Jet lag made us miss breakfast, so we walked from our hotel down to Picadilly Circus to lunch at the Wolseley, a well known London restaurant famous for its food and its interior. Originally built as a Venetian/Florentine showroom for high end autos,
It was bought by Barclays Bank and then later changed into a high-end designer restaurant by David Collins.
view from the London Eye
...and even higher.
Very communal and fun, and brought the exhibition to the public and the public to the exhibition.
These are great galleries—bite sized and manageable and always interesting. Unlike the British Museum, which you must put your affairs in order before entering, because you could get lost there for the rest of your life.
Also really worth checking out is the new Magazine Restaurant attached to the Serpentine Gallery and designed by Zaha Hadid. This was an amazing, luminous and amoeba shaped space that was glommed right onto the side of the gallery.
It was bought by Barclays Bank and then later changed into a high-end designer restaurant by David Collins.
photo from www.telegraph.co.uk
Lunch off the special vegetarian menu:
Gnocchi with buffalo mozzarella and eggplant
beet and goat cheese salad
quail egg croustade
And pommes frites for the table. Nothing unusually creative, but all beautifully served and delicious. For non-vegetarians there is a lot of variety to the menu, but reservations are a must. They do a brisk trade. We ate in the front room, which was much quieter than the big open central space.
From there we grabbed a cab to the London Eye, Europe's tallest ferris wheel and the second highest viewpoint in London (surpassed by the observation deck of The Shard)—we were eager to take advantage of the clear skies since rain comes and goes in London, as we know.
The ride is half an hour, it is very relaxing and stable and did not excite my discomfort with heights at all, and the views were spectacular!
One other benefit of traveling to London over spring break was that we got a little bit of a preview of spring... Irad and Yuval finished their work week and we took a walk through Hyde Park and were delighted to smell the Hyachinth and see actual spring flowers. Soon, Cleveland, soon...
Hyde Park Gardens
The Serpentine Lake afforded us views of many different waterbirds.
We stopped in the Serpentine Gallery and the Serpentine Sackler Gallery to see two related exhibitions: Design is a State of Mind and Haim Steinbach: once again the world is flat. Both exhibitions dealt with collecting: structures for collecting, collections themselves, and art about collecting and they played off each other nicely. My favorite aspect of the exhibitions were the salt and pepper shakers - Steinback requested the public to contribute their interestinging salt and pepper shakers and they were lined up throughout the exhibition.
photo from Serpentine Gallery site
These are great galleries—bite sized and manageable and always interesting. Unlike the British Museum, which you must put your affairs in order before entering, because you could get lost there for the rest of your life.
Also really worth checking out is the new Magazine Restaurant attached to the Serpentine Gallery and designed by Zaha Hadid. This was an amazing, luminous and amoeba shaped space that was glommed right onto the side of the gallery.
The skylights bring natural lights through
the pillars themselves, and there are curves everywhere. Every table is a
different shape. We had just read about Zaha Hadid, a famous Iraqi woman architect, in the New York Times Magazine last October so it was especially exciting to come upon an actual building of hers.
photo from http://www.dezeen.com/
my photo of restaurant in action
We had moved to the Intercontinental London Park Lane for the weekend, and were happy to retreat there to FINALLY have the real London afternoon tea:
Real scones!
Yuval toasting our trip.
Pip pip and cheerio!
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