Support your neighbourhood elaborate restaurant

[fivemack]

Alimentum, opposite the cinema just after the perpetually-roadworked bridge on Hills Road, have a pudding made out of marshmallows, honeycomb, toffee, banana icecream and caramel mousse, served in a smoke-filled preserving jar. It tastes of bonfire night with bananas.

I convinced the Geek Pizza People to be Geek Elaborate-Restaurant People this week, and a good time and fantastic food seems to have been had by all. Maybe leave a few weeks to recover from the shock of the new, then propose sushi.

Comments

[kaberett.livejournal.com]

OOI did anyone have the vegetarian option? If so, what did they make of it? From the menus it tends to look... well, as though they've put a lot less effort and imagination into it from any of the meat dishes - is this also the case in person, as it were?

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

We had the prix-fixe menu, so there was a choice of two starters one of which could be vegetarianised, and three mains one of which was vegetarian.

The veggie main course was a cauliflower risotto, which a couple of non-vegetarians had with every sign of enjoyment; the veggie starter was lettuce soup with the bacon left out of the smear of cheese-and-bacon stuff on the side, and generally went down very well. It was quite strikingly green.

I think we were having too much of a discussion of politics to apply any very serious critique to the food; maybe poke cartesiandaemon?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

liv's description seemed valid to me.

[liv]

I've been to Alimentum a couple of times, and yeah, the veggie option tends to be less exciting than the meat. If you take the prix fixe menu (which is vaguely affordable!) the veggie option will probably be soup followed by risotto or similar. Very good soup and risotto, but still, doing a simple thing well rather than something exotic. Their desserts are out of this world, though. OK, I have a sweet tooth, but I do find that a lot of grand restaurants don't have desserts up to the quality of their mains. Alimentum serves stuff miles better than any other dessert I've tasted.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

I wonder if this dessert was vegetarian? Marshmallows are variable in this respect.

I should probably find time to go to some vegetarian restaurants when in London, really.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

I'm more likely to be persuaded to do sushi, since they might have something vegan/DF veggie.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of Teri-Aki, which has a couple of dozen vegetarian options of which I'd expect most to be dairy-free; I've emailed them to ask if they've already compiled a list of the dairy-free possibilities. http://www.camvegans.xonline.org.uk/local/index.html suggests that there's a reasonable choice.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Yay, that sounds like something I'd be interested in too.

[j4.livejournal.com]

That pudding sounds awesome. How did you rig the geek-pizza dessert-vote to be sure you could stay for it? 8-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

There was general acclamation :)

[ceb.livejournal.com]

Sounds cool, I shall have to go sometime for smoke and bananas :-)

I'm not very impressed with Cambridge sushi, but then I am a mad conveyor-belt fan and, whilst I like fish-and-rice concoctions, I get bored quickly if that's all there is. ETA: though the place at Liverpool St station is very good and slightly handy for Cambridge...

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I assume you've tried Teri-Aki and found it wanting, it's not conveyor-belt but neither is it unmitigated fish-and-rice: there are all the standard California roll-like things, there's a lovely presumably-Korean beef-wrapped-around-vegetables dish that I used to have for Sunday lunch when there was a gym class that ended Sunday lunchtime, there are several kinds of fiery Japanese curry, and all possible combinations of big or small noodles, fried or in miso soup, with fish, beef, pork or tofu are available.

[ceb.livejournal.com]

Their noodles are OK, but they're not sushi, and the sushi has the same problem as all sit-down sushi, that you either order a big plate of similar fish-and-rice things or you call the waitron over 20 times. The true sublimeness of sushi is experienced only when a parade of small tasty things which you might not otherwise have tried glides past your seat. It's like tapas but with a conveyor belt, hence better.