On Saturday I met up with my friend Laura in North London. We hadn’t made a reservation anywhere but walking around Upper Street in Islington, we spotted The Blue Legume. It looked nice and cosy and Laura remembered that our friend Jess had mentioned the place. So we walked in and they had a table available.
Figuring out what to order was a little bit harder than scoring the table though. The food looked really good at the tables around us, but I noticed the cheap prices on the menu and got suspicious. Good produce costs more than bad and it just looked like this place was too cheaply priced to be able to buy good produce and still make money.
Luckily I was wrong!
Laura loves seafood and ordered the calamari after our waiter recommended it. It was nice and soft because it had been baked in the oven.
I chose the asparagus with hollandaise and was very surprised when I saw the thick but tender, and perfectly cooked asparagus stems on my plate with a lovely hollandaise.
It is not very often I am happy with a restaurant version of hollandaise/bearnaise sauce, usually they are too acidic or too runny but this one was thick and had just enough acid to cover the butter’s richness.
So I figured I might as well order the steak with bearnaise sauce as well then. The steak was hu-uge and very tender although cooked blue, and once again the sauce was very enjoyable. I really started to like this place!
So did Laura with her lovely salad topped with teriyaki salmon. It was perfectly cooked and just fell apart.
Both maincourses were really large and would have made any man working in hard labour happy, but it was a tad too much for us office girls. Sadly we were too full to even contemplate dessert. But we promised each other we would be back.
The damage? Not much at all, I think all in all around £50 for the both of us including a decent bottle of wine.
The Blue Legume 177 Upper Street Islington N1 1RG
Scandelights 