meemalee

I have this friend. Let's call her Rachel. She's one of the funniest people I know, in a charming, often acerbic but never cruel way. She also happens to be a wonderful cook and bilingual - Spanish is her second language, as she spent most of her youth in Catalonia aka Catalunya, in Spain. The fact that she's from Glasgow is just the icing on the cake, as it means that she'll slip from a Scottish brogue into perfect Spanish without a blink. So when she decided to start her own Catalan Cooking Class , I thought "Sign me up!". As far as the online food community are concerned, Rachel is the Catalan Queen . I was honoured to be invited to attend the inaugural class ... The Catalan Queen and Gareth Groves of Bibendum It's Tuesday evening - the venue is the lovely patisserie Bea's of Bloomsbury . I take my husband along as I think he'd have fun and it's a good decision as, within minutes, Rachel has us all laughing as she tells us stories about l...

I'd never been to Notting Hill before. It exists in my mind as a weird amalgam of Hugh Grant and spangly breasted dancers. But the other day I found myself at Notting Hill Gate tube station, attempting to find the Westbourne Grove sibling of Mayfair's El Pirata known as El Pirata Detapas , which seeks to present a more modern take on Spanish food than its older sister. I'd been invited to a tapas dinner to celebrate the launch of Viewcard (from Viewlondon - you know, that website you go to to find out what's on at the cinema now that Teletext is dead). Viewcard entitles you to special offers at lots of London restaurants and El Pirata Detapas is one of the latest to join the scheme. I'm going to call it EPD now because El Pirata Detapas is too long to keep typing out. The road to EPD is paved with strange pretensions - I lost count of the number of shops along Pembridge Road advertising themselves as retro chic or vintage glamour when all they seemed to be touting...