We couldn’t decide early on where we wanted to go for our 40th anniversary so the serious planning didn’t happen until we returned from the USA in January. We had talked about some place warm but from Europe you have to go a far distance in February. We checked on Majorca but were told it can be cool in the winter as can Greece. We thought about the Azores, Canaries, Malta, and Cyprus but didn’t follow through. Rita was leaning towards Morocco but the state of the world politics scared us from there. We both thought about South Africa but it was a long ways off and fairly expensive so we never followed up on that either. As a result we settled on a less expensive holiday that would be shorter, culinary, and cultural in theory – a weekend trip to London to eat well and see some West End plays.
I should point out that we are also getting close to moving, which means we have to do physicals for the State Department. Rita’s cholesterol dropped the last time but mine went up. So Rita talked me into going on a diet with her with the aim of losing weight and dropping our cholesterol levels. About a month before our anniversary we had just cut back on some carbohydrates and portions but nothing organized. Two weeks before our anniversary Rita put us on the South Beach diet which is similar to Atkins and other low or no carbohydrate diets. The first two weeks are deadly strict with no sweets, no fruit, no starches, no alcohol, and no bread – in short not many good meals. We ate eggs every morning with Canadian bacon but no toast, fruit or orange juice. It was tough but we stuck with it and, I don’t know about my cholesterol yet but I did lose eight pounds, mostly around my middle. And I felt okay. Rita’s results weren’t as good but she still looks good and, remember, her cholesterol was much better than mine to begin with.
All this is a lead up to our anniversary weekend where we ‘blew’ the diet and threw caution to the wind. Actually we didn’t do all that much damage and as I write this a week after our anniversary I have now lost ten pounds even with the bacchanalian weekend.
I should include a short word on celebrity chefs. America has had a few such as James Beard, Julia Childs, and Paul Proudhomme. France has many more and they endure much longer, many even gaining international fame. England also has some with two of the top names today being Michael Wareing and Gordon Ramsay. Gordon Ramsay is the current ‘hot’ name in English chefs and we tried to get into his Michelin three-star restaurant in Chelsea but it isn’t open on weekends for some strange reason. Then we tried to book his one-star restaurant at the Claridge Hotel but it was booked up months in advance. However, he owns a company that has several restaurants and several name chefs working for him, one being Michael Wareing, who is the head chef at the Savoy Grill in the posh Savoy Hotel. They could get us into the Savoy Grill for our anniversary so we did have reservations there.
I took off work at noon, Friday, February 20, and we had booked tickets for the Eurostar train from Brussels to London, which goes through the tunnel under the English Channel known as the ‘chunnel’. It is a pleasant, easy 2 ½ hour trip and the best part is that we can walk the two blocks from our apartment to the Central Station and the train delivers us to Waterloo Station in the heart of London. From Waterloo we took the tube (underground or metro) to the Bond Street stop and walked the short distance to our Marriott Grosvenor Square Hotel. Grosvenor Square is in the upscale Mayfair district of London and the US Embassy is situated on one end of the square just around the corner from our hotel. The Marriott hotel was very nice and situated in a quiet neighborhood. We like Marriott hotels since they give excellent rates to American government employees worldwide.
After check in we took a stroll past Berkeley Square, down New and Old Bond streets, through the Royal Arcade to Piccadilly Street and Fortnum and Mason where we drooled over all the great food products. Then we walked down Jermyn Street to Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square and Covent Gardens. Rita did some shopping, or rather scouting, in the Lush soap store. Soon it was time to eat an early dinner as we had play tickets for the evening. We stopped by a restaurant called Le Deuxieme that we had found the last time in London and liked. We were able to get in for their pre-theater dinner and had an excellent meal. It probably tasted all the better since it was our first real meal after being on our diet. We didn’t overeat, however, since food portions in Europe are much smaller than in the USA as a general rule. That’s why we can usually eat a multi-course meal with variety and still have less food than a typical restaurant in the USA.
Rita started off with a simple, but nice, green salad. I watched. My main course was excellent prepared duck breast (magret) with potatoes dauphinoise. Rita had my other choice, veal scallops with potatoes rosti. We each had a very nice glass of their house red wine, a Merlot from France. Rita had a yummy lemon tart while I had a very nice apple tart with a small scoop of ice cream. The meal went down very well and we didn’t feel stuffed afterwards.
Woody was of the opinion that our play this evening was at the Apollo Theater which was a short walk from Le Deuxieme. We arrived ahead of curtain time and to our surprise the theater was closed. We asked about this at another theater next door and were told that the play we were attending, “Bombay Dreams”, was at the Apollo Victoria Theater near Victoria train station. This was not in walking distance but the nice lady told us which bus to catch. There wasn’t time to catch a bus so we hailed a taxi that dropped us off at Apollo Victoria Theater – we thought. As soon as we were inside the theater I discovered that I had lost our tickets. Panic time! The nice staff at the ticket office was trying to help us but they couldn’t find record of our purchase of the tickets through the Internet. As we were being assisted by several people we heard the music from the play and it was Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night”. We had been dropped off at the wrong theater! This was beginning to look like a scene from “The Out of Towners”. We hurried the block to our theater and again started the process of trying to get duplicate tickets for the ones I lost. They needed our seat numbers but we couldn’t think of them. Rita went into a deep trance and happened to come up with the numbers through solid concentration. Amazing! They gave us duplicate tickets and we only missed about the first five minutes. But they couldn’t seat us for a while and we had to stand at the back for about another five minutes.
