A LUXURY WEEKEND IN LONDON

As one of our wedding presents, some of our lovely friends and my bridesmaids bought us an amazing gift for us both to have dinner at Alyn Williams' Michelin-starred restaurant located within The Westbury Hotel in London. Nick and I both love our food and love experimenting in the kitchen (oh) so to have this bought for us was so special! To make it even more exciting, my lovely parents bought us a two night stay at the hotel as a wedding present which was incredibly generous! We went down this weekend just gone so I thought I'd share a few pictures, although I don't have many to be honest! (first image taken from The Westbury Hotel twitter page as I forgot to take one from outside!).

The first course of the 7 course tasting menu that we had was probably the favourite of all of them. It was a cold seafood salad with lobster, squid and scallop served in a light broth with, what says on the menu is preserved kombu (so that's something new) and calendula (I know it from Liz Earle's Instant Boost Toning Lotion!) It was honestly the best tasting fish dish I've ever had, it was so fresh and light and the fish in this was the softest, most tender that I've ever had.

Gotta get that wine in....haha classy as always!

Below is 'Sweet and Sour Quail/piquilo pepper/pineapple/Sichuan pepper. I won't start going on describing what everything tasted like because I ain't no food critic but needless to say, it was delish and the addition of the pineapple was amazing, it really brought the dish to life for me.

The final course was the dessert below which was so lovely, you can see how bloody perfect it was when it came - look at that meringue! This was Yorkshire rhubarb pavlova/stem ginger/rhubarb sorbet and it was delicious. The rhubarb flavour was absolutely incredible, imagine eating a rhubarb and custard sweet and this is basically what it tasted like only much fancier! Hmm...maybe I could be a food critic after all?

The Westbury hotel itself was lovely, situated on Conduit Street which is literally a stones throw from Oxford Circus, it was a great location for wandering around London. The room was pretty spacious with a lovely bathroom and nice view over the street. I have to say all of the staff at the hotel were super friendly and helpful, especially those working in the restaurant when we were there, there were very accommodating to a couple of changes we asked for. The best part has to be when I sneezed at the table, a special little tray of tissues was brought over for me to take one. I sneezed again about ten minutes later and the tray was brought over again and left on the table 'just in case' pahahaha it made me chuckle. I keep expecting a tray of tissues to be brought to me now when I sneeze but unfortunately I haven't quite trained Sponge or Berg to do it yet. I'll keep working on it.

Our gift of dinner was bought by my lovely bridesmaids through Truly Experiences who were also fantastic - they sorted out the reservations for us at a time and date that suited and were very happy to help so I would definitely recommend taking a look at their website if you're looking to treat someone (or yourself!) to a special occasion. They emailed the day after to check that everything had gone smoothly and that we enjoyed the experince which was a lovely touch.

Overall, we had a fantastic experience and it was so nice to get away again just the two of us as a sort of mini honeymoon, we also completely lucked out with the weather (which is why Nick's face is a tad rosy in the picture above) which made it even more enjoyable!

#review #food #travel #london #life