toastcrumbs :.

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…

Finally have managed to upload the “official” photos to Flickr - there were quite a few so we’ve tried to narrow them down a bit. These photos were taken by Jacqui van Dam who is based in Invercargill.

A lot of our friends have taken really good photos (some of which are on Facebook and Flickr), so we intend to create a second collection/album of non-official photos (hopefully we’ll be able to get that online sometime in the near future).

View the photos here, or click here for the slideshow.

I recently created a book using blurb.com for a Christmas present for my parents and my new in-laws. The book is intended to be a bit of a retrospective look at London over the last five years I’ve spent there. It was a few weeks in the making and I’m pleased with the end result. I had good fun making it and it was a lot easier than I thought it would be.

Blurb botched up the first attempt at an order - they sent me the right dust cover, but the book was someone else’s family photo album! They apologised though, and did a reprint and posted it to an address in New Zealand so I’m fairly happy with their service. They are fairly affordable as well, offering a variety of printing options including hardcover.

A preview of the book is here. I can’t sell the book online at the moment as they aren’t allowing non-US people to set up a store. However, I can order copies for anyone who is interested.