My relationship with Tiramisu is not so great. Sure, first time I made it because it was a Daring Bakers' challenge and loved it. But I've always been afraid of eating raw eggs.. And when I made it the second time, well, you can probably guess what happened the night after eating it.
However, every time I ate tiramisu anywhere, it was soaked in coffee. It was even sprinkled on top. I was always so excited because I thought the brown topping would be cocoa, but no... the majority of people think it has to be sprinkled with coffee. (Does it? I don't know. I don't care. I want cocoa powder!)
Anyway, it has now been more than 4 months since I was in London, but I can still remember the heavenly taste of this Tiramisu. I was never a huge fan of Jamie Oliver - or any other chefs, really, because I'm a picky eater and I can never use any of their recipes.
A few days before 31 December, I was in Tate Modern again (they have free Wi-Fi), checking a food-related app on my iPod for the first time. You have to type in an ingredient or a dish and it gives you photos and links to restaurants where you can find those dishes. I typed in Spaghetti Bolognese, and that's how I found Jamie's Italian. I didn't even know he owned any restaurants! We wanted a break from the steady McDonald's diet, so we decided to give it a try.
Since the whole menu is available online, we were able to decide on what we were going to eat before even going. There are 19 locations on the planet, two of them in London. We decided on Covent Garden, since we were going there anyway, but there's one at Canary Wharf too.
Here I should say that I only eat my pasta with the Bolognese sauce or Salmon sauce (which I can only make myself since no one does it better), so I ordered Spaghetti Bolognese. It was the best I've ever had... (the pasta is homemade too!) But let's not lose time with regular food. You're here because of the desserts, aren't you? Well, they have quite a selection at Jamie's: ice creams, sorbets, affogato, brownies, pannacotta, tarts and tiramisu.
Because of the high prices (5 £ for one serving) we only ordered one tiramisu and split it. It was so tasty... You can actually see the grated orange zest sprinkled all over it! Overall, the tiramisu tasted of mascarpone and oranges with a hint of coffee, and it was very aromatic. More than a half of the dessert consisted of mascarpone, and they even added a generous dollop of it on top. Definitely the best dessert we could've ordered. I mean, I'm definitely not going to order brownies in an Italian restaurant, and I'm not a fan of panna cotta either. Of course, they could've sprinkled some more cocoa on the tiramisu, but that's just my opinion - and you know by now that my opinions are always very pro-chocolate, even when completely unnecessary.
Our budget was limited, but since we really wanted to eat a good meal, we shared one dessert. That way, the final price of the meal was around 25 £, which is still affordable (and good for my figure!). We ate there on the last day of 2010, the 31 December - and came back on 1 January! And we ordered that tiramisu again. We came back and paid 5 £ for it again, that's how good it was!
Jamie's Italian, Covent Garden
11 Upper St Martin's Lane
London WC2H 9FB
While you're at Covent Garden, you might want to pay a visit to Cybercandy (3 Garrick Street), where they sell lots and lots of colorful candy imported from all over the world (USA, Japan, Australia, Canada, even New Zealand), and Paperchase (13 The Piazza), where you can find a huge selection of cute notebooks, address books... and beautiful recipe books! Everyone needs a beautiful recipe book. I bought mine there. If I won the lottery, I would definitely go to Covent Garden and spend a great portion of the money in those two stores. And then, I would go to Jamie's with all my bags from the shopping and order myself two servings of Tiramisu! :D
No comments:
Post a Comment