Bermondsey is between Tower Bridge and London Bridge on the south side of the river. It has always been an interesting area - the variety of restaurants, galleries and museums attest to that. A friend dragged me to an eatery on a Sunday evening - Village East - where we had a delightful dinner.
There is a homely unpretentious feel to the place. A bar fronts the restaurant (a trend that's returning to London after an absence of a decade or so), with dining tables sprawling the irregular space. The menu is Modern British - simple dishes well cooked. I had mackerels on a bed of mash and chopped choriso sausages - very nice. My glass of prosecoe unexpectedly arrived in a wide-mouth champagne glass - the kind you used to see in B&W films!
What was enjoyable? The ambiance, the staff and the unpretentious food. It was a Sunday night and they had run out of a few ingredients - it's nice to know not everything was coming from the deep freezer.
What was not enjoyable? Nothing really.
Those of us London-centric folks easily forget there are great concert halls in other parts of the world. I remember as a young kid buying DG LPs with von Karajan on the front cover conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. So as my first visit to the city, a visit to the Philharmonie to listen to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra was a must. Ivan Fisher started the evening's concert with Haydn Symphony 88. A light and delightful work. As I'd expected, the acoustic of the hall was amazing - probably a good 2.5 second of reverberation - and much more generous than the Royal Festival Hall in London. The strings sounded sweet and the timpani came through clearly with definition. The audience was then treated to Béla Bartók's Seven Pieces for Choir and Chamber Orchestra: the Berlin Phil reduced in size occupying only half of the stage while the Netherlands Youth Choir took the other half. These young performers (all female) sang in Hungarian from memory - not easy at all - and rea...
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