Spice Market Raw Bar at W Hotel, London

Hallelujah. Praise the lord. Big in the scene, etc. etc. After a year and four months at long last I HAVE AN I-PHONE AGAIN.

My last one vanished somewhere between the sofa and the corner shop when I was pregnant and the f**king insurance w**kers, f**ked me over and I have been using an old knackered blackberry ever since – and as you can see I am still not over this.

So obviously on my first evening out in town with my new phone clasped firmly in my hand (you’ve heard about the masked bicycle phone thieves right?), I got snap happy while on my way to the launch of Spice Market’s Raw Bar.

I walked through Trafalgar Square and the fountains were lit up and looked so pretty:

Looking up at the colossal W Hotel on the corner of Leicester Square:

So What Exactly Is The Spice Market?

Spice Market is an Asian-fusion restaurant at the W Hotel, sister to the Spice Market in New York’s Meatpacking district. The menu is inspired by legendary French chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s travels around South East Asia and the street food scene he encountered there.

Over here though, it seems executive chef Peter Lloyd is in charge of the kitchen and he has developed a new ‘raw bar’ menu that is made up at the bar in front of diners and is based entirely out of raw ingredients. Shaved rare tuna with chilli tapioca and Asian pear; salmon ceviche with avacado; and beef tartare with pickled cucumber were some of the canapés we sampled. All of the dishes are citrus-filled, fresh and zingy with barely a carbohydrate in site.

Happy raw bar chefs hard at work:

The medley of cocktails on offer as we entered the restaurant:

 

I'm keen to return to the Spice Market and sample the raw bar dishes in their entirety as I must admit after the canape-sized portions my journey home was via a takeaway pork bun from Chinatown. Finally, below, it just goes to show that even with today’s state of the art technology there is still some skill involved in good photography. Apologies to those at the Raw Bar as this photo is not the remnants of my Saturday night kebab but is indeed a Raw Bar salad. Don't worry it tasted better than this looks.

 

More from me on The Spice Market's Raw Bar  

 

Spice Market RawBar on www.julib.com   *Foodie Mom in London was an invited guest to Spice Market Raw Bar launch  

Bone Daddies Rock ‘n’ Roll Ramen Bar

I’ve been following the mania surrounding the opening of Bone Daddies Japanese ramen bar, which opened in November 2012. Bloggers have been raving about it, tweeters have been tweeting meet-ups and I have been dying to get down to check it out for myself.

When I found the little alley off Berwick Street, a throng of hungry diners had made it well before me and were queuing outside on a cold January evening.

Luckily I had made plans to meet @hungrybecs and she was already nearing the front of the queue so we huddled in the doorway smelling the sweet aromas wafting up from the kitchen and got excited about what to order.

Bone Daddies – What’s The Big Deal?

I have to admit, I’m not sure what all the fuss is about here? We ordered the soft shell crab. It was fine. Not a patch on the soft shell crab you will find at Song Que Cafe, Kingsland Road though.

We ordered a couple of ‘Maiken-Me’ cocktails (shochu, ume shu, watermelon, salt). They were quite potent and although fun for an evening out in Soho, they were just about the last thing to be sipping alongside a bowl of noodles and I found myself looking wistfully at the blokes across from drinking their Asahi.

Bone Daddies has a good booze menu with beers, cold and warm sake, cocktails and different varieties of homemade shochu, which sits on a shelf in the restaurant.

Bone Daddies – Noodle Soup

The crux of the menu is the ramen noodle soups which all come with bamboo, bean sprouts and a boiled egg. We deliberated over which ramen to order like a couple of food geeks (spot the bloggers in the corner taking obscure pictures of chopsticks on their i-phones), yup, that was us!

In the end I chose the ‘Tantanmen’ - with sesame, chilli, pork mince and bok choy in chicken bone broth as the waitress tipped us off to get this if we liked spice.

The soup did have a punchy spice to it with plenty of depth. I loved the wholemeal noodles and the sesame gave the meal a sweet, deep nutty flavour. Overall though with the minced pork and egg it was a bit too rich for me.

Bone Daddies – A Rockin’ Joint

To sum up, with its Rock ‘n’ Roll soundtrack and young, buzzy crowd Bone Daddies is certainly a fun place to meet a friend for a catch up but I don’t think I’d go back and spend over an hour in the cold just to eat their noodles again.

Perhaps I’ll rock back in the summer.

A Note on Imagery - or lack of....

Uh bugger. Something happened to my pics. They don't seem to be on my camera. I'm sure I had some good ones too. So I just wanted to say thanks to Wilkes888 as I came across this nice shot of a menu on google images and I've used it above. Hope you don't mind? : )

Visit the Bone Daddies website