Tom "London 2010" E.'s Profile

This is the only dedicated Hot Pot / Shabu Shabu restaurant in London and is where ALL of you should be dining this winter. Nothing beats a cold wet and dark evening than a cauldron of bubbling spicy soup right in front of your face. Epic.

For the uninitiated, Hot Pot is a Mongolian meal where you boil one or two soup broths on your table and then cook thin meat slices, veg, tofu and noodles in bubbling soups. It's a ritual dinner taking a couple of hours and it's crazy popular in Japan where it's called Shabu Shabu and in China, where Little Sheep Hot Pot is the country's most successful chain restaurant (and now owned by Pizza Hut).

Little Lamb in Chinatown does a good job of Hot Pot, notably they don't hold back on the spicy level with their super-spicy mala soup. Ouch! The fishballs are sensational, the piles of sliced meat are massive and the flat noodles are very cool. I think they could improve on their sauces and have a few more options, but for now they are a 5-star choice because London has nowhere better for this wonderful meal. I don't expect that to last long - bring on the Hot Pot invasion!

Little Lamb is also very small, and very Chinese. So I suggest booking ahead. We were surrounded by the young, shopping-mad fashionable Chinese and for the whole evening we were the only non-Mandarin speakers in the house. We even partook in a Chinese rendition of Happy Birthday To You that landed us a free slice of cake from a neighbouring table. At that point we felt less in London and much more in Beijing. Soho was thousands of miles away!

Our 2 hour banquet finished at 20 quid a head for two and we left incredibly happy and significantly closer to being spherical-shaped human beings.

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If I've not convinced you yet - then I suggest you look at my photos!

On Sundays, in the car park is THE best place to get authentic Thai food in London.

For 5 pounds I got a bamboo shoot salad swimming in super-spicy fermented fish sauce and decorated with mint leaves, plus a bag of sticky rice to help me with the heat. Seriously spicy. The real deal.

For a further 5 pounds I got two boxes of Thai desserts, including a mouthwatering box of banana custard and purple sticky rice. I could have spent a lot more... Isaan sausage, Northern sausage, Satays, Fried Fish... every tupperware box was so tempting.

The food sold here is the closest thing I've found in the UK to real Thai street-food, but it is literally sold out of the boot of people's cars. It's stuff they've made at home and brought to share with Thai tongues.

Finding this is a foodie dream come true. Oh, and the temple is gorgeous too.

At first we thought Chon Thong would just be a cheap, quick and ordinary Thai before our gig at nearby Koko's, but with the detailed menu open our aspirations changed - this place has some pretty interesting nosh!

From the outside Chon Thong doesn't look like much, and inside it's quite sparse too... just another eatery between Mornington and Camden, right? But we got a few really good Thai dishes here from the specials section...

Laab Pla Salamon (fried salmon chunks in a spicy lime salad)
Goong Ob Woonsen (shrimp and noodles baked in a clay pot)
Kaao Ped Moo (pork fried rice)

Also tempting were the seafood salads, other laabs and the Tiger Tears.

If this all sounds a little too Thai for you, they still have green curry, tom yum and phad thai on the list and everything still comes with a smile and a beer Singha.

So while the restaurant itself was not that special, the more authentic options push this up to a 3 Star for me. If you're looking for a quick and good meal in this area... highly recommended.

CB1 is the World's Oldest Internet Cafe, so it's a fitting review as this week the internet is 40 years old. HAPPY BIRTHDAY INTERNET!

CB1's cafe-cum-bookstore has been here in operation since the early 1990s in a spot just opposite from where Sinclair Computers used to design their ZX81s and 128ks, and not far down the road from where the world's first webcam was set-up to watch a coffee pot brew.

The welcoming cafe with excellent coffee, pastry and sandwiches is dark wooden tables and chairs, walls lined with books of interest and  a bar decorated with computing equipment from the past... from old Compaqs and Amstrads to classic Apples and Acorns.

CB1 has always been an intellectuals' caffeine-stop haven, and has never run off in the mass web cafe  direction. Just a couple of terminals to browse with your tea, otherwise it's bring your own laptop to dust with croissant crumbs.

Even if you never pop in, it's worth taking a look at their website: they had this website in 1995 and froze it in about 1999 for posterity.
http://www.cb1.com/new...
The announcement of a new cool service called 'HoTMaiL' and a list of the different search engines and how good they are (what no google?) is very cool.

I'm hooked!   This site is audio porn central.