We finally were seated and could really enjoy the play. This is Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest play, which has been a hit for the past year. The cast is almost entirely Indians as the story is set in Bombay and tells the story of a poor boy from the slums who makes it big in Bollywood movies. We came out of the play singing “Shakalaka Baby” the rest of the evening. It was a cold night and we had walked a good deal all day long so we took a taxi back to our hotel and were pleasantly surprised to find a bottle of chilled champagne in our room. Shakalaka baby!
Saturday we slept in late and had a nice breakfast at the hotel’s buffet. We set out on foot again walking down Brook Street and Regent Street and wound up in Soho on Carnaby Street. Here Rita found another Lush store and stocked up on fragrant soaps and lotions. We continued walking to the Savoy Hotel so we would know for sure where we were going for dinner tonight. We had time to kill before our matinee play so we walked down the Strand to Trafalgar Square. The National Gallery was there, and free, so we just walked inside and toured about three rooms with paintings by Van Gough, Matisse, Monet, Pissaro, El Greco and Sisley among others. It was just a quick look around and out again. We wanted an English tea with scones and all but it was too early. We found an Italian cafĂ© where we had a strong coffee with the Portuguese custards we discovered last October in Lisbon.
We walked the short distance to the Prince Edward Theater and our play, “Mama Mia”. This time we had everything and made it inside the theater with plenty of time. If you don’t know, “Mama Mia” is a musical play written around 22 of Abba’s songs. The story is about the wedding of a young British girl on a Greek Island. She was raised by her mother and never knew who here father was but through spying in her mother’s diary discovered it could be any of three men. So she invites them all to the wedding hoping to discover who is her true father. It’s very funny but the Abba music was the highlight. The cast was great, but nobody we really knew, and the audience participation made it more fun. All around us people would sing along with the cast and by the end everyone was standing and swaying to the music. It was a fun play that we think we enjoyed better than “Bombay Dreams”. Afterwards we took the underground back to our hotel and rested a short time before dressing for dinner.
We took the underground to a station near the Savoy Hotel for our 7:30 reservation. The Savoy Grill is an art deco style restaurant that has seen many famous customers over the years. Kings and queens have dined here and now we had our chance. We were treated very nice and had about five or six people waiting on us over the evening. We began with a nice glass of champagne and soon after were brought an amuse bouche of cauliflower and mushroom soup. Next Rita had a starter of king shrimp tortellini with a rich creamy sauce. I had a bite and it was delicious. My starter was a pate of foie gras and goose breast with little crispy toasts to spread it on. I really enjoyed my starter as well. We had a nice bottle of Chateau Le Pez Bordeaux wine. For our main course we agreed on a chateaubriand cut of beef that was done to perfection and carved at our table. It came with what they called choucroute but looked and tasted like red cabbage. There were also grilled mushrooms and roasted new potatoes with the main course. After a nice pause we were given a sample, pre-dessert of coconut and mango cream in a small glass to sip. Rita had rice pudding with caramelized banana and a scoop of chocolate sorbet. I had a chocolate fondant, which was crispy on the outside and gooey on the inside. Coffee came with chocolate petits fours on a plate that spelled out “Happy Anniversary” in chocolate syrup. It was an excellent meal throughout and the surprise was yet to come. When we asked for the bill we were told it had been taken care of by our daughters! What a pleasant surprise. Then I asked if the restaurant had a special table in the kitchen, which is the latest trend among upper scale restaurants. They did, of course, and they asked if we would like a tour of the kitchen. We said we would and were taken back into the hot kitchen and introduced to tonight’s main chef who was not Michael Wareing. He probably has most Saturday nights off. It was a very special evening.
Sunday we had another nice breakfast buffet and with time to kill before checkout we took another walk. We walked to Hyde Park where the crocuses and daffodils were coming up in great numbers. It was a cold, windy morning but there were still many runners and walkers about. We walked down Park Lane to Hyde Park Corner and then through Green Park to Buckingham Palace. Next we walked back to our hotel through pretty little streets in the Mayfair District. We checked out of the hotel and took the tube back to Waterloo Station where we caught the Eurostar back to Brussels arriving about 4:00 pm. When we arrived home we had a message on our answering machine
from the Gordon Ramsay restaurant at the Claridge Hotel. They called Friday night after we left with the news that they had a table come open at the restaurant if we wanted to take it. That would have surely foiled the girl’s plans to treat us to dinner Saturday. And we can’t imagine that we would have had much better than we had at the Savoy Grill.
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