French cuisine – Tango's Baking

So it’s finally half term, which means I will be taking off a week away from work! YAY! 😁👏👏 It also just happened to coincide with with my mum’s work break, so we decided to travel together this time. 👵Obviously, with the current pandemic, we had to think long and hard about which was the best place to visit, and we finally settled on visiting Brighton for a four-night stay! 🌊

I baked some egg tarts the night before to take with me on the travel 😂

It wasn’t a long train ride to get to Brighton (and I took off immediately after work! 😂) This time, we had to travel separately, so I ended meeting my mum at the hotel there. With her working as a chef for a hotel group, we were also very lucky to get a free stay in the city. 😁👌

Greetings from the hotel! How cute are these! ❤️

Since my mum and I were both enthusiastic foodies, we were so happy to get to enjoy so many great food on this trip! 😋 One of the first places we visited was Riddle and Finns just by the Brighton Seafront. Nothing can really beat a luxurious seafood lunch by the sea! 🦀🐙🦪🐟 (And how can one possibly say no to seafood when you are in Brighton? 😉)

The view from the restaurant (before it started raining heavily! ☔️☔️) We were so lucky we chose to eat inside (not that my mum could stand the cold 🥶 anyway! 😂) as the people eating outside were then ushered back in all soaking wet!

Complimentary bread basket with four different condiments (our favourite was the mackerel 🐟 I really enjoyed the horseradish too but my mum wasn’t a fan! 😂 ) I thought it was really cute for them to serve the butter on a shell.

Starters: braised octopus with confit egg yolk and miso yoghurt (left), New England clam and bacon chowder (centre) and tempura monkfish cheeks with a jalapeño and basil dip (right)

Jersey oysters three ways: (From the left clockwise) Porthilly (deep fried with pickled vegetables), Oysters Rockefeller and creamy champagne sauce. 🦪🦪🦪

My mum is working hard to try to get all the crab meat out! 🤣

My favourite dishes there were the oysters (the Rockefeller style was the best of the three for me), octopus and the tempura monkfish cheeks (loved that dip!) The clam chowder was okay, but I personally would enjoy it less thick and the vegetables more cooked. My mum (who is even pickier than me with food) really enjoyed the oysters too, but she also liked the crab, though it was hard work and a messy job getting all the meat out! 😂 💪 Actually felt like a proper workout after! 🤣 (I found the dish okay, but we both thought the Malaysian coconut sauce was slightly too sweet and I wasn’t a massive fan of crab to begin with… 😅)

Luckily the rain stopped pouring when we finished our lunch, so we got to enjoy a stroll around the seafront and the city, including visiting the famous Brighton Pavilion. We snapped many pics! 😆📸

Look at the waves! 🌊 🌊

Love the market feel here with all the boutiques

Brighton is truly hidden gem with its ambient, relaxing atmosphere and a beautiful seaside. Over the new few days, it was such a delightful surprise to discover all these great food places within the city! 🤤🤤 Here are some of the best ones!

Delicious, healthy salad lunch in Foodilic 🥗 That mango and avocado salad was so yummy! It’s great value for money too – only £8.50 to sit in with one hot main and three side salads. Very generous portions too! We were so stuffed afterwards! 😬

Blue cheese pizza in Fatto a Mano. Simple and scrumptious! And I introduced Burrata to my mum – which she absolutely loved! 😂 (We wandered into this restaurant as a shelter when the sky suddenly started pouring 🌧🌧 one day. Weather hadn’t really been on our side throughout this trip… 😅)

When I visited Salisbury last month, I found a Roly’s Fudge store and bought some of these back for my work colleagues. They absolutely loved it and devoured the whole box before I got to try any. 😛 So I finally got to have some this times around, but I found them rather too sweet for my liking… 😖

Our last meal in Brighton was a French dinner in the Petit Pois Restaurant. 🇫🇷 And we managed to finish on a high as this was our favourite meal throughout the trip! 👍

Complimentary appetiser: apricot and chestnut croquettes

Starters: pan fried scallops with artichoke purée, apple and hazelnut salad (top) and classic garlic and parsley snails (bottom)

Bouillabaisse- fish soup with sea bass, mussels, squid, king prawn, seaweed and potato

Duck breast with celeriac Dauphinoise, grilled spring onions and blood orange sauce

We absolutely loved the earthy nuttiness of the croquette appetiser! 😋❤️ The dish of the night though was the scallops. The artichoke purée and the acidity of the apples marries perfectly with the lightness of the scallops. 🤤 My mum also really enjoyed her Bouillabaisse. For me, the duck breast was also very yummy with a medium-rare cook (which it’s how I always like my duck) and I wished they gave me more of that delicious blood orange sauce! 😂 I couldn’t get enough of it!

