The latest post on the Flickr Blog is about the National Library of New Zealand which was one of the first users of Flickr’s Commons which is for public photo archives. The library’s collection is viewable here and the blog post is here. Nice to see someone in the NZ public sector up with the technology.
I’ve had the idea for a while, and now that I’m back in Aotearoa, and in a new city, its a good chance to get it started. Kawhe.com is the name for my new site, “New Zealand Cafe Review”.
The idea behind this is to identify the best cafes in New Zealand. At the moment we have reviewers in Christchurch and Auckland, but I’m hoping that as interest grows, so will the number of available reviewers.
This was a good exercise in Wordpress setups. The whole thing including finding a good theme and installing caching and star review module (to put pretty stars on the page) took four hours. In time, I may want to change the site to arrange reviews in a better structure, but for now tagging and categories will help me organise the reviews.
Reviews take into account the coffee (both espresso and flat whites), food and atmosphere.
The other day I met up with my friend Rudy in the Stockwell/Vauxhall area where we checked out one of the local Portuguese restauruants (Vauxhall has a large Portugueuse community). We opted for Bar Estrela which seemed to be quite popular. The whole place was buzzing - people sitting at tables outside the restaurant and people spilling out of the door of the bar where there was a football match playing on the TV (not English!). If it weren’t for the double decker buses and the black cabs, we could have imagined we buried somewhere in Europe. The menu was in Portuguese with English translations. In the end we opted for paella with chicken and seafood which was excellent. The seafood was very fresh and tasty and went well with a bottle of the “local” Sagres. Highly recommended.
Lydia and I have recently been to two very interesting restaurants from two very different areas on the globe - a Cuban restaurant, Cuba Libre & Havana Bar, and a Vietnamese restaruant, Song Que Cafe.
The weekend before last we went to Cuba Libre & Havana Bar just north of Angel tube station. We stumbled across this after doing a bit of window shopping at the botiques and design shops on Upper Street. The sangria was lovely and food interesting and fairly tasty - however, the best thing about this place was the atmosphere of the place - though we haven’t been to Cuba, we thought we could imagine that for an hour we weren’t in cold, wet, miserable London. More about it on google…
The other day Lydia and I went with a number of friends to Song Que Cafe which is on Kingsland Rd, in Hoxton, in the area known as “Little Vietnam” (see photo on flickr). Dan was an expert and ordered two amazing starters - one was a large roll of prawns wrapped in a thick, translucent rice paper with a sweet chilli sauce (delicious), the other was beef wrapped in betal leaf served with herbs and salad leaves and noodles (assemble your own roll - amazing flavour). I then went (upon recommendation) with a rice noodle soup with raw beef (that cooks in your bowl after it arrives) - I found a photo of it on flickr. You then add herbs, chilli, bean sprouts according to taste. This was far better than Wagamama’s equivalent offering. Lydia went with a prawn and cashew nut dish with rice which looked good. The price came to £11 each which is very cheap - will go there again. Plenty of reviews on google…
Got up really early yesterday (6:30am!!) to meet up with a friend at Borough Market. Got to Borough Market at 8am after a nice stroll along the South Bank of the Thames (Lovely crisp Autumn morning with clear blue skies - the Thames was glassy still).
We caught the final stages of the stands being set up then saw the market slowly come alive with people shopping. The visit included a nice bacon and egg sandwich from Maria’s Market Cafe, a triple ristretto from Monmouth Coffee Company, and finished the visit off by sitting down in the gardens of Southwark Cathedral with a mulled cider from the New Forest Cider stall.