We’re back from London! You guys know it’s one of our absolute favorite places to visit, and this trip in particular was so much fun! As we’ve been to London many times, this trip was NOT about the tourist spots. We breezed by them on the way to our many foodie destinations. Now, I used to live in London (this was over 10 years ago now), and the food back then largely left a lot to be desired. London was definitely not a culinary destination. But now, things have changed, and there are so many yummy spots we wanted to visit on this trip. We always keep a running list of places in London we want to visit, mostly sourced on Instagram, and I think we hit everything on our list this trip! Some twice! Kristen, who you may remember from our Belgium trip last year, currently lives in Cambridge with her family and came to meet us in London for a few days. If you’re curious, here is part one of our travel diary from London with links to everything we did while across the pond.
We flew overnight from JFK to Heathrow and landed about 6:30am. We anticipated a long line at customs (last time we flew in we had about a two hour wait) because customs at Heathrow always takes a ridiculously long time. But to our surprise we were through in a total of 12 minutes. We were utterly shocked! Turns out just two days later a new policy went into effect allowing United States citizens to use the same automated electronic gates at border patrol as UK citizens. This is such great news as border control at Heathrow is always a headache. Even though we were coming in a couple of days prior to this new policy, it seems they were being much less stringent than in the past as we moved through very swiftly. So Kristen quickly jumped on an earlier train into London from Cambridge to come and meet up with us.
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We jumped on the tube from Heathrow and headed to our hotel to meet Kristen and drop off our bags. This time we stayed at the Sheraton Grand Hotel. It was a great location with large rooms for European standards. We set out for Notting Hill to grab brunch at Eggbreak. It was really good! Notting Hill is just so fun to walk through. As this happened to be a Saturday, the Portobello Road market was going to we spent some time browsing the stalls before popping over to the Notting Hill Bookshop where they actually filmed the movie.
From there we headed down towards Kensington, popped into Whole Foods for some snacks, and decided to have an impromptu picnic in Hyde Park. I used to live across the street from Hyde Park and would go hang out in the park almost every day, so it always makes me happy to return.
We were tired since we didn’t really get much sleep on the plane the night before, so we opted to have an early dinner before heading back to the hotel to get some rest. We headed to a place that has been on our lists for years- Dishoom. Y’all, this place is worth the hype. It’s so good! We got there around 5pm and didn’t have to wait, but by the time we left there was a line to just get in the door. So get there early if you don’t want to wait. Order the okra fries and the daal. We liked it so much we went back again at the end of our trip. Our waiter mentioned they have plans to open a location in New York next year and we are SO PUMPED FOR THAT. I’d go back to London right now just to eat at Dishoom again.
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The next day we woke up early, refreshed from a good night’s sleep, and headed to the Covent Garden area for the day.
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We had breakfast at Grind and then decided we needed more coffee to we walked over to Jacob the Angel in Neal’s Yard.
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We walked around and did a little shopping, popped into Crosstown Doughnuts for a snack, then grabbed some gin and tonics from a cute little pop up truck and sat for a bit listening to some really great musicians busking on the sidewalk.
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We had dinner at La Goccia where I proceed to order one of everything from the vegetable category of the menu and it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. The food was so fresh and delicious.
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On day three we had breakfast at The Breakfast Club which was a cute American dinner kind of inspired place.
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After breakfast we walked through Spitalfields Market which has really changed a lot since the last time I’d been there years ago. There were lots of yummy looking food stalls and had we not just eaten there were many places I would have loved to order something from. We continued on, walking through Shoreditch for a bit, popping in to any store that looked interesting, before landing at Paper and Cup for you guessed it, more coffee!
After some caffeine, we continued on to Boxpark where we met up with our brother Ethan who came in from France to hang with us. Boxpark was a really cute market made out of shipping containers and was a mix of food vendors and stores. We grabbed some ciders and fries and just sat and chatted for hours.
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Before we knew it was dinner time so we walked over to Gloria Trattoria which is an Italian restaurant but felt very much like a French café to me. I got to fulfill my dream of ordering pasta served in a wheel of cheese. And it was every bit as amazing as I wanted it to be.
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Later that night on the way back to the hotel we decided to walk through Green Park and over to Buckingham Palace. It was dusk and practically deserted. This is for sure the time to go if you want to avoid the tourist crowds.
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The following day we went to brunch at Aubaine inside of Selfridges. It was a cute spot, and the food was really good.
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After doing a little shopping in Selfridges we headed down to the South Kensington area so I could show Kristen and Ethan where I used to live. We grabbed our traditional Ben’s Cookie from the store right outside the tube station and then a 99 flake from this ice cream truck outside of Imperial College that I’ve been going to for years. The ice cream tastes like birthday cake and it’s amazing.
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After walking by my old digs and Royal Albert Hall we ended up back in Hyde Park for another mini picnic before saying goodbye to Ethan and heading back to check out of our hotel and catch a train up to Cambridge for the next leg of our trip.
At that time we didn’t anticipate returning to London this trip, but long story short we ended up back in London at the tail end of our trip for about a day and a half. But more on that later. Next up is our time in Cambridge!
-Ash