As you may have established – my two main passions in life are traveling and food. Last week I was contacted by Zomato, asking if I wanted to be a contributor on their website – of course I’d love to!
For those who don’t know Zomato, it is restaurant review website and a community for food bloggers, call it the Facebook of food www.zomto.com
That’s an even better excuse to eat more than I normally do and also to dig up my backlog of restaurant reviews. Fast forward to a week later they set up a food blogger meet up/dinner and as a newbie I was kindly invited to attend – I was so excited.
The dinner was held at Pont St restaurant at Belgravia hotel in Knightsbridge.
The evening started with a demonstration of how to make handmade ravioli from celebrity master chef Sophie Michell. Sophie has cooked for Claudia Schiffer and most importantly Leonardo DiCaprio (lucky, lucky lady… I hate cooking but I’d cook for that any day)
Watching this made me appreciate more what I would normally call just another meal at a restaurant. The amount of work that chefs put in to their food making is no joke and I can only dream of making pasta from scratch. This comes from someone who can barely get the minutes on a quick cook pasta right. Well done Sophie, its truly an art.
Now enough with the food watching, let’s start eating.
First of all, the presentation of every single dish in this restaurant was flawless.
The starters all came out together. I will mention them in order of my favourites, starting with those mini burgers. I’d go back for these mini burgers alone. They were cooked to absolute perfection with an added sweet sauce.
The Beef Carpaccio with truffle cream, parmesan crisps, turnip and watercress was amazing. So many flavours going on, very well combined.
A must try as well are their fried blue cheese balls (for those who are fans of strong flavours) and pork belly.
As for the rest of the starters, none of them were bad yet I felt something was missing. Scallop Carpaccio with mandarin, fennel, cretan olive oil and basil.
The baby vegetables with Belgrave’s own dip.
Grilled oyster
Quinoa salad
Moving on the to main, I had the lamb rump with vegetables. As much as I love lamb, this dish was a bit too plain and could have benefitted from more sauce.
Going back to presentation, other dishes looked wonderful.
As did the desserts but I wasn’t overly keen on any of the flavours.
I couldn’t do it, after all of this food I am ashamed to say I didn’t try the doughnut but the feedback was very good. You can’t go wrong with doughnuts. The milkshake was very light and tasted of vanilla, not thick at all which is good as their other dishes are quite heavy.
The winners of the evening were definitely the starters and I can imagine that the burger main-course is one to be blown away by. I would return to this restaurant to have the beef dishes, all which were great. If you’re one for plain and simple food you’ll like the rest as well but my taste buds are picky.
Pont Street restaurant is quite simple in terms of interior which works well with the European theme. For dinner parties the layout is great as they can easily adjust their individual tables into long tables, separating the rest of the restaurant with a shelf.
It was great meeting so many food bloggers and I’m happy to be a part of the Zomato family. Thanks everyone :D
