Eating in "The City" in London (UK) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Eating in “The City” in London (UK) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

On our second trip to London (UK), we set out for the Tate Gallery in London.  As we were walking towards the Tate, Laurent got a nasty piece of dust in his eye and said he needed to sit down and deal with the dust.

“Ok, honey,” I said.  I knew he really did not like modern art.

“Let’s just eat light lunch and skip the Tate today,” I said.

Laurent liked that idea.

The Wren Café sat next to a small Wren Church in the financial district where we eventually walked.  London’s financial district is called “The City.”

The Church was designed by the architect Sir Christopher Wren, the 17^th century Baroque architect, who also built St. Paul’s Cathedral where royal weddings have taken place.  There are about 50 Wren churches in the city of London.  Most have little parks around them with a café.

The Wren Café where we went to eat looks like most American University Cafés.  This is probably why I liked it.  The moment you walked in this café, the aroma of homemade soup teased your nose and made you hungry.

This café served broccoli-cheese soup.  I ordered it from a menu written on a chalkboard.

What made the Wren Café so collegiate was the eccentric collection of customers.  The people eating at the Wren Café included hippies with very long hair, a chic couple with a big bag of books from Dillons, and an older lady with a big bag of books in grocery bags – probably from a used book store.  I thought you could get several perspectives for book discussions here.

We just had tea and a muffin here.  We took the Underground back to the hotel and passed Highgate Cemetery where Karl Marx is buried on the way back to Laughton.  We were going to change hotels for a place closer to town, so I could walk Florence around in her stroller easier.

We ate at the hotel before going to our new hotel.  I loved it that hotels had some “garde manger” or pantry items that they could offer as light meals in the lobby of the hotel to guests.

I ate tomato soup as an entrée and a sesame chicken salad as a main dish, or plat prinicipal.

Most hotels in London at that time used French menu order to designate dishes in the following way:

-hors d’oeuvre (appetizers)

-entrée (first course)

-plat principal (main course)

-fromage (cheese)

-désert (dessert)

If the French have a reliable source of lettuce like a home garden, they serve salad.  The French eat croissants and dessert on the weekend, walk a lot, and do their own housework, and cook lovely family meals, which keeps them thin, limber, and financially independent.

I have always liked this style of living, which I was exposed to on trips to Canada as a child. 

You can take a bus to Canada and shop for Christofle Crystal on Oulette Street in Windsor, Ontario, for example, come back to Detroit, shop at DuMochelle’s and drive back to Grosse Pointe, if you really wanted to.

After lunch, we moved to a Posthouse Hotel in Epping and called it a day.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup in Chopsticks and Marrying France

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