A rainy day in DC
I just returned from a long, and largely unexpected, summer trip. As a reminder of how unexpected it was, when I looked in my fridge for the first time in six weeks, I saw shrivelled-up veggies that I had bought at the Dupont Farmers' Market back in late July. I felt a bit melancholy on seeing this, not only because I never got to eat them, but because they seemed to symbolize the fact that summer is now over. I'm not sure if the farmer's market is still going on, but it seems likely that soon such fresh treats from the soils of Virginia will be replaced by the usual pale and tasteless fare that Safeway offers.
At the tail end of my journey, as is often my custom, I stopped off in London, and this time stayed a couple of nights in Bayswater, which is a new part of town for me. But the streets of nearby Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove all seem familiar nonetheless, if only because it is the same terrain traveled by Keith Talent, Nicola Six, and Samson Young in Martin Amis' unforgettable book, London Fields.
One night, walking down Kentish Town Road in the dark, I spotted a sign that called to me like a beacon: "Bintang," which means "Star" in Indonesian, and which in Indonesia is a brand name for a local beer and welcoming sign of oases all over the archipelago. So, of course I had to go in.
It turned out that they didn't serve Bintang beer, or any beer for that matter -- it was a BYOB establishment without a liquor license. But in a lovely garden out back I ate a most delicious spicy chicken dish that was part Indonesian, part Malay, and (I suspect) a little bit Indian -- it reminded me of chicken tikka makhanwala. It was London after all.
Besides looking forward to a good meal, I was also looking forward to getting to throw a few words of Bahasa Indonesia around -- despite never becoming anywhere near fluent, I miss speaking it. It was not to be, however -- again, this being London, one of the world's great melting pots, the waitress was (I'm guessing) Russian and the maitre d was Eritrean.
I later Googled the place and discovered it's received a good review from Time Out London. And it's definitely a place I'll be going back to again.
At the tail end of my journey, as is often my custom, I stopped off in London, and this time stayed a couple of nights in Bayswater, which is a new part of town for me. But the streets of nearby Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove all seem familiar nonetheless, if only because it is the same terrain traveled by Keith Talent, Nicola Six, and Samson Young in Martin Amis' unforgettable book, London Fields.
One night, walking down Kentish Town Road in the dark, I spotted a sign that called to me like a beacon: "Bintang," which means "Star" in Indonesian, and which in Indonesia is a brand name for a local beer and welcoming sign of oases all over the archipelago. So, of course I had to go in.
It turned out that they didn't serve Bintang beer, or any beer for that matter -- it was a BYOB establishment without a liquor license. But in a lovely garden out back I ate a most delicious spicy chicken dish that was part Indonesian, part Malay, and (I suspect) a little bit Indian -- it reminded me of chicken tikka makhanwala. It was London after all.
Besides looking forward to a good meal, I was also looking forward to getting to throw a few words of Bahasa Indonesia around -- despite never becoming anywhere near fluent, I miss speaking it. It was not to be, however -- again, this being London, one of the world's great melting pots, the waitress was (I'm guessing) Russian and the maitre d was Eritrean.
I later Googled the place and discovered it's received a good review from Time Out London. And it's definitely a place I'll be going back to again.
1 Comments:
welcome back. I was wondering where you had been....not that have been all that great in updating my site or anything.... :o)
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home