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There are a couple of things you need to know if you are thinking about going to London right now. One: it's one of the most expensive cities on the planet. Two: the dollar sucks against the pound. It has pretty much always sucked against the pound, but it's craptastic right now. These things combined make London an incredibly expensive place to vacation if you're from the U.S. We got our plane tickets dirt cheap, though, and we got our hotel quite cheaply on Priceline (even more cheaply when you know that it's in very pricey Kensington and right near the tube stop). So the larger aspects of the trip were pretty affordable. We knew, though, that we'd have a hard time eating cheaply in London. Luckily, the kind of eating Greg and I like to do lends itself to eating cheaply. We are not huge fans of five-star dining. We are never going to eat at Gordon Ramsay (unless, of course, someone else is picking up the check). Some people don't mind spending $400 on one dinner. We'd rather spend it on another plane ticket back to London. Everyone has their thing. It's not that we don't like going out for nice dinners; we go out for several excellent meals a year, usually on anniversaries and occasionally just because we want to splurge. But we'd rather have four $70 dinners at Philly BYOBs than one $300 dinner, so that's usually what we do. When we want to splurge, that is. But our usual vacation eating goes something like this: seek out the hidden holes in the walls of the new city and the best ethnic and street food. Eat it all. This is how our budget survived London. We ate at Wagamama twice. We discovered Wagamama in Dublin (the top picture was taken there), and if one would only open somewhere near home, we would weep with joy. The food is so fresh, so clean, so hot and delicious. Oh, the duck gyoza. Oh, the miso ramen. Oh, the yaki soba.
So yay, Wagamama. Cheap and fantabulous. The true discovery of the London trip, though, was the West Cornwall Pasty Company. We were in London for six days; we ate these pasties three times (and I'm pretty sure we tried another stand, so we had pasties four times). Greg and I are very big on things that come wrapped in dough. The pasty is truly the perfect meal. It's portable, it's hot, it's flaky, it's full of protein, and it's damn good. We tried the traditional, the steak and stilton, the steak and Guinness, the pork and apple, the chicken Balti, the cheese and tomato basil, and I think Greg had the lamb and mint (I don't eat lamb). The great thing about being with someone else that loves them too is that you can get two different kinds and swap halfway through. So there I am sitting on a curb in Covent Garden eating a pasty. It must be late in the trip because I'm wearing the super cute striped mittens/fingerless gloves I bought. (They're fingerless gloves with a mitteny attachment that you can either pull over your fingers or fold back and button flat. They are brilliant.) Apparently the girl behind me thinks I'm weird for enjoying my pasty on the Covent Garden curb, but whatever, strange girl. I'm eating meat in dough. Step off. I had two lunches at Pret a Manger and I may just have had the Smoked Salmon sandwich both times. It was delicious. Greg had Indian food one of those times (we had split up to go shopping; him: CDs, me: clothes). We had an excellent dinner in a pub in Hampstead. We had a decent meal at a Pizza Express and a terrific one at a sushi place where everything comes around on a conveyor belt (I wish I could remember its name). And we did have one nicer meal out with our friend Annie, the night she and I saw When Harry Met Sally (verdict: play pretty good; Luke Perry surprisingly excellent; Alyson Hannigan should stick to film). And, of course, we did lots of snacking. There's a fantastic cookie stand in the Kensington tube station. We ate almost as many goodies from grocery stores as we brought back with us. Walk and snack; that sums up most of a great vacation to us. London was certainly no different (although we weren't having a Magnum bar every five seconds like we did in Ireland). If you were asking us for recommendations, though, it would be for huge, steaming bowls of fantastic soup and delicious stuff in dough. Long after the memories of the British Museum fade, we'll still be talking about that food.
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