Londonlicious is London’s take on Toronto’s notorious Summer- and Winter-licious events. Unfortunately, the pricey menus leave little room to explore local cuisine.
The event features prix fixe menus offered at a collection of popular London restaurants. This provides people an opportunity to taste popular dishes, without paying full price. If you have a really good experience during the event, maybe you’ll come back for the full menu, ready to dish out more cash.
Londonlicious includes a good number of top London restaurants, but most menus have shockingly high prices that leave you little room to “try” anything and hardly give you any real bang for your buck.
One example is Fellini Koolini’s, an upscale Italian restaurant downtown known for its quality and reasonably priced dishes. You would think Londonlicious would be a perfect opportunity to test this place out before suggesting it for a special night out.
Among other high priced items, the lunch menu includes a seven-ounce New York striploin for $35 (with appetizer and dessert).
Other top restaurants offer more of the same. Dinner at Garlic’s is $35/person, as is dinner at Blu-Duby and Che Restobar.
With prices like these you’re better off paying the same (in some cases a bit less) for their full menu, where your options aren’t limited to a prix fixe menu of questionable value.
Fortunately, Tamarine, an upscale Vietnamese restaurant offered a dinner menu for $25/person, so I was able to give it a try without having to dish out a ton of cash.
The owner said things have been very busy, especially on weekends.
That said, the restaurant was already busy with plenty of reservations being made when I visited on a Tuesday evening.
Tamarine’s Londonlicious menu features several dishes spread into appetizers, entrées and desserts.
A waitress commented that the Londonlicious menu has Tamarine putting its best foot forward.
The food was fantastic, which combined with the reasonable price made it a saving grace of upscale Londonlicious restaurants this season.
With such a significant student population in London it would be nice to see more affordable menus offered by restaurants participating in Londonlicious.
Hopefully in future years the student population will have more of an opportunity to taste the culinary diversity the city of London has to offer.