Once we finished dinner, we ran back into the hotel passing through a storm ☔️ ☔️ as the rainy night marked the end of our trip. 😝

‘So excited for Paris!’ I thought to myself after I woke up early at 7 this morning and finished my last bits of packing. With everything ready to go by half 8, I steadily made my way to St Pancras station (which is a quick 10 mins underground from my home) to meet my Eurostar train at 9:24. Even when I looked at the time on my phone, I thought to myself that there was still plenty of time. How wrong I was…

Now, in all fairness, I could only blame about what happen next on myself. When I arrived at the Eurostar entrance at 9am, it turned out that the gate had already closed for my train. 😱 I was unaware that the gate would close about an hour before the train’s designated time (which was stated in very small writings on the ticket). It turned out, however, that I wasn’t alone in that boat as I queued outside ticket office among many people who had also similarly missed their trains. I did have a brief chat with the guy in front of me (who was from Paris and was heading back after few days of training in London). He told me that he too made the same mistake the first time he took a Eurostar train, which made me felt a little better about myself haha (he was late this time because of his friend who was late picking him up to the station).

Now, just to make matters slightly worse, the queue in the ticket office was moving very slowly as they only opened one counter (which probably was the thing that irked me the most at that point 🙄). It turned out though that the ticket change can be done on the self-service machines next right to the ticket office (which the friendly guy in front of me quickly advised me to go over after he went to try them himself as I watched his bags 😁). The two ladies over the self-service counters were very helpful. I had a minor panic attack when I thought there were no later trains to go to Paris today. (It turned out that because I booked my tickets through an agency, replacement trains don’t show up on the screen…. Don’t ask me why lol!)

After paying a bit of a hefty fee of £44, I was finally able to get the ticket for the train at 12:24. This gave me about an hour to kill in the station, which involved me buying a small sushi from M&S and calling my mum on the phone. (‘I told you to go to the station earlier!’ she said. 😓) I was surprised by how packed it was at the gate by the time I went over. And there was a little story saga when I bumped into the lady who sorted the new ticket for me (she was ushering people forward at the passport control). She instantly recognised me and said, ‘Oh, you again?’ To which, I said, ‘I am not late this time!’ 😂 (which earned a ‘well done’ from her lol!)

First thing I ate as I stepped foot into France (or rather the train did lol!)

While there was a slight minor delay with the train, but things got moving pretty fast after and I snatched an empty row that no-one ended up sitting on. 😏 The train ride was only 2 hours and to be fair, it felt even less. The train was moving so fast that I was swaying from side to side as I walked down the carriage to the mini bar!

I could literally feel the heat by the time we arrived in Gare du Nord station. It was a warm day in Paris (and part of me is now dreading about the fact it will be getting hotter in the coming days 😓), and I wasted no time to get to the hotel first. The feel of air con after 10 minutes walk from the station was well worth it!

However, I was starving by that time (having only ate a sushi and two madeleines throughout the whole day), so I was honestly ready for a big meal! I searched up places to eat nearby online and found Terminus Nord which is right opposite Gare du Nord station. It is a classic French restaurant opened since 1925, and I was most definitely in the mood for some classic French dishes.

Crêpes Suzette flambéed in Grand Marnier and Lime Sorbet

If you are wondering, this was not the first time I ate snails (In fact I had it many times before. For some reasons, they were common in many European restaurants in Hong Kong…) The duck breast and the crêpes suzette were both delicious, and I was quite surprised by how much I liked the latter. (It was one of those dishes I always knew about but never had lol.) Here is also a video of the server doing the flambé for the crêpes in front of me. 👇

To end the day, I leapt to the supermarket after for some sweets and drinks in preparation for the upcoming hot weather.

I’ve never seen this version of Haribo in the UK before. Is it only available in France?

Anyway, that’s it for now. Hopefully, I will be sharing more with you all over the next few days. The adventure has only just begun! 😀

Tag: French cuisine

Two Foodies’ Trip to Brighton

Day 1: Runaway Train