London Notes, Cont.

The weather continues to be spectacular – Julia bundled up a bit, but I walked all over Kew Gardens today with only a sweater.

Kew Gardens is very nice, and it was a treat to finally get out there after many trips to and through London. We walked all through the glass houses (one of which is the oldest and largest remaining of the Victorian glass houses) taking shots of blooming plants, etc.

In one of the glass houses there was what the crew at Kew had labeled as “perhaps the oldest pot plant in the world.” In the U.S., we would have said “potted plant” to distinguish it from Marijuana, but you get the drift. Anyway, it was brought back from the tropics in 1775, in a pot, and has been a part of the Kew Gardens since then. (The Gardens themselves are celebrating their 250th anniversary.) The problem is that at least one of the bonsai on display at the National Arboretum in DC is older (if one considers those to be “pot plants,”) and I’d guess there are a whole bunch more bonsai scattered around that are older. Interestingly, under the pot for this old guy there was a time line that listed major events in its potted lifetime. The French Revolution was there. The American Revolution was not. The Kew gardeners are Still touchy about that one, I suppose.

Our Thanksgiving dinner experience at Boundary had its highs and lows – mostly highs. We started with French onion soup (about the best I’ve ever had) and a nice salad, and a wine suggested by the sommelier to match both a Dover sole and a grilled beef dish (the cows with the long horns, as our waiter explained – “they come from Yorkshire so they are English beeves”). The wine started slow but opened up nicely, and it fit the meal very well. It was a Rockburn Pinot Noir from New Zealand.

Julia’s sole was really good – I mean really, really good. The dusting of spice was not overwhelming, but it was balanced to the taste of the sole, and the display of de-boning the fish at the table was almost worth the price of admission in itself. My English beef wasn’t so good. It was very tough and stringy, which I let the waiter know, nicely. In a rare instance, I actually left some of the beef on the plate and sent it back to the kitchen. They took it off the bill, and I really enjoyed the perfectly done chips that came with the beef, so it wasn’t a total disaster.

For dessert we split a selection of very good English and French cheeses, followed by a mandarin souffle that was out of this world- a soft meringue crust with a mandarin crème center – none of that went back to the kitchen. All in all, I'd go back in a heartbeat.