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Home→Categories restaurant review 1 2 3 … 24 25 >>

Category Archives: restaurant review

When I visit a restaurant, I will make some comments about the place.

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Mowgli Street Food

Blasdale Home Posted on April 26, 2022 by SteveMay 22, 2022

R and I took a trip to Oxford to look at an exhibition at the Bodleian and for R to go to the Oxford Pen Company. She’d seen mention of the Mowgli Street Food restaurant in Westgate, so we thought we’d check it out. We had not seen it before, though I believe it has been there since the new Westgate centre had been completed. We used to eat at the Cinnamon Kitchen, but since lockdown that restaurant has closed for good.

Mowgli was a surprise, not expensive, and delicious food. Don’t think of an Indian restaurant with the standard range of curries, instead think of deliciously spiced food. We both went for the ‘Office Worker’ Tiffin box, which saved us having to decide on the individual dish. The waitress told us the chef would provide different dishes for us, except for the rice, so we could share the flavours between ourselves. While we waited for the food, we each had a yummy cocktail.

This was an excellent meal with fast service and little waiting after we had ordered. We will be back there the next time we are eating in Oxford.

Mowgli Street Food
Mowgli Street Food
Mowgli Street Food
Mowgli Street Food
Posted in Oxfordshire, restaurant review | Leave a reply

Cinnamon Collection

Blasdale Home Posted on March 19, 2021 by SteveJune 2, 2021

A day of madness and extravagance during the lockdown. We ordered a takeaway from the restaurant chain Cinnamon. Not quite a takeaway, as it takes a day to deliver from London and requires finishing at home. This was a celebration of their 20years of existence. It arrived, and that evening we ate most of it. We were stuffed and never got to the afters. They were reserved for the next day. Extravagant, but really tasty. Not at all like a chicken vindaloo.

Cinnamon Collection
Cinnamon Collection
Cinnamon Collection
Cinnamon Collection
Cinnamon Collection
Cinnamon Collection
Cinnamon Collection
Cinnamon Collection
Cinnamon Collection
Cinnamon Collection
Cinnamon Collection
Cinnamon Collection
Cinnamon Collection
Cinnamon Collection
Cinnamon Collection
Posted in Kingswood, restaurant review | Tagged Cinnamon Kitchen | Leave a reply

Oxford and Cambridge Weekend

Blasdale Home Posted on February 23, 2020 by SteveApril 2, 2020

Saturday – Oxford Conference

For several years we have been meaning to attend a one day conference at Oxford University on various topics concerned with the History and Philosophy of Physics. These conferences run about three times a year and are organised by the Post Graduate college of St Cross. They appear to be open to anyone.

We dutifully made full use of our old people’s bus passes and parked at the Bicester Park and Ride (still free) and took the S5 into Oxford. We walked to the Martin Woods Lecture Theatre for our days’ conference on The Rise of Big Science in Physics.

Big Physics: The Manhattan Project

The first session was a history lesson given by Professor Helge Kragh from the Niels Bohr Institute. This lecture charted the history of Big Science before, after and including the Manhatten Project. We heard about the Leviathan of Parsonstown, a large telescope built by William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse which was the largest telescope in the world from 1845 to 1917.

The liquefaction of Helium was an expensive project first undertaken by Kamerlingh Onnes. In 1904 he founded a very large cryogenics laboratory and invited other researchers to the location. In 1908 he was the first to liquify helium. He also discovered superconductivity and superfluity during this research.

Big science ramped up in cost when high energy synchrotrons were built. These were necessary to understand the building blocks of life. They became more costly as they became more and more powerful.

During the war, the Manhattan Project to build the Nuclear bomb was an expensive project, which involved organisations from across America. In today’s money, this project cost $20 billion. Huge industrial plants were built to separate the uranium isotopes.

We heard how the Americans led the high energy physics until the Europeans got together after the war, coordinated and jointly funded CERN to build powerful cyclotrons. We also learnt a little about the Russians and their spying.

CERN

Dr Isabelle Wingerter from the French National Centre for Scientific Research talked about CERN, and the Large Hadron Collider built to find the Higgs Boson particle. Listening to her talk, you became amazed how these large projects are run. How technology advances during the build, and how the documentation and project management must be an absolute nightmare. Definitely going to visit CERN when we are in the area again.

ITER

Next up was Bernard Bigot, the director-general of the ITER project. ITER is a Nuclear Fusion reactor being built in France. It will be the model for commercial reactors and should be the first reactor to generate more power than put in.

The project is funded by China, EU, Japan, Korea, Russia and the USA. Components for the reactor are built in all the counties and shipped to France to be assembled. The agreement to build the reactor was signed in 2006. All members of the project share all the intellectual property rights generated by the project. The UK participates, and the fusion reactor at Culham is used to prototype technologies to be used in ITER.

