Rambling Restaurant
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On 8th May 2010 poet, journalist and food artist Michelle Rambler opened Rambling Restaurant’s doors for the first time in South America. Back in March this year, on a quest to discover more about her Latino roots, Michelle upped sticks and set up camp in Buenos Aires. She has been artist in residence at Argentine artist Lucrecia Urbano’s studio in San Ferdando, a leafy suburb north of the city which is home to chocolate factories, farms and one of Buenos Aires’ largest villas miserias, La Cava. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Buenos Aires, Cordoba, Gabriela Bejerman, giant salad toss, gingerbread houses, JC Sullivan, Juan Salzano, La Cava, Lucrecia Urbano, Michelle Madsen, Michelle Rambler, mini English breakfast, poetry, Rambling Restaurant, Rambling Tongue, secret supperclub
Photography by Mark.
On Saturday 10th and Sunday 11th April we took on our biggest Ramble yet, transforming a Soho office into a secret cabaret den. Artist Ali O’Malley was responsible for designing this rambling interpretation of Pigalle’s infamous Moulin Rouge, making great use of satin, peacock feathers, chicken wire, fairy lights, paint and tea.
The office belongs to the word of mouth people at 1000 heads, who are some of the most up-for-a-challenge corset-lovers I’ve ever met! Not only did they de-wire all their phones and computers, shift desks and manage to carry on as a functioning office throughout all the disruption, but also proved their abilities in handling all sorts of obscure requests, including being able to reach the ceiling, procure frilly pants, become waiters for the weekend and rescue our rambling sanity.
Post Saturday-night exhaustion meets pre-Sunday evening calm… Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: 1000 Heads, Abi Palmer, absinthe, beef bourguignon, cabaret, can-can dancing, cornichons, erotic poetry, Great Windmill Street, Liqueurs de France, pop-up restaurant, Rambling Restaurant, red velvet layer cake, rillettes, secret supperclub, Soho, The Moulin Rouge Ramble
So, following on from Thursday’s haggis hunting post, the three lambs’ plucks continued to boil and change in colour and consistency. The lungs kept bobbing to the top of the pan like jostling whales. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Burns' Night, haggis, heart, lamb's pluck, liver, lungs, offal, Rambling Restaurant, Robert Burns, secret supperclubs
I’ve spent a good few hours this week hunting for the elusive wee rampant Scottish beastie that is the haggis. It’s Burns’ night on Monday and we need a few of them to stab and recite poetry over.
Lamb’s pluck is not that easy to get hold of. After trying a range of butchers, all of whom seemed to think that making my own haggis was a bit insane and needed a good few days to get hold of any, I tried the excellent Marky Market. He rang me, as requested, from Smithfield meat market at 4am on Wednesday to tell me what was on offer. I’ve been having Delicatessen-style dreams about sheep organs ever since.
A few hours later he arrived with a bag of three lambs’ plucks, delivered straight to my door and up four flights of stairs. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Burns' Night, haggis, heart, lamb's pluck, liver, lungs, Marky Market, offal, Rambling Restaurant, Robert Burns, secret supperclubs
This December Rambling Restaurant was hugely excited to be invited to run a pop-up café at the Somerset House Super Christmas Design Fair (Emma and Mei are deep in concentration in the photo above, but believe me, they were bubbling inside). Next to the skating rink, in the maze of rooms that makes up the East Wing, stalls were were manned by established designers and students from the Royal College of Art and Camberwell College. There were all sorts of original Christmas presents to be had, from the sublime to the silly, including hip flasks for two; chocolate battleships; i-pod cuckoo clocks; newsprint wallets; moustache brooches and my favourite – the share-faces-with-your-friends-and-relatives mirror. This is a hard one to explain, but hilarious and at least an hour of fun.
We teamed up with some students from RCA who were working on food design projects. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: banana cardomom & poppy seed cake, Camberwell College of Art, chocolate brownies, cinnamon buns, cream tea, December 2009, edible cups, hot spiced cider, Kate Weatherall, Mad And Sad, mulled cider, orange coriander and polenta cake, pop-up cafe, Rambling Restaurant, RCA, rice crisy treats, Royal College of Art, Somerset House, Sugar & Spice, Super Christmas Design Fair
So, it has taken me this long to recover from the blaggertinis and delicious Portuguese wine (from Casa Leal, called Quinta Lagoalva De Cima) from the Blaggers’ Banquet the Sunday before last.
