Scandinavian Kitchen

Today Polly and I went to visit the Scandinavian Kitchen for an exciting sounding 'smorgasbord' of lunchtime delights. There was a very huffy and irritable man making a fuss about waiting all of 40 seconds for potato salad, I wished he would shut up and stop being such a twat. Just wait your turn, the food will arrive, and really, how hungry can you realistically be? The service was actually very brisk and polite, so obviously he was just unstable on some deep psychological level.

I went for potato salad with red onions and chives, a roast beef open sandwich and what I thought was a ham wrap, but was in fact salmon, which I don't like. Polly had a meatball open sandwich with beetroot salad and a ham and cheese wedge. I was jealous of Polly's lunch, mainly  because it featured more meat and was a bit more substantial and I am greedy. My beef open sandwich was served on dense rye bread and topped with mustard mayonnaise and some sort of crunchy scatterings, which I cannot identify, but which were pretty nice. Pickles too, which I must eat more of in light of how much I like them. Polly was impressed by the cutlery, which was not only substantial, unlike the terrible brittle offerings from so many other lunchtime haunts, but biodegradable. Good work.

The Scandinavian Kitchen is lovely, I think next time I will eat in (instead of on a bird poo-spattered bench on the ugliest street in London) and I will definitely have a slice of LOVE cake (Their capitalisation, not mine) which is a chocolate sponge topped with gooey chocolate and coconut. You can also buy Scandi food in their deli/shop at the back, so there's no earthly need to ever go to Ikea again. Hooray!

The Scandinavian Kitchen
51 Great Tichfield
W1W 7PP
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In search of a perfect club sandwich

A hangover borne of half-price drinks (anything! Even cocktails! Even champagne cocktails! Oh my head...) with our friend Jess in the bars of Bank propelled Polly and I towards the pub on the corner for a recovery lunch. Nothing recovers me more quickly or more effectively than a club sandwich. It is one of my favourite lunches, but it is so seldom done properly, that I've all but given up ordering it. The closest I've come to club perfection was at the now defunct Green at Goose Green. I almost cried when I arrived for a chicken fix one lunchtime, having walked 2 miles in the Peckham heat to find it closed. Forever.

I can be seen regularly in The Carpenter's Arms on Whitfield St, swilling vast quantities of wine down my throat and generally carousing a bit. It's a really nice pub, with three rooms, each more comfortable than the last, but the best thing about it is its proximity to my office. It's handy because it means I can slip out for a livener at pretty much any time of the day, and be back in time to pretend I just went to buy gum or something innocuous like that. The room at the top, The Belle Bar I believe it's somewhat pretentiously named, is my favourite bit, but it's a bit patchy in it's opening times. It has a good terrace for smoking on though, so do persevere.

The club sandwich won't win any awards, (especially not my coveted "chicken club sandwich gold star award for excellence") but it had a very good go at it. Not since the glory days of the Charlotte St Blues Bar have I been so satisfied by a chicken and bacon sandwich. I really do fail to see how meat, salt, fat and carbs can fail to set you back on your feet after a battering by the booze bandit. This one was on granary bread, which is a club-sin as far as I'm concerned, and also contained no tomato, again a poor show. But I was made generous by the fragility of my mental state, and I'd award the sandwich a 7/10. Chips were good but their main benefit was that there were lots of them.

Wild and Wood

Further lunchtime adventures with Miss Polly Button has led to a dreary afternoon improved by a long black coffee at Wild and Wood on New Oxford Street. The teeny cafe has an adorable cosy panelled snug and a droolingly good display of cakes, pastries, sandwiches and home made breads in the window. For today, it was just a coffee, very strong and very cheap (£1.20) but I will certainly be back. Followed by a stroll around the British Museum and two cigarettes, it was pretty much a faultless lunch hour.