This reactor should generate 500MW for 50 MW put in. Commercial reactors will be larger. The reactor works at high temperatures and uses a magnetic field to keep the plasm in place, The device is huge, with 18 Toroidal Field Coils weighing 360 tons each. They are built to a precision of 0.2 mm. The central solenoid is 1,000 tonnes and powerful enough to lift an aircraft carrier out of the water.

The work is progressing on time, work started on site in April 2014. The next two years are crucial with most of the large components being delivered and installed. Then comes the long few years in commissioning the equipment. The first plasm should be generated in December 2025.

Lunch

We left for lunch and had soup at the Pitt Rivers Museum. The queue was busy when we arrived. A few from the conference were there also. A thought, each session of the conference was around 30 minutes, with questions afterwards. Some of the questions were rather bizarre. One attendee was asking about documentation, and how to get these large projects documented. He found nobody wanted to update the Wikis. Isabelle said there was nothing better than human interaction and meetings. But what happens years down the line when everyone has left.

Interesting to hear how the published papers now had hundreds to thousands of names as authors. These were the researchers, but not the technicians who built. operated and serviced the machines.

ASTRON

Professor Carole Jackson from Astron, The Netherlands Institute of Radio Astronomy talked about the mega projects in Astronomy. Here we learnt about the creation of NASA and how they were the birthplace of big astronomical projects. We again heard about the hyper authors, with over a thousand authors named on a paper.

As well as building large radio telescopes, there is collaborative research where telescopes are linked together across the world to make one large machine. Pure Science research requires global participation.

Look Ahead at the Next Decade

Dr Michael Banks a journalist from Physics World, Institute of Physic Publishing, took a look into the next decade.

In 2021 we should have the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. This will work in the Infrared and is a joint project from NASA, EAS and CSA. $8.8 billion

2025 The European Extremely large telescope with a 39.9-meter diameter dish. This will be used to searching for exo planets. $1 billion.

The Square Kilometre Array, thousands of radio antenna, building in South Africa and Australia. (low radio interference) $1 billion

2027 Long baseline Neutrino Facility. A proton accelerator and neutrino detector. Built-in Fermilab and Sanford. To detect the symmetry violations in antimatter. 180 organisations including CERN. Cost $1.5 billion

2027 Hyper Kaniokande, 260,000 tons of pure water in a mine in Japan to detect the symmetry violation of neutrinos. Why is there more matter than antimatter? $0.8 billion.

2035? International Linear Accelerator. 20 km accelerator (250GeV) with two detectors. To study the Higgs Boson in greater detail. To be built in Japan, $7.5 billion

2040? Compact Linear Accelerator 11 km tunnel (380GeV) CERN, further study of the Higgs Boson. $6.0 billion

2040? Future Circular Collider. 100 km tunnel, first stage 250GeV, then 100TeV with protons. Higgs Boson and look for further particles. $9-25 billion

Tea

Tea was taken in the Physics Department. Chatted with a couple of attendees. One was a questioner, who had a bone to pick on documentation. Hopefully, he won’t be at the evening meal.

Closing

Professor Frank Close closed the proceedings with a summary of the days’ events.

Conference Dinner

Dinner was held at St Cross College. We arrived in plenty of time and sat in the Common Room waiting for pre-dinner drinks. Close examination of the pictures on the wall, which had all been bought in a few years from a bequest. The College was founded in 1965, admitting its first five graduate students a year later. The College moved to its present location on St Giles in 1981.

After preprandial drinks, we went into dinner. Rosemary and I seemed to be seated in quite a good position on the table. Near to the organisers and some of the speakers. Our dinner, which included wine was.

Twice-baked cheddar souffle
Confit of duck with spiced plums, celeriac mash and flageolet bean ragout.
Vanilla baked cheesecake with roasted spiced plums
Coffee, mints & petit fours

It was an enjoyable evening with lots of conversation. We left and caught the S5 bus home. Busses seem to run late into the evening and well past midnight in Oxfordshire.

Sunday – Cambridge Society

Next day was the Berkshire branch of the Cambridge Society AGM. It had been scheduled to be the last AGM. This was to be the winding up AGM as there was no one wanting to stand as committee members. Thankfully two new members were found and we are going forward.

The meeting was held at Hurley Village Hall. We held the AGM, over quite quickly. We then ate lunch, each of has brought along a dish. Then there was a talk on a cruise from the UK, to France around Spain and back again. This did not persuade Rosemary to undertake any more cruises. We might visit Bordeaux though.

I came away not a member of the committee. We were asked to look at whether it was possible to organise a tour of the Space Centre at Wescott.

