Eat well, live happy.
Murger HanHan is the Mayfair branch of Euston’s Murger Han and the pair of restaurants are specialists in regional Chinese cuisine from Xi’an City in the Shan Xi Province – the home of the legendary Terracotta Warriors of the Qin Dynasty. Along with various other unique aspects, they’re apparently the only restaurant in Europe to serve traditional drinks from Xi’an City such as Ice Peak Orange and Xi’an rice wine.
Us city workers are absolutely coffee obsessed, and with 30,000 people commuting to the square mile every single day, it’s possibly also the area of London most densely populated with coffee shops too. Yet despite the insane levels of coffee consumption, I’m shocked at the number of people who seem to go for Pret, Eat or worse.. Starbucks 😦 At least those with Pret coffees can argue its convenience (I do like their food and can see the impracticality of queuing twice) but I think I’d sooner drink coffee from our machine at work than Starbucks – it tastes so bad I simply cannot even begin to comprehend its apparent popularity. I suppose we can only hope that one day our coffee culture will even begin to start catching up with the likes of Australia..
A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be offered free tickets to Taste of London. Having been away for last Summer’s festival, I’d never actually been but I’d heard wonderful things and I couldn’t wait to go!
Although it may seem like I’m always eating out (okay.. yes admittedly I do eat out a lot!) I really struggle when it comes to choosing dinner places. Often when I eat out during the week I go for simple options, and with pizza being one of my favourite foods I do end up at places like Pizza Pilgrims and Franco Manca more often than I probably should.. but they’re just so good! My decision making is poor at best, and it’s hard enough to choose a brunch spot, but when it comes to dinner options I can’t even decide on a cuisine, let alone a restaurant!
Maggie Jones’s first opened in 1964 as Nan’s Kitchen, and was reportedly Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon’s favourite restaurant at the time. Restaurant owners say that they would slip in at around 9.30pm, sit in a discreet booth at the back on the ground floor and order their favourite dish – the chicken pie. In the early seventies the restaurant changed its name in honour of its most famous client, who used to book under the alias ‘Maggie Jones’. Over the years, it has actually welcomed most of the Royal family.
Following the huge success of the Choose Love Store in Soho, Help Refugees has teamed up with the incredible Imad Alarnab to save Hope Hospital. Imad was a successful restaurateur in Damascus with two restaurants but during the war, his restaurants were destroyed and he was forced to flee the country in search of safety for his family. When he arrived in the UK, Imad found work as a car salesman and was able to bring his family to join him in England. Over time, he began to dream of running his own restaurant again. He opened a series of pop-up restaurants in London that sold out every single night. This time round, instead of doing it for himself, he wanted to raise money for the people who really need it, through teaming up with Help Refugees.
