Bone marrow at the Court Restaurant, British Museum

The Court Restaurant is a classy place to eat lunch at the British Museum. Situated high up in the Great Court, you get good views of the wonderful geometric glass ceiling over the court and can see the clouds beyond. Because there are two coffee shops in the court below, the buzz of conversation from there is a little diverting, but the restaurant's tablecloth settings, including a live miniature chili plant (with chilis) instead of flowers, give a fancy ambience. For those pleasures, the menu is stiff: ca. £22 for a 2-course or £28 for a 3-course meal. But a la carte held some surprises.

Bone Marrow at the Court Restaurant, British Museum

In the past month, I have seen three references to bone marrow on menus. Where has this come from suddenly?? I suppose bone marrow is consistent with the traditional down-market English cuisine of whelks, steak & kidney pie, tongue and tripe, etc. I first ate it (trepidatiously) mixed in with mashed potatoes. Wonderful! What a flavour. So yesterday at the British Museum, I thought I'd try the Small Plate meal of Bone Marrow (£6.50, not a bad price for lunch).

What did I get? Four halves of a long bone and three slices of baguette. I needed more baguette! The stuff was so rich I could only eat one and a half of the bone contents, sharing an equal amount with my co-diners. That took care of the three baguette slices and left one bone contents uneaten. So I asked to take all the bones home with me (of course, the waitress thought it was for a dog, but it was really for my husband to try, on a rice cracker).

How was it? Well, straight from the bone, it wasn't as tasty as the mashed potatoes. It might have been better if I had loaded the seasoned salad garnish with sea salt onto the bread as well. In making my open-face sandwich, it was hard to spread the marrow. It has the consistency of jello (English jelly) and tends to wobble around a lot and fall off the bread. It looked kind of greyey pink, somewhat like a pink speckled jelly bean. And I felt like a Stone Age carnivore eating it.

Would I try it again? Yes, for the novelty and to see if the flavour changes with different ways of cooking and presenting it. It was a great conversation piece over lunch and cost a quarter of what the others paid. So, see you at the Court Restaurant for a real experience!

Plutonic lunch: new understandings of Shap granite

Recently, we ate lunch at the Honest Lawyer pub outside Durham – an oxymoron for sure. Staring at me from the table was the belly of a possible volcano: a granite tabletop! It looked suspiciously like Shap granite from Cumbria, but unfortunately the quarry provenience was not known to the waitress.

As any volcanologist (but who else?) knows, granite is mainly formed in volcanic arcs where magma rises through the Earth's crust in 'diapirs';  most of these diapirs solidify as plutons 5 to 20km deep in the crust, but some make it to the surface where magma is extruded through volcanoes as lava or volcanic ash. The magma that doesn't make it out cools slowly in the chamber or pluton, allowing very large mineral crystals to grow. In this kind of pink granite, the large pink rectangular crystals are potassium (K-)feldspar, also known as orthoclase. Regular feldspar (plagioclase) forms the white crystals surrounding the large pink ones, while the grey bubble-like crystals are quartz, and the black grains may be biotite or amphibole.

Shap granite is featured as the Rock of the Month for December 2011 by the Open University. The Shap granite outcrop in the Lake District is intrusive into the Borrowdale Volcanic Group, which was once an island arc off the micro-continent of Avalonia in the Iapetus Ocean between 460 and 444 million years ago [1]. However, Shap dates later via processes quite different from the subduction zone granite emplacement described above. After Avalonia was accreted to Laurentia (North America), the area of the Iapetus suture in northern England (demarcated by the Solway tectonic line) was subject to magmatism on both north and south sides of the suture. It is thought that a period extensional tectonics, creating a pull-apart basin 21km wide, was able to generate higher temperatures that caused both mantle and crustal melts to rise into the upper crust [2]. These were emplaced in the subsequent period of Acadian Deformation between 400 and 390 million years ago. Shap granite, therefore, stands as the representative of a newly understood source of magma generation that is totally divorced from subduction tectonics.

Many buildings around England feature Shap granite floors or columns. So you can also walk on it  or bump into it as well as eat off it. Just keep those sharp eyes open for Shap and you will be rewarded by a trip to the center of the Earth (or at least 5 kilometers down where granite forms).

Oh yes, and the Honest Lawyer has great Eggs Benedict. Did I say lunch? Maybe it was brunch...

[1] Huff, WD; Bergström, & Kolata, DR (2010) "Ordovician explosive volcanism," pp. 13-28 in The Ordovician Earth System, ed. by FC Finney & WBM Berry. Geological Society of America Special Paper 466.

[2] Brown, PE; Ryan, PD; Soper, NJ & Woodcock, NH (2008) "The newer granite problem revisited: a trans-tensional origin for the early Devonian trans-suture suite". Geological Magazine 145.2:235-256.

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Restaurant Rant No. 3: empty glasses

Restaurant Rant No. 2: napkins under food

Restaurant Rant No. 1: rocky tables

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Sunday Brunch at St. ALi (now Workshop Coffee)

STOP PRESS! St. ALi has been renamed Workshop Coffee, due to its new management and independence from the Melbourne shop. Far less lyrical, I think...

Now Redundant: St. ALi. No, your eyes do not deceive. There is a full stop (period) after the 'sint'* and the L is capitalized in ALi – at least on their website it is. These are two clues that it is not English: in fact, it is an offspring of a coffeebar of the same name in South Melbourne, Australia, and the name was chosen to honor the Sufi mystic Ali ibn Umar al-Shadhili.

We heard of it through Aussie friends and immediately went out for Sunday brunch. Crowded! The queue didn't let up until 3pm, though we got a table at 2.35 after waiting 10 minutes or so. It calls itself a coffeebar and cafe, having recently opened in April 2011 and only doing business 7am~6pm seven days a week. Apparently they will be starting a dinner service soon.

The central coffee bar at St. ALi, with tables on two floors,
some available for reservation during weekdays

Already St. ALi has been named a runner-up in the Allegra Coffee Symposium awards (2011) as one of the best independent cafes in Europe, despite its Aussie affiliation. The reviews for the Melbourne branch are increasingly disillusioned, but this one, near the intersection of Clerkenwell Road and St John Street, is really flying: listed high in the Independent "Best British Breakfasts", and called "a great day-time cafe" by TimeOut magazine.

We were very impressed with the service: quick and compassionate. The food was imaginative and tasty, and the interior of the cafe was fascinating. In the back stands their own coffee bean roaster, so all the coffee you drink there has been roasted on site, hopefully very recently. The wall behind the roaster has been made into a vertical garden, much like the one I reported on for Edgware Road Station.** This one, however, is inside and includes a water moat and water-loving plants such as ferns. Very lush and supposedly pumping out good oxygen for us.

Despite the change of name noted above, the coffee is still spectacular and the food delicious...

* as discussed in my blog on St Bart's.
** see also the hanging garden in Madrid!

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Vegetarian Lunch at Chutneys