It's been far to long since I crossed one off my list....four months in fact, so I thought as I was down in London Town I would cross one off and have a trip down Brick Lane and head off to the oldest bagel shop in the capital and sample one of the famous salt beef bagels.
Everyone who knows me, knows I love my food, always willing to try new things and sample different cuisines from around the world. If you haven't tried it I fully recommend trying Ecuadorian fish stew, it's proper name I can't remember, but it's so good and mole from Mexico it another thing I would recommend everyone to try.
I enjoy watching cookery shows and in my younger days, when he was alive my favourite was Gary Rhodes, I think I liked the spiked hair and his enthusiasm for his passion. I remember one show he did where he was tracing back the heritage of certain foods and The Beigal Shop came up with one, it stuck with me a little bit.
The queue of people waiting to sample the delights, how they raved about it. It was one of those thing that just lingered in the back of my mind and when it came to writing this list, it resurfaced. Physically it's not difficult to do, just head over to Liverpool Street station and then a short walk to Brick Lane and order a Salt beef bagel with mustard and pickles, which Gary informed me were a must, but it represented something more. I lived down south for a few years, spending a lot of time in London but never got round to going to the place, why? Laziness mostly, but also what if it didn't meet expectation? I was happier not knowing than trying it out. So this one was on the list to cross off one of those things I should have done a long time ago and also because I was hungry when I woke up that morning!
Unfortunately this is the first thing on the list I can say I didn't particularly enjoy. I found the amounts of filling didn't mesh up well, there was far to much meat to the mustard and pickles, added to that the beef didn't have that much flavour to it at all in my opinion. The bagel itself was nice, slight chewiness to it that I would expect from a bagel but all in all I felt let down a little. When I spoke to a couple of friends they were surprised as they know what I'm like for food based activities and especially as I had moaned previously to them about sandwiches not having enough filling in them. Have you ever had that experience where you've built something up in your own head that it's going to be amazing and then the actual thing came up well short? This was it for me, so yes another task crossed off the list but I think I'll put this one in the negative category.
Would I go back? Maybe, they did do different flavours of bagels and maybe a salmon and cream cheese one would be better, I just wouldn't go for the salt beef one again!
So 15 down and 85 still to go, I was planning on doing another one during this trip away namely getting up to Bladon and to the grave of Winston Churchill but I've had to postpone due to train related issues around the Oxford area....but watch this space plans are afoot to cross another couple off the list very soon!
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