moving on – potentially ending up with something that you didn’t really want.

This is the curse of having too much choice around you, it becomes impossible to make a decision where to go and new things become the only appealing choices.

Good thing then that after a couple of years construction, the Nido Student Living tower in Spitalfields has been completed and several unique (non-giant chain) restaurants have sprouted up on the ground floor offering some new choices!

Just off from Bell Lane – near Artillery Lane – Kastner and Ovens have opened up their second branch serving up a variety of hot dishes, salads, pasta dishes and a huge range of cakes freshly made on a daily basis.

The menu doesn’t change as often as they claim but there are minor tweaks and additions from day to day that can keep things interesting, and the quality of the food is pretty exceptional compared to some of the other local fare.

So far I’ve sampled some of the salads which were all tasty (though I did get a shock when eating some potatoes and getting a shock of roast garlic in there), the haddock fish cake – which was both gigantic and tasty, and the roasted vegetable quiche – which had wonderful pastry with a firm but wobbly filling – yum.

If you’re short of somewhere for lunch, try Kastner and Ovens either just off from Spitalfields, or in Covent Garden on Floral Street, hot foods range from £3-5, as do salads, so maybe something hot and a small salad.

Met an old friend for dinner this evening and having pretty much been busy all day I left the restaurant choice in his hands and also accepted to break my chain of visiting Japanese restaurants in favour of something more ‘American or Italian’.

We ended up at somewhere entirely different, El Cantara on Frith Street. Situated a little too close to the theaters for comfort it had a menu board outside touting pre-theatre offers – this should have been more of a warning sign.

When we entered I had to both sigh and laugh at the Moroccan decor, it’s only been a couple of months since I got back from touring parts of Morocco and had more than my fair share of cous cous and tagine for the year; had to immediately text my travel companion and groan at the thought of more cous cous.

El Cantara have a split menu, there are some popular Moroccan dishes such as the cous cous dishes and tagine dishes, but there are also heavily Spanish influenced dishes such as paella, and a variety of tapas sharing dishes which are a mix of the two cuisines.

There are deals if you order a number of tapas dishes, so we decided to order the most we could (which is 7 for around £28 if I remember correctly) and share them between us with some olives and freshly baked bread.

The olives arrived and were pretty decent, I ate them all though because I’m the only one that likes olives. The bread didn’t arrive at this point, and there was quite a gap between our olives and our sharing dishes arriving which can leave one gnawing at the edges of the table.

When our tapas arrived, it looked pretty bog standard. The squid was okay but the way it was described on the menu made it sound more interested than just simple rings in batter, the meatballs were okay but any Italian would scoff at them, the sardines were mostly a bone minefield, the broad beans were pretty tasty in fairness, but overall most of the dishes were about as interesting as you might expect from chains like La Tasca or Las Iguanas – only not as good.

Our bread never did arrive, our waitress made several calls to the kitchen, and bread did arrive to her several times, but it never appeared to be the right bread, or it went to another table if it was actually our bread.

Would recommend avoiding this restaurant, if you’re after tapas try the highly popular Cafe Espana at the end of Old Compton Street is only a short walk away and better value and quality.

As it comes to the end of the second bank holiday weekend in the UK in a row, it seemed ideal to finish off with a treat – a perfect (if windy) evening for it too as the streets seemed to be extraordinarily quiet, possibly the second long weekend in a row taking it’s toll on shoppers and tourists.

Decided to try out another highly recommended Japanese restaurant on my search for some new favourites, and sat proudly in the middle of Charlotte Street is a simple but elegant and charming restaurant. Nizuni are on a mission to become the best Japanese restaurant in London and seem to care immensely about service and quality.

We were greeted and seated by some cheerful and friendly staff who made some good suggestions on what might go better with our other choices from the menu and it wasn’t long before we were happily sipping hot sencha and eating edamame beans. You know when even the simple dishes taste like edamame taste better than you’ve had before that you know you’re going to be in for a good meal.

After much deliberation on the menu, we finally ordered:

• Edamame
• Ika Karaage (deep fried squid, served with a wasabi mayo)
• Tori Tori (crispy deep fried chicken with a sweet chilli sauce)
• Salmon skin maki
• Seafood yaki soba
• Nabe udon (udon noodles with prawn tempura & vegetables in a broth)

The deep fried squid with the slightly powerful wasabi mayo was tasty and crispy, the salmon skin maki was good and packed a lot of flavour, but out of the appetizers the winner had to be the crispy deep fried chicken which was in small bite size portions in a delicious sweet and sour sauce with a small punch of chilli.

I passed on trying the seafood yaki soba, that’s one dish that I’ve had several bad (and somewhat vomit inducing) experiences with elsewhere of recent. I was confidentially reassured that it tasted good though!

My udon noodles were fresh and perfectly cooked in a lovely broth. Most Japanese restaurants will serve your tempura in the broth, by the time you get to eating it they are normally soggy and disappointing, I was pleasantly surprised that at Nizuni they leave the tempura on a side plate for you to dunk in the broth at your leisure to get warm and still slightly crispy tempura.

Overall Nizuni really hits the mark, and at only £20 each for a fairly hefty meal.

They clearly invest in the quality of their food and the service which is honest, friendly and attentive. I think I’ve successfully found a new favourite.

Time then to discover some of the other Japanese restaurants out there; this evening was Kikuchi tucked away on Hanway Street a short walk from Tottenham Court Road. This small but elegant little place is subject to heavily contrasting reviews with some people rating very highly and praising the authenticity of the food and freshness of the sushi, with others saying that the service was appalling and the food bog standard.

When we arrived we were greeted by perfectly friendly staff but immediately told that there is a minimum charge of £25 per person – realistically if you’re hungry I’d recommend you budget higher than that though, and if you’re a fan of sake then considerably more.

The menu outside Kikuchi speaks of a bog standard lunch menu at any Japanese restaurant, however when you’re seated at the table you’re presented with a drinks menu that boasts a vast selection of sakes ranging from £30 to £500 for a bottle, and a food menu that basically leaves you bedazzled with the sheer number of pages and items.

Between two of us we ordered:

• Salmon skin with ponzu
• Grilled aubergine with miso dressing
• Mixed tempura
• Eel tempura with taro
• The chef’s special sushi

The grilled aubergine was insanely good just as we both hoped it would be (unlike the disappointments at some other restaurants), the salmon skin was addictive and delicious as ever, the ell tempura was good too but the mixed tempura was pretty par for the course.

The sushi, well I guess that’s always going to be a subjective one depending on what tastes and textures appeal to you as an individual, but it wasn’t helped by the fact that we waited over an hour for our sushi to arrive and even then that was after chasing them for it.

For £30 we only got 12 pieces of generally uninteresting looking sushi; the salmon was good, the tuna was great, but the white fish (which I’m useless at identifying) didn’t really offer much in the way of flavour, the texture of the squid was a bit difficult to cope with, and the sea urchin, well, I’m probably not going to have sea urchin sushi again let’s put it that way.

All in all I’d say that the food is amazing and the slow service is something I would suffer through again to try some of the other interesting items on the menu, but I won’t be having sushi again – at least not the chef’s specialty.

For someone that really enjoys food and spends quite a lot of time and money ‘investing’ in London restaurants (that’s code for getting fat), I’d completely failed to get on the TasteLondon bandwagon (sorry, that’s now tastecard) – it’s the magic little black and green card that gets you either 50% off your food bill or 2 meals for the price of 1.

That’s all changed this week, tastecard were going a half price deal on their annual membership, and they’ve also announced that they are supporting Macmillan Cancer Support this year which is great news, I decided it was time to take the plunge!

My card arrived early this week with a nicely printed coffee table book of restaurants that makes your stomach beg you to go and fill it up, so I decided to break my tastecard virginity and book in at Imli, the Indian Tapas on Wardour Street that I’ve walked past many a time and thought ‘that sounds nice, if a little pricey’.

You need to phone in advance for most of the non-chain restaurants, which was easy and welcoming, however when we got to Imli we were made to feel a little bit uncomfortable by it being mentioned at least three times by two different waitresses that we were tastecard customers and what we could get 50% off on.

Swallowing my pride and assuming it was just their attempt at being clear, we looked around and saw an array of really delicious looking food, and we jumped into the menu ordering roughly three dishes each off of the a la carte menu.

We ordered:

• Lemon rice
• Potato naan
• Stuffed paneer (spinach, mushroom, potato)
• Chennai fish (I think?)
• Lamb biryani
• Chicken haryali
• Duck with honey

The food arrived pretty quickly which was surprising, usually in an Indian restaurant you’re left waiting with the aroma of spices floating over you until you start to salivate (or until you get drunk enough to tolerate the food, in some restaurants!) – makes you question the freshness of the food a little.

Most of the dishes we ordered we actually quite nice, though some of the meat was a little tough, some of the non-spicy dishes were actually a lot spicier than they’d been described in the menu, and the fish is definitely an acquired taste – probably best avoided unless you’ve had it before and are used to the taste.

In retrospect we probably ordered far too much food in an attempt to try as much of the menu as we could, and we ended up leaving quite a lot. Still, that’s an easy mistake to make when you’re getting 50% off the food, a mighty saving of £20+.

It would nice to visit again and sample some of the vegetarian dishes, but maybe in smaller quantities rather than trying to eat the entire kitchen.

It’s probably considered blasphemy by many to say this, but I was never really a great fan of The Knife until lead singer Karin left to pursue her own solo project as Fever Ray, but since then it’s fair to say I’ve been hooked.

What luck then, that on the night of Karin’s last gig as Fever Ray before she goes back to a new project with The Knife, that I happened to have a pair of tickets to the Brixton Academy show.

We got there predictably late and this turned out to pay off rather well as the general murmurs about warm up act Zola Jesus weren’t exactly bursting with enthusiasm, apparently she was bouncing around the huge stage wildly on her own whilst everyone else seemingly had no clue of what was going on.

The atmosphere really had some time to build up, for at least 30 minutes the audience was left with some eerie music whilst the academy was pumped full of smoke, I think even the folks in the front row probably would have struggled to see through the smoke and actually get a clear glimpse of the stage!

Then still in utter darkness came the alternating throbbing of ‘If I Had A Heart’, sending a chill over the crowd for two minutes before the lasers that have been a trademark feature of Fever Ray’s shows kicked in and gave us a glimpse of the stage.

The show was better than I could have imagined, whilst all the time being so stripped back and simple – something that should be easy for every artist to get right but actually pulled off well by so few.

The lighting was provided by lasers cutting through the smoke and forming patterns that looked like clouds floating across the sky, and the bass was punctuated by lampshades on the shade fading in and out with the heavy and lighter beats.

I don’t know how they did it but the bass was body trembling and intense, it felt like the music was trying to flow straight through us rather than just tingle our ear drums!

Highlights of the night were ‘Coconut’ (which I may have taken a sneaky video of), ‘Concrete Walls’, ‘Dry and Dusty’ and ‘Triangle Walks’ which all really seem to achieve that trance like state that the bass, awesome vocals by Karin and percussion bring together.

Looking forward to seeing what The Knife will get up to now that Karin has returned.

It’s been a busy few weeks at work so I haven’t been very good at keeping my blog up to date, but I have managed to squeeze in a few meals at various restaurants with friends, which is probably the only reason I’ve retained any measure of sanity!

One notable spot recently is Cha Cha Moon, hidden away in Kingly Court just off of Carnaby Street it’s not exactly well advertised, it has all the makings of a true hidden gem (apart from the fact that it’s hugely popular and always packed full of noodle slurping punters).

There is a small outdoor area in the courtyard, and inside an interior that is sharp and clean, with a good layout of benches that are separated into fours so small groups get at least a small barrier from other diners.

The kitchen space is enviable, and you soon understand why your order reaches your table so quickly in comparison to the likes of Wagamama which often seems to have those long but thin kitchens that makes it impossible for anyone to pass each other.

The menu is primarily dedicated to a variety of noodle dishes such as noodle soups, lao mian and a huge collection of wok noodle dishes. They also serve up some curries with Thai influence, plus some mouth watering side dishes too.

Service is prompt, your drinks are brought to you quickly (in my case a huge pot of jasmine tea) and food follows shortly after with the now popular “dishes arrive at different times” warning attached to them. Quality doesn’t seem to be sacrificed in this speed, they genuinely seem geared at churning out good quality food quickly.

On the few visits so far some friends and I have tried mains of seafood ho fun, Fujian style udon noodles, jasmine chicken all of which were pretty decent and tasty… though a word of warning to those that are sensitive about spicy things, the level of spice does seem to vary so ask before ordering!

We’ve also tried the Szechuan won-tons (spicy but delicious), Taro cake (acquired taste – requires more than one person to eat unless you’ve got a really big appetite), Cha Cha mooli (very rich but really tasty) and the Chinese basil calamari (crispy joy!).

If you’re looking for somewhere quick to eat, or you’re a noodle maniac then you absolutely have to give Cha Cha Moon a go, and take some friends so that you can share the side dishes without feeling guilty!