When I and a dozen or so other bloggers dribbled into the Hawksmoor that morning there were mountains of vegetables waiting to be julienned for decoration, shaved into crisps, oiled up and pureed down. It was somewhat daunting. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Abel & Cole, Barbers 1833 Vintage Chedder, blaggers' banquet, blaggertinis, bompas & parr, Bramley & Gage, Brock Hall Farm, canapes, Casa Leal, Chapel Down, Chegworth Valley, Donald Russell, Easy Tasty Magic, gougeres, Halen Mon, Laverstoke Park, monkfish tartare, Peter's Yard, Pong, Portuguese wine, Quinta Lagoalva De Cima, Rambling Restaurant, Riverford Organic, Sainsburys So Organic, Sipsmith, St John Restaurant, the Hawksmoor, Trethowans Dairy, Trish Deseine
In mid-September Rambling Restaurant took on a challenge – providing canapes and salads for 150 guests at our friends’ beautiful wedding. I ordered the meat from the excellent local Sheringham butcher Icarus Hines and boxes and boxes of veg from the lovely people at Salle Organics, twelve miles north of Norwich. They were having a rather hectic time of it, what with the opening of a new farm shop and several of the staff being off on holiday, yet still delivered excellent fresh produce on time (we knew they would though, as we used them before for the tossing of the giant salad at Antic Banquet festival last year).
The day before the wedding we took over the groom’s mother’s kitchen and found out what cooking on an aga was all about – careful timing and keeping the heat up! We roasted countless aubergines, boiled up chickpeas and beetroot with onions and garlic, marinaded chicken in lime, fish sauce and tumeric, duck in sweet chilli, lamb in harissa and then went out for the most enormous portion of fish and chips on the seafront.
The next morning was all about blitzing hummous, breaking blenders (aaargh) and stuffing a taxi full of fragrant herbs, dips, meats, lidless(!) oils and bottles of freshly squeezed lemon juice. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: barbeque canapes, beetroot hummous, canapes, chilli duck, flatbread, harrissa lamb, hummous, Icarus Hines, Lithanian wedding cake, marinaded chicken, Moro, Rambling Restaurant, Rose Gray, Sakotis, salad toss, Salle Organics, The Goat Inn, wedding food
On 5th September Rambling Restaurant attempted its largest event to date, in conjunction with poetry slammers Hammer and Tongue. We followed the well-tested (?) equation “feasting + poetry = decadence + debauchery” and called this collaboration the rather suggestive Rambling Tongue in the wild hope that it would descend into a massive orgy (joke). This was our second Rambling Tongue to date (we’re still gathering evidence of the first one back in July – did it really happen or was it a dream?) Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: AngrySam, brandy snaps, Clapton, crystallized violets, David j, Dizraeli, feasting, globe artichokes, Hammer and Tongue, homemade mayonnaise, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Michelle Madsen, pistachio apriocot and wild rice, poetry, rabbit with cider and honey, Rambling Restaurant, Rambling Tongue, The Mighty Worm, Vulpes Vulpes
The Rambling Restaurant launched on Sunday after a wild flurry of activity with friends and neighbours. The precarious table I’d made out of a volume of Renaissance Drama, a Tom Wolfe tome, chest of drawers & filing cabinet was deemed unsafe, so I borrowed Mary and Edward’s garden table from down the road. My mum spent an entire day hemming material (wonkily self-cut in Ikea and some from neighbour Elspeth) to make tablecloths and napkins. Her friend Hilary provided candles and ivory bedsheets to go under the table cloths, which they both expertly pinned and sewed until they hung perfectly. My friend Emily cut down roses, created a suitable playlist on her ipod and ran off to the shops for extra cream and cava, while Michelle and Mei – the star sous chefs and hostesses of the evening – chopped, grated, wrote menus and generally got things organized. I used strength I didn’t think I had to shift my bookshelves across the room to create a room divider between kitchen and dining room and we hung up a curtain to shield diners from the cooking frenzy within. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: chocolate fondant, lavender icecream, liver bacon and mushy peas, Rambling Restaurant, secret supper clubs, trout and fennel, underground restaurants
On Saturday evening I headed to Brixton for the opening of Ellie and Rosie’s Salad Club. What is salad club? It’s one of London’s new living-room restaurants and serves a four course meal for a suggested donation of just £15. I must admit I was a little worried and had visions of a secret, super-skinny, salad-worshipping society, but Ellie set me straight. The name comes from a time when she and her friend Rosie used to go to the gym together once a week and follow it up with a salad and a good catch-up. This they called Salad Club. They are obviously good girls – my post-gym sessions used to involve an enormous amount of pizza and so convinced me that going to the gym was actually bad for me. Twisted logic. Anyway… the girls’ salads got bigger and better week by week until they decided they should probably share them with the rest of us, along with plenty of non-salad type food too.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Brixton, living-room restaurants, Rambling Restaurant, Salad Club, secret supper clubs, underground restaurants
