MIKE AND JESS' TRAVEL DIARY
England and Wales Trip
Day 13 - May 17 2019
It’s travel back to London day. We decided to get a really early start to have a full day in the big city so we caught the first of three trains at 7:10AM. We dropped off our bags at the hotel and was starving, so we hit a cafe for one of my favorite, simplest breakfasts that are hard to find in the US… Good, crusty sourdough, toasted, buttered, and topped with soft poached eggs.
Next, we wandered around hitting some of the iconic sights we skipped two weeks ago like Big Ben (completely covered with scaffolding) and the palaces.
With some hours to pass before our early dinner reservation, we made it to the imperial war museum. I love that museums are free admission here and taken very seriously. It was a multi-story museum and had a ton of artifacts and information.
We checked into the hotel and cleaned up for our much anticipated reservations at Dishoom. Two weeks ago, we thought about hitting it for dinner but even though it was a dead zone everywhere, the line to get a table was wrapped around the block. Even though every other restaurant was empty. Turns out you are unlikely to get a table in less than an hour usually. They don’t take reservations for dinner, so we opted for a 3:30 lunch reservation to avoid waiting out on the cold street.
It would have been worth the wait. We got butter chicken, lamb biryiani, and gunpowder potatoes (kind of a take on aloo Gobi minus the heat.) Holy crap it was good. Every sauce accompaniment, every bite, was delicious. We immediately made a reservation for the following day at 4.
Even though it feels like 8pm, it’s only 5, so we walked to a pub I really wanted to go to but was closed in the beginning of the trip, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. You have to walk down a narrow alley to get to the door and the pub is three stories, but the rooms are all separate and have their own bars. The walls have black and white photos of the pub in 1919. When you look at the wall where you sit, you can see what that corner looked like 100 years ago. The beer is also the best we have had on the trip- Samuel Smith only, a Yorkshire brewed line. Really really good beer.
Believe it or not, though you likely know us well enough to believe it, we are passing time until we can stomach another meal- the amazing Italian place we went last time, Bancone. We had to get that one more time before we left!! This time, we got ragu, ravioli, and the hankerchief pasta (again).
