The London Eye

I took advantage of the mini break in the typically grey weather. We had two days in SW London where it was warm and sunny and heavenly and, like a typical American girl, I went and baked myself in the sun. And although I got got burned to a crisp and suffered a full week of painful redness and nearly unbearable itchiness as layers of my back peeled away, and am probably on the shortlist for skin cancer as a result, I’m now a glorious shade of golden brown. It's a well-known fact that everything done with a tan is at least 10% more awesome and 90% more attractive!

Me with my first English sunburn, making a really stupid face

During the same week I suffered the discomforts associated with sunburn I was happily distracted by a nifty array of birthday-linked activities. This post describes the first day of birthday-ing.

These past few months I've neglected describing all the different restaurants I've tried, mostly because they all seem great to me and I’m not much of a food critic. Frankly, I’m happy just to have someone else cook for me and serve me the food I select off a list of choices. As long as the dish doesn't look questionable when it's served and doesn't make me ill afterward I’m usually satisfied, especially if I haven't had to trade in an arm and a leg for it. But in this case, stop #1 on my first birthday day was to The Square in Mayfair, a 2 Michelin Star Central London restaurant. While many of his peers are fawning for the TV cameras or signing cookbooks, Philip Howard is at the stove, attending to the finer points of unimpeachable, grade-A contemporary cuisine. Although it can feel a bit corporate and the acoustics leave something to be desired (I felt like I was talking loudly just to be heard cross a small, two-person table), such gripes seem churlish when Howard reliably delivers ‘perfectly paced’ cooking and sheer indulgent class. Nearly every table was occupied by smartly dressed business types that Thursday afternoon, which isn't a surprise considering the location right off Old Bond St. Appropriately named, The Square is an angular, impersonal room, but also very open and light and clean-white. Sober and modern. Luckily, in contrast to the room itself, service was friendly as well as plentiful. We had so many waiters and servers such come to our table there was never a moment when I feared I wouldn't be properly gastronomically pampered. 

Flavors are big and complex, and saucing is exquisite. Paired with my first Earl Grey iced tea in London, a real treat for an American used to the sweet, cool southern drink easily found anywhere in the US but nowhere in the UK, we were served an amuse bouche before the meal of potato foam and salmon on the side, plus a current and walnut bread selection with warm butter was a lovely, light way to begin the meal. The starter was the chef's special that day, Roast Isle of Orkney Scallops with peas, broad beans, morels and parmesan. I love seafood, so I couldn't resist sticking to it with a main of sauté of John Dory with turnip tops, snails, morels, peas and parmesan. For dessert, crème caramel with candied fruit (I know there were raisins but I couldn't tell what the other fruit was...something sugar-coated so it's not like I worried about labeling it, really) and warm blood orange brioche roulade. £80 a person for four courses, so it wasn’t a cheap lunch, but we had a fabulous time. Though it’s never been the trendiest restaurant on the block, but The Square is a benchmark for pure-bred, French-inspired culinary sophistication. 

These aren't all photos of what we ate, specifically, that day but they were pretty photos from the slideshow on the website

Feeling fully, well, full after several hours of lingering dining and conversation, we made out way south via the underground to Westminster Station, just across the river from the London Eye, destination #2 for birthday day #1...interestingly, a perfect Circle in contrast to The Square....

It is the tallest Ferris wheel in Europe, and the most popular paid tourist attraction in the United Kingdom, visited by over 3.5 million people annually.When erected in 1999, it was the tallest Ferris wheel in the world, until surpassed first by the 160 m (520 ft) Star of Nanchang in 2006, and then the 165 m (541 ft) Singapore Flyer in 2008. It is still described by its operators as "the world's tallest cantilevered observation wheel" (as the wheel is supported by an A-frame on one side only, unlike the Nanchang and Singapore wheels). Originally the Millennium Wheel, the London Eye was officially called the British Airways London Eye and then the Merlin Entertainments London Eye. Since 20 January 2011, its official name is the EDF Energy London Eye following a three-year sponsorship deal.

Inside a capsule, at night (duh!)

Either way, whatever you want to call it, “The Eye has done for London what the Eiffel Tower did for Paris, which is to give it a symbol and to let people climb above the city and look back down on it. Not just specialists or rich people, but everybody. That's the beauty of it: it is public and accessible, and it is in a great position at the heart of London.” Writing for G2 in an article from August 2007, Steve Rose described the Eye as follows, “The Eye... exists in a category of its own.... It essentially has to fulfill only one function, and what a brilliantly inessential function it is: to lift people up from the ground, take them round a giant loop in the sky, then put them back down where they started. That is all it needs to do, and thankfully, that is all it does.”