Life's a beach at Rosa's

London Restaurant Festival gets underway on Monday 4th October. During its two-week stint, there's some 250 restaurants throughout the UK capital offering Festival Menus for as little as £10. To book a festival menu, just visit the LRF website. This week I went along to one of the participating restaurants in Soho to continue my series of Street Level blogs and report on a Thai evening at Rosa's.

Street Level: Life's a beach at Rosa's
The best nights out are often those that produce the unexpected. Catching up with an old friend over Thai food in the heart of Soho was always going to result in stories of surprising and often salacious gossip. What I really didn’t expect however, was to discover some of the best Thai cuisine in London from a restaurant I must have walked past a thousand times and never acknowledged was there.

What’s even more surprising is that Rosa’s doesn’t exactly blend into the Dean Street brickwork. Its bright red frontage is hard to miss when you’re actually looking for it. Even on this cold and rainy evening, in-the-know diners sat outside under the awning, no doubt drinking green teas whilst watching the Old Compton Street characters and chaos unfold.

On opening the bright red door, you half expect a bell overhead to ring akin to an old curiosity shop but instead, you enter a modern Thai family eatery, designed to resemble a Phuket beach hut. Wooden benches upstairs are made for sharing and the wooden wall paneling has interspersed coat hooks or rather, hooks to hang your towel on if this really was a beach hut on a Thai island.

After ushering my guest onto the bench and taking my seat on the wooden stool opposite, we order a bottle of red before I head downstairs to dry myself off after getting caught in the torrential downpour outside. The basement is a darker, more mood-driven bar dining area and the toilets are communal, adding to the rustic ambience Rosa’s sets out to create.

Back upstairs, and I discover we’d been moved to a more intimate wooden booth towards the back of the restaurant. These booths should be requested when booking in order to keep confidences private and to allow greater room to spread out the Thai delicacies as they arrive.

For starters, we shared a mouthwatering deep fried soft shell crab topped with thai herbs, shallots and spicy fresh chilli sauce and a Som Tam papaya salad with prawns. It may have been the beach hut surroundings, but we both opted for more seafood with coconut rice as our main course.

I went for grilled squid, pan fried tiger prawns and scallops stir fried with mixed spices and yellow chilli. My guest ordered a thai chilli seafood mousse, baked in half a butternut squash which, when served, looked more like a tropical cocktail than a main course but tasted divine.

Thailand is known as the ‘Land of Smiles’ and our waiting staff didn’t disappoint, maintaining friendly fast service without interrupting the flow of our conversation.

When we left, the rain outside no longer mattered. We could have been in a tropical monsoon as we’d just dined on Thai seafood which I was more than happy to believe had been line-caught fresh from the pier at the front of our Phuket beach hut.

Rosa’s is running a Festival Menu as part of this year’s London Restaurant Festival.

What happened next? A look back on my travels to Thailand and Israel

As 2008 draws to a close, I hope you’ll allow me the small indulgence of reflecting on two of my personal highlights - travel writing assignments to places that have subsequently experienced significant world events.

As I flew into Bangkok's new international airport, Suvarnabhumi and marvelled at its unique architectural design, I never imagined that five months later, it would form the backdrop for anti-government protests that resulted in more than 300,000 travellers becoming stranded.

I went to Thailand to write a series of articles promoting it as both a C&I destination and luxury tourist destination. The Thai people are the friendliest and most hospitable I’ve ever met. The idyllic landscapes, turquoise waters and distinctive cuisine all add to the appeal whilst, my experience of river bathing an elephant at the Baan Kwan Chang camp up in the hills at Klong Son is one I shall never forget.

However, the eight-day airport shutdown that followed, battered the country’s tourist-friendly image amidst a political storm that appears to be worsening with the Thai parliament now under a new blockade.

In September, I found myself in Jerusalem, for Luxury Travel magazine, attempting to make sense of a country, which throughout history has been torn apart by religious and cultural differences.

My guide went to great lengths to show me that, today, Israelis and Palestinians live and work side-by-side in harmony. But, the scars of gunfire in the city walls and the underlying religious tension across a city that has such significance to so many, is a constant reminder of how quickly the melting pot can boil over.

On 11 November, brawling priests and Israeli paramilitary police careered through the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The fight erupted when a Greek Orthodox monk posted in Jesus’s tomb blocked the path of Armenian monks participating in a ceremony to mark the 4th-century discovery of the cross on which Jesus was crucified.

I had stood in that spot where the fists went flying and had remarked on the religious tension of a Roman Catholic church situated adjacent to a muslim mosque that was broadcasting prayer and drowning out the words of my Jewish guide.

At the time, the ceasefire between Israel and militants in Gaza had been in place since June. It lasted until November, when it began to break down with violations on both sides. Its recent collapse has resulted in the latest Israeli bombing campaign, which so far has killed in excess of 360 Palestinians.

Behind the scenes, Israel’s tourist industry is working hard to consign the country’s past to history and look to a future, which in 2009 includes Tel Aviv’s centenary celebrations. The hotels, guides and destination management companies face an uphill struggle. But it’s a fascinating country and whilst there, I acquired a wealth of knowledge that has broadened my world view. And for that, I’m grateful.

There have been many other memorable moments of 2008 as I’ve pursued freelance writing opportunities that have taken me in varied and diverse directions. I hope the blog posts along the way have been worth reading and I appreciate the support of everyone that’s followed me on this site throughout the year. I’m looking forward to the year ahead and I wish you all a prosperous and happy 2009.