Posted in Berkshire, Cambridge Society, Oxfordshire, Uncategorized | Tagged Cambridge Society, Oxford, Physics | Leave a reply

The Bodlein Library and Erotic Literature

Blasdale Home Posted on November 26, 2018 by SteveFebruary 28, 2022

Rosemary and I had a trip to Oxford today. Parking virtually impossible in Oxford, so you have to use the Park and Ride. Being retired, the cheapest and easiest way into Oxford is to park at the Bicester Park and Ride which is free. Then catch the S5 into Oxford, yet again free with your bus pass, and they supposedly run every 15 minutes. The website shows you live arrival times of buses, ours was a tad late.

In the city of Oxford, we went straight to the Library where there was an exhibition of books and magazines. The Bodleian is a copyright library so receives most publications from the UK. These included erotic publications, some of which were subsequently banned. The access to these publications was restricted and categorised as Phi. Students could see them for research purposes only with a written note from the Director of Studies. Most of the books displayed in the very public area were very tame, you could hardly believe any of them would have been banned in the UK.

Once Banned Books

Next was the business of the day shopping, clothes shopping. Having spectacularly failed at this, it was time for lunch at the Cinnamon Kitchen, an upmarket Indian Restaurant on the upper floor of the Westgate shopping centre. There are several restaurants up on the roof. Many with outside seating for warm days. A token gave us a free glass of bubbly and we had a fine meal.

After lunch we had a look around John Lewis. They were still doing their Black Friday sale, and all the Google Equipment was matching the online Google prices. So tempted to load up with a few more Google Home Speakers. I was also looking for active noise cancelling headphones for travel. I did learn a couple of things though. Noise cancelling means two things, Noise cancelling can apply to microphones in the headphones enabling the other party to hear you above background noises, or it can be to remove the noise of the environment from the music you are listening to. Be warned, it’s not obvious when you look at the devices. Most of the headphones on display were not working (battery flat), and to pair your Bluetooth phone to the device was nigh impossible, you had to find the device, and I have never seen so many Bluetooth devices available for paring on my phone.

Well after this, it was home time, but we had to go to the sweet shop for some aniseed balls. These were purchased at Hardys Sweet Shop on the High Street. It is so much further down the road than we ever imagine. We always believe we have gone past, and the shop has closed. Aniseed balls purchased for Rosemary. I won’t touch them now after a large dentist bill to replace a cracked tooth; I tended to crunch them up with my teeth.

Posted in Oxfordshire, Oxfordshire | Tagged Cinnamon Kitchen, Oxford | Leave a reply

It’s gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright) Sun-Shiny day

Blasdale Home Posted on May 25, 2017 by SteveAugust 27, 2018

Sun-Shiny day

Today was forecast as a brilliant day, and so it was.  The sun shone into the van at an early hour, but we were awake, the peacock had seen to that.  We left early picking up the bread and pain au chocolat as we left the campsite for the 9.11 bus into St Peter Port.  This arrived on time and we were whisked to our destination via the hospital.  Today we were catching the 10.30 ferry to Herm.  It should be a lovely day there.  Seems many others thought the same, as the ferry filled up.

The tide was low and we arrived at the steps and not the harbour.  More steps and we were on our counter clockwise walk around the island.  The first part is on the cliffs where bracken grows rather too profusely, smothering most other vegetation.  Various flowers were spotted and photographed as we walked around, although I did not photo the brromrape.

We stopped for tea at a Kiosk on a small beach where we had seen people swimming in late October. Today despite the warm sun, there was only one intrepid elderly couple dipping their toes into the sea.  Umbrellas and sun worshippers were in evidence. 

We continued to Shell Beach where we ate lunch.  Rosemary started her shell hunt.  As one couple said, the shells and sand urchins were small.  I ventured out onto the rocks and took a few photographs around the area.  A few other photographers were in evidence, one keen woman with a professional Canon lens.  It was always interesting to try and see what she had been photographing.   Many times, I was mystified.

We walked the rest of Shell Beach to the furthest point from the landing steps, when Rosemary announced we were to catch the 3.35 home, and we had 35 minutes to walk back.  We did make it in plenty of time, and thankfully our hurry meant we did not have to spend time in the shop.

Back to the camp site on the 81 bus.  I said we were going to Candie Road, was perplexed when the driver said, that’s just up the hill. He was soon stopping and telling us we had arrived.  No I said, the other Candie Road, just before the Little Chapple.  OK the road was named Rue du Candie, so technically I was wrong.

More cider was drunk at the campsite, and then we discovered someone new had arrived and they were parked in their VW next to us.☹

Some good photo opportunities as the sun set on the campsite, missed most of those.

 

Posted in Guernsey | Leave a reply

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