Bye bye Spotify
Bye bye iTunes
Bye bye Fabriclive
Bye bye struggling to download old DJ sets from obscure sites
Bye bye using Youtube to listen to the latest tracks (and staring at stills)

Hype Machine is now my 1 stop, only stop, crack-house addict stop for new music. More shit-hot remixes than a night on the tiles in Ibiza, more unsigned new indie gems than weekend boozing in Camden and (sadly) more hip-hop/electro mash-ups than an LA after-party.

I know I sound like some cheesy advert for this website, but it's just so perfect for good music, so easy to use and just so fucking right up my street for music taste. It aggregates blogs that post music, and gives you an all-in-one site where you can listen to the newest songs, skip and pause, look up older ones and see what the most popular tunes are right now. It's like an interactive version of the best radio shows without the talking, and if you go through my favorited songs it's like the best crazy electro remix dance party of all time... and it's going on in my flat right now. LOUD

I've never felt dirtier right after getting all clean in a shower than when I took a shower at King's Cross Station.

I mean, I really needed the shower after a long set of flights and it was gorgeous having pumping hot water all over, tons of shower gel and a big clean towel for 15 mins. But... doing all this and then unlocking the door and being back in the King's Cross basement men's toilets didn't exactly feel good.

So now you know - you can actually roll-up to KC and get a shower - a few quid for the soap and towel rent and a shower room for yourself down in the men's bogs.

My wonder is who else knows this, and what they've got up to in the showers. Ewww.

You need the toilet

You need a token

You need £1 for a token

So, you need to pay £1 to pee

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Bring a colostomy bag

...or better yet - just piss your pants - it'll give you an excuse to get out of this neo-migraine of mezzanines.

Organic? I'll be the judge of that, Duke Smartypants of Cambridge

* paper fliers on the table - waste I tell you! - oh, they're 100% recycled
* lager!? - i bet from lorries from Europe - oh, it's organic UK lager
* fish and chips - death to cod - oh, it's line-caught trout and organic veg.

Bah and humbug... as soon as I saw the 'organic' pub moniker and all the soil association stuff I was determined to find Duke of Cantab guilty of some minor eco-crime just to satisfy myself that do-gooders can't also be do-wellers and have such a cracking gastropub in London. But to my annoyance, the verdict was returned NOT GUILTY. You can't trip them up... they are righteously organic.

Good place, good location, good fucking good food. Pricey though, and I appreciate why - we all know organic food costs more. But please DofC bear in mind that the high prices drove the chavvier members of our clan to nip out for 30 mins to get KFC.

Pools panel rules - 'Whole Object' - Home Defeat

"One large Americano, please"

... this better be big, I am in some serious need for coffee ...

"Here's you coffee, sir"

... oh shit, it's practically a whole bathtub of coffee, this bowl doesn't even have handles, it's some sort of caffeine immersion therapy, do I stick my whole face in? ...

"Check please, check check, gotta get the check, gotta get the check IM WIREDDDDD!!!!"

Every now and then something comes along that blows away the norm by such a massive degree that it changes everything. They call it a black swan event.

::: Debora's cupcakes are the black swans of cupcakes. They change everything :::

For every 4 or 5 stars I've ever given a cupcake place... these should now read as 2 or 3 stars. Debora's home-made, market-sold cupcakes destroy the competition. They're the Usain Bolt of baking.

For £1.50 each you get a peach-sized cupcake from a diverse range, all beautifully sculpted and many topped with a single fresh fruit. The size and price is perfect for buying two, and two small cupcakes are always greater than one big one!

Debora sells her wares at the Saturday market at All Saint's Garden opposite Trinity College, but also supplies the excellent Origin8 on St Andrew's Street for the other 7 days a week. If you're passionate about  food, I suggest you make a date to meet this Italian baking laureate and get her treats fresh on a Saturday.

::: So enough hyperbole and facts... what about the cupcakes? :::

I didn't go for blueberry with sweet cream cheese icing, I didn't go for rum-topped coffee cake or strawberries and cream sponge. I went for  orange and cream icing on a chocolate cake filled with Grand Marnier and then followed that up with a fresh raspberry on dark chocolate cream icing on a raspberry-jam filled chocolate cake.

'::: As it says on her website  "...these cupcakes are from another planet!" :::

I'll be back soon for more, and looking at Debora's website it seems I also need to try her award-winning petit fours, her myriad of biscotti and everything else she's ever made.  **Drooling**