After some urging from my mother, I decided to treat myself to a one-last-hurrah type of dinner in London.  Now, I know that in a previous post of mine I commented that most of the food here in England was total rubbish; I still stand by that, but if you’ve got the money to blow (which I really don’t) it is quite possible to have some truly grand gastronomical adventures in the UK.  We’ve all heard of The Fat Duck, after all.

I started off yesterday by very energetically researching places with tasting menus (to be specific and very precocious, I feel I should mention that my search originally began in French with ‘le menu découverte’).  Back in October, when my parents were visiting me for my Oxford graduation we went to L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon in the West End.  The food was excellent — I tried foie gras and Wagyu sliders — but I had desperately wanted to order the tasting menu, an eight-course culinary orgy with items like a Parmesan and port cappucino, caviar, and coriander panna cotta.  The thing with tasting menus, though, is that the whole table Must Agree, or the deal’s off.  My mother, bless her, is not very adventurous when it comes to food.

So what better way to get what I want than go alone?  I flittered through numerous reviews on the web, a venerable mountain of menus, and felt I had pretty much uncovered every restaurant with le menu.  Unfortunately, the average price was over one hundred quid, before alcohol (and I refuse to go through a nice dinner without wine!), and my dream of a farewell-to-London dinner was in danger of dying.  It was about this time that I stumbled upon L’Autre Pied, sister restaurant to Pied à Terre, a super pricey two-Michelin star restaurant in the West End.  At L’Autre (which yes, literally means ‘the other foot’), reviews said, you experience Michelin-star dining but not the prices.  I found this hard to believe, and rung them up for a table for one. Continue reading →