Where to eat in St Foy en Tarentaise

 Having visited St Foy every year for the past decade and suddenly realising that there was absolutely no literature about where to eat in this rapidly expanding town - it was time to make the ultimate guide on where to dine. Please note - all prices for dinner are estimates and include significant amounts of alcohol and that bookings in high seasons are a good idea - think a couple of months in advance for La Colonnes or a year in advance for New Years Eve.

MeatLiquor

I'm not very good at queuing for food and I'm definitely not very good at waiting for an hour for food once I'm seated. Normally, this would make me hate the restaurant involved, angry at the staff, tearful inside the restaurant and bitter leaving it, and yet, I left MEATliquor happy. Fatter but happy.

The Breakfast Club

The Breakfast Club has been on my “to-eat” list forever - they have four branches, the Soho one not too far away, but always I’ve been put off by the lack of reservations and the threat of the queue. Okay temperature, sunshine, and only a slight hangover made it a feasible option for The Brunch Buddy and I. When we arrived at 11am, the queue outside was already snaking up the street, and we waited about 15 minutes before grabbing a table outside next to the ever growing queue. 

Vapiano - Italian food organized by Germans

It is a dream combination. Italian food, created in an incredibly efficient way. This is what Vapiano is all about. There is no messing about wasting time trying to work out who pays what, as every person is given a card, that they then "charge" food and drinks to at a selection of various stations. Your food is made to order at one of each station whilst you watch (pasta, antipasti), or just collect them (dessert or drinks), or order and get a buzzer (Pizza). It works out perfectly. Each person gets what they want, charged to them and can edit their dish to their particular liking - no basil, no issue, no garlic, no problem. Even better, you can get it to go (their pasta makes a very good breakfast), and their takeaway boxes are perfectly lunch sized Tupperware. In fact, this is possibly one of my favourite casual places to go. It is great place to meet up with old friends, as the lack of service means no-one really cares if you sit there for four hours, as I did last Tuesday.

Polpetto

Faced with the familiar situation of yet another Saturday night with no reservation The Boyfriend and I ended up at Polpetto. Barrafina, would be the normal choice in this situation, but we felt like going outside the box.

Corner Room

I really didn't want to like the Corner Room. Why? Because the Corner Room is really far away from Covent Garden, and I mean River Cafe far away. A £20 and 30 minute long cab ride each way and this place becomes expensive and time consuming. To be perfectly honest, had The Boyfriend and I not been heading to the East End anyway we probably never would have gone. This would have been a mistake because the Pork with Portugese Bread and Butter Pudding was so worth the journey. 

Nordic Bakery

Soho, cinnamon buns, coffee, cakes and a whole host of other wonderful things.

Princi - The Happiest Place on Earth

There is one over riding factor that puts me off visiting a restaurant - a lack of information. Apparently, this is cool at the moment  and seems to be a common  theme with new restaurants, I blame Nuno Mendes and Russel Norman. As a control freak, I hate this. A normal trip to a restaurant is incrediby well researched - I tend to know everything about the place before I show up - I know what I am going to eat, what the place looks like, and roughly how much the experience will cost me.

Cox, Cookies & Cakes vs. Hummingbird - A Tale of Two Cupcakes

The corner of Brewer Street and Wardour Street in Soho is a great place to be standing, as both streets have a fabulous cupcake shop. The question is which street to take? One afternoon, The Boyfriend and I decided to taste test. One Vanilla Cupcake (Cox,Cookies and Cake) and one Toffee Apple Cupcake (Hummingbird). Sitting on a step on a random street in Soho we compiled the following list of merits: