London Weekend Part 1: Ottolenghi's Restaurant

Last weekend had been much anticipated in my calendar for the past two months: my surprise belated birthday weekend arranged by my lovely boyfriend! He combined my two favourite things: eating and Shakespeare, for the ultimate perfect weekend in London.

Angus kept lunch plans well under wraps, and I was completely surprised when I found out we were going to Yotam Ottolenghi’s restaurant in Islington.

I’ve only known about Ottolenghi for about a year, thanks to my Mum receiving his book Plenty and producing out of it the Mediterranean Farro Salad – something that has quickly become a firm staple at any family dinner. It’s totally delicious and always completes the perfect tapas style dinner – my absolute favourite type of meal. Having this limited knowledge of Ottolenghi, the restaurant both met my hopeful expectations and completely surpassed them.

You can’t book for lunchtimes so we went early (12.30) to avoid missing out. We only queued for about half an hour, and were happily seated by 1. I’d advise not going any later than this as soon after we sat down the entire front of the restaurant/shop was a crowd of hungry people. I say restaurant/shop because this is both a sit-down restaurant and a (very posh) take away. As we were queuing a constant stream of yummy mummies and fashionable London-professional-types were running in and out with their boxes of salads and cakes.

As well as this, the front of the shop is lined with shelves of all sorts of Ottolenghi products. For a start: the desserts (I didn’t even know he did desserts!). The front window is packed with an innumerable number of sweet treats, from cupcakes to meringues, chocolate torte to apple tart, if you could name it, it was there. And all beautifully laid out. The other front window is similarly adorned, but this time with various store-cupboard goodies – I was particularly tempted by the homemade granola and jams (yes I am a breakfast fiend). With all this to work your appetite well and truly up, along with the copies of Ottolenghi’s cook books to flick through, AND the table of beautiful, colourful salads to excite you for what you’re about to dig into, the wait literally flew by.

Now onto the important stuff…the lunch menu is a ranging option of about 10 salads and 6 mains – there are various choices of how to mix and match these, but we both went for ‘normal’ (their subtler way of saying large) – 1 main accompanied by 3 salads. We chose to share these so all in all we had (get ready for this): Sundried tomato, caramelised onion and goat’s cheese quiche, seared tuna, grilled peppers with mint yogurt, spiced cauliflower with curried almonds, quinoa and giant cous cous with gorgonzola, roasted aubergine with pomegranate seeds and yogurt, roasted butternut squash with chargrilled sweetcorn and feta AND roasted new potatoes with an anchovy tapenade. Phew. Not your average green soggy salad from the supermarket.

Everything was absolutely incredible, even the things I wasn’t expecting to love (butternut squash – not a huge fan) I wolfed down. My favourite was definitely the aubergine – I always go for an aubergine dish in a restaurant as I can never recreate it at home - but with its perfectly chargrilled aftertaste and crispy skin, combined with the thick yogurt, this was by far the best aubergine dish I’ve tried. Having mopped up the rest with the generous assortment of bread, which was also really unique and unrivalled by any ‘bread baskets’ I’ve had before, we were well and truly stuffed.

Dessert is self-service; you simply go and pick which cake/pastry/tart/chocolate monstrosity you want from the front window. Having been desperate to sample these at the start, we decided we definitely needed a bit of a wander to work off our main...we’ll have to sample those another day!

Although we weren’t having dessert, the staff were extremely polite and accommodating. We weren’t rushed out at all, and were left to have our coffees in peace. Despite there being an ever growing queue of waiting diners we were under no pressure to leave, unlike in some busy restaurants. As well as an unrivalled meal and perfect service (as if you need another reason to pay a visit immediately), the prices are extremely reasonable. For what I’d definitely call a large plate of the most delicious, perfected and creative mixture of dishes you pay £16, and that’s the most expensive choice on the menu! Pretty good for a wonderful, filling meal at the restaurant of one of the most innovative and unique chefs around today.

Thank you, Ottolenghi! (And Angus…)

Ottolenghi also has restaurants in Soho, Notting Hill and Belgravia – you can find information and sample menus for them all here