Okay, I know the intro is really dumb, but yay for international restauranting!  Back in November of 2009, Mike and I travelled to England to visit some good friends.  One night while we were there, we all went into London (about a half-hour’s car ride from where we were staying) to see “The Phantom of the Opera” at Her Majesty’s Royal Theatre.  We needed to stop and get some dinner first, though, so we randomly picked this little place, which is about a block from the theatre, and I am so glad we did!  This is one of those little restaurants that takes a simple idea, a simple way of doing things, and makes it into something great.  All the tables were set up the same way they are in school cafeterias, so each one seated well over a dozen people.

    There were a lot of different dishes you could get, as you can see by the pic to the left, and ordering was a dodgy business because a lot of the dishes had really unusual names and very short descriptions.  I think I just pointed to mine and then butchered the name.  I’ll get to my main dish in a moment, but I really wanted to focus on my appetizer: Dumplings.  I love Asian dumplings.

  I would eat them everyday if I could.  They are a perfect blend of meat and dough.  I believe I got pork dumplings at Miso, but I could have that wrong.  I honestly don’t remember.  Nevertheless, these dumplings were really good.  Of course, I paired my meal with green tea.  Mmmmm, tea...but I digress.  After the truly stupendous dumplings, my main dish arrived.

    Here is something I love about a good restaurant, and this truly is a sign of a good restaurant: You get what you pay for and sometimes more.  I got some form of duck soup for my main course, and the bowl they brought me might as well have been a tureen.  There was enough food there to feed four people!  I think I only paid about six or seven quid for this dish.  It’s a real shame so much of it went to waste, but Mike, Sally, and Chris all got equally big portions and we couldn’t

very well bring a take away container into the theatre with us.  I am a little sad to say that the soup was not as good as the dumplings.  Duck, alas, is a greasy, greasy bird and so my soup was too, but that’s not the restaurant’s fault.  Otherwise it was very good.

    Sally, who pretty much only eats fish for meat, ordered a kind of seafood soup thing.  That was very interesting.  You know how Asian countries are far less picky about their seafood than us silly Westerners?  Yeah, there were some unidentifiable types of seafood in her bowl.  I’m sure it was perfectly fine.  Not knowing just what some of those things were was just a bit too intimidating for any of us to try.  Oh, the service was excellent at Miso too.  The servers weren’t real talkative (slight language barrier), but they were very prompt and attentive.  All in all, it was a really great place, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is in the neighborhood of Her Majesty’s Royal Theatre in London.  Just make sure to bring a sense of adventure for the ordering process.