In the ongoing jetlag saga, Vicki slept, Tony slept (eventually) and slept in. Once again, we missed our free English breakfast. Tomorrow we set an alarm.
Our first order of business was complying with UK law and submitting a COVID test. We tested in our room, but had to drop the tests off at a "green bin" behind the Tara Hotel near the High Street tube stop. Yes, it was a dodgy as it sounds. Adding to the mystery of it all, we walked the long way around the Tara Hotel, through not so pleasant corners of a relatively pleasant neighborhood, around the gigantic trash dumpsters, to find the green bin that was stainless steel with a green sign to drop the test. Scenic as this may sound, surprisingly we did not document with photos. You may be thinking, "Really, is this the official drop site for your very important COVID test? Was it just a big scam?" The jury remains out, as we have to wait until tomorrow to learn our fate. Fingers crossed all goes well or Italy will not let us in.
After the adventure amid rubbish bins we walked up to High Street. It is a bustling there are a fair amount of shops and restaurants. There are also charming little off-shoots that look so adorable they could easily have been set designs. We did not stop on High Street (well, only to take a picture), because today was a park day. To be clear, it was a park en route to our lunch destination day. (More on that to come.) We first walked through Kensington Gardens to Hyde Park. There were a couple of impediments to the full park experience- (1) A budding blister, distracting me from the idyllic setting; (2) a half marathon, for which several white tents strategically blocked our view. We saw a ton of birds, including a random parrot, and more squirrels than I remember. We also walked by the Albert Memorial. This picture doesn't appropriately reflect the scale. It is massive. We continued through the park until it was time to return to the city outside. We were headed for Belgravia, a posh neighborhood spotted with beautiful row houses, high-end shopping, and nice looking restaurants.
I don't think either of us had been here, but we both knew we wanted this to be our stop today. A couple of years ago, Tony received a subscription to Master Class. We fell in love with two chefs while watching it. One is Massimo Bottura, who we will cover when we are in Emiligia Romagna. The other is Yotam Ottolenghi. His restaurant, Ottolenghi is a feast of vegetable-forward dishes. It is tiny, and we expected we would need to order our meal take-out, but they were able to find a table. We enjoyed a charred broccoli with chilis, a cauliflower salad with pickled onions and pine nuts, an endive salad with roasted peaches and goat cheese, and roasted eggplant with tahini sauce, not to mention a ham and gruyere swirl (looked like a croissant cinnamon roll, but tasted entirely different) and a vegetable fritter with yogurt sauce. It was a feast for the eyes as well as the stomach. Everything was so fresh and flavorful. They dishes were elegant, but not overly fussy. We finished the meal with two slices of cake. Tony had a black walnut carrot cake which was moist and delicious, and I had a semolina cake topped with pistachios and rose water. We were satisfied and ready for the next leg of our walk.
We walked through new neighborhoods, passing about a dozen different embassies, all of them flying their flags out front. We tried to get a photo, but it was difficult to capture the grandeur. There were even more smart looking neighborhoods, then we came across Westminster Cathedral. It is a Catholic church of massive proportions. We went in, lit a candle, and enjoyed the peace and quiet of the small chapels within the large cathedral. My favorite was the Virgin Mother Chapel with its gold-plated ceiling. Joseph's Chapel was quite impressive as well.
We came back to the hotel for Band-Aid replacement and some rest before our evening snacks. Afterward, we walked through a very dark St. James park (which, surprisingly, was full of people, including families with children) to enjoy a tapas dinner in Mayfair, yet another new neighborhood for us. The dinner was nice, but we are excited to get a move on to Italy tomorrow, COVID test dependent.
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