Favorite Fotos: food, glorious food

I thought I'd dip into my signs folder again, this time showcasing signage dealing with food and drink. Starting with this very strange beverage that I bought at wonderful Tesco and found to be fairly tasty. A bit like Dr. Pepper.

I wish I could give you a pictorial glimpse of the very strange experience of grocery shopping in London. They have very good food on offer (especially their fresh produce, cheese, breads, and yogurt) but then you find things like Dandelion and Burdock soda and know you're not in Kansas!

Another thing that was rather hard to understand was the obsession with waffles. There were permanent waffle shops (like this one, which I believe was on Charing Cross Road not far from the National Gallery), but also booths selling waffles wherever there was a festival or other temporary market set up. How weird is that? Even stranger, one of the staff at the Imperial War Museum, Duxford, mentioned that waffles were on sale in the American section of the museum particularly catering to American tastes. Maybe some other part of America, I suppose.

I took the picture below early in my visit, mainly because I was charmed by the fact that porridge was on the menu. The ubiquitous baguettes, though, came to be a mainstay of lunchtime eats for me in London. Not just bread, as the word usually refers to here, they were wonderful sandwiches. In fact, every kind of sandwich I had in England was fabulous. I guess going where the thing was invented, I should have expected this high a quality, but it was a great way to eat well and relatively cheaply. Another common, but usually uncommonly good, food found on this chalkboard: kebabs.


Here's a sign I found amusing in Oxford. The angle is strange because I took it out of the upper deck window of the Oxford Tube bus we were riding into town:


Another amusing sign, this one in south Chelsea, not far from my flat. The red sign is the focus of the picture, highlighting not only somewhat off-color British humour, but also the variety of ethnic food on offer in the metropolis. I believe the photo was also taken from a bus.


One category of pictures I wish I'd taken more of was pubs. There are of course lots and lots of them, most with very interesting names. Here are a couple that I did manage to snap. The Goat in Boots is in the Fulham Road not far from my flat. The Fiddler's Elbow (possibly favorite pub name of all) was in Kentish Town and the photo was taken from the #24 bus that I rode to Hampstead Heath on two different occasions. It looks like more than a pub, actually, as it is a musical venue, too. The Troubadour, just down the street from my flat, also offered musical entertainment, although we never partook of that (just had one rather over-priced lunch there). Hal had read that Bob Dylan played there in the '60's.

Another really great-named pub was the Hung, Drawn and Quartered, near the Tower of London, where the kids and I had pints and watched a soccer game one afternoon. The quirky name thing extends to restaurants, as Henry, Joan and I found the Cat and Cucumber to have fabulous cheap food; it's south of the Thames on Tower Bridge Road and a bit off the tourist beaten track, which may account for the good prices. Plus we saw this and, though we didn't eat there, had to have a picture of the probably too-quirky name. Apparently it's even a chain!


[How could I have overlooked this photo, of the most famous pub of all! Tolkien's watering hole in Oxford, the rather creepily-named Eagle and Child]: