The Friday 5 #126
Wines to drink if you think you don’t like Australian wine, more alcohol-free drinking tips and a brilliant new resto (with reservations)
So apologies for the lateness of the Friday 5 this week. I thought a 12 o’clock lunch would leave plenty of time to finish it off before I pressed the send button. By 3.30pm I released it wouldn’t . . .
More on that next week - it WAS quite a lunch - but in the meantime here’s what I was going to say.
It’s felt weird being back in London this week, as if I haven’t been here for a month. In fact I haven’t been here for six weeks. SIX WEEKS. No wonder I’m feeling disoriented.
Anyway I’m back on the restaurant circuit with a brilliant new Thai restaurant (with reservations. About the pricing, not the food) and a new Mexican restaurant which made me feel nostalgic for Mexico. Santo Remedio in Marylebone. Bonus tip: order the ceviche.
It’s coming up to that time of year when there’s a succession of events which have to be marked which I’ve done religiously over the years on my website, offering matches for haggis, Chinese food and V-Day, which is fortunately still some time away.
And, perhaps less on your radar, Australian wine. It’s Australia Day on Sunday which gives me an excuse to focus on what Australia does well - and not so well. There is some shockingly bad Australian wine around and it’s not chardonnay.
We had a really enjoyable on-line hangout this week talking about whisky which I once again failed to record due to being flustered because I couldn’t get an adequate signal in the kitchen which meant the only voice I could hear clearly was mine and had to move lock stock and barrel into the front room, whisky bottles and glasses in tow. However below are a few useful takeaways.
And Thursday was my second live event as the Pilgrm’s wine writer in residence (I so love writing that) which ironically was not about wine at all but how to moderate your drinking alongside non-drinker Laura Willoughby of Club Soda whose excellent tip I’m passing on below.
It’s easy to get the impression everyone is doing dry Jan but our whisky session and the full restos I’ve been in this week indicate some are definitely not. However an impressive 75% are trying to cut down according to Chat GPT. (I do feel though that must be at least partly due to the way the question is phrased. As in “Are you trying to moderate your drinking?” Who would answer “No, I’m actively trying to increase it.”
Just one more thing before I get on to the recs. You might note I’ve reorganised the home page having discovered from Sarah Fay of Writers at Work that I’ve been doing my tagging entirely wrong and should have been using it to highlight subject areas rather than attract the bots.
So you can now easily find all my recipes and posts on cookbooks, travel and living well if you click on the headings in the navigation bar.
Although most of my wine recommendations are in the Friday 5, I feel I should create one for booze. What should I call it? Booze? Bottles? Drink? You decide.