A Birthday Christmas Holiday: Day 8

After one final salmon sandwich with egg at the Reykjavik airport (God bless you, Iceland!)…

…I took a flight back to London…

…where I had just enough time to check into my room at the Amba Hotel Charring Cross…

(…and grab a snack from the free minibar…)

…before running off again to my scheduled Muggle (Walking) Tour.

Our tour started in Borough Market (a foodie paradise) where scenes from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (and Bridget Jones’s Diary AND Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) were filmed…

…and, after about 2 hours, ended in Cecil Court, which inspired Diagon Alley.

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Once the tour ended, I needed to run off once more to Sushi Tetsu.

This was a restaurant that I had been trying hard to get into since I had tickets to London.

They only have 7 seats and they have 2 hour lunch and dinner offerings where the chef selects the best fish and serves them one piece at a time…an experience I’ve seen in the film Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

I wanted an experience similar to this, but it’s so hard to get in!

Every 1st and 3rd Monday, they open the phone lines to make reservations for a two week period in the following month. So on Monday, November 2nd, I called and called on for the period I would be in London.

But I only got busy signals.

So I put myself on a Waiting List and subscribed to their Twitter feed (as they announce cancellations).

Then, while in Iceland, they had an opening and I had to reserve the spot by emailing them my credit card number.

And I did it.

So here I was, racing to the restaurant, accidentally getting off a tube stop too soon and realizing I was still 20 minutes away on foot.

I hailed a cab driven by someone not familiar with where I was going and helped navigate him toward my destination.

I let him take a right instead of a left and then got out (as it was faster on foot) and ran.

I arrived 5 minutes late, but the hostess was waiting for me and she was very pleasant and welcoming despite my tardiness.

After being given my seat, I relaxed and settled in.

First, I was given some ednamame…

…and then came a tray with two types of sauces…

…used for this beautiful plate of sashimi (fish on the left were to be dipped in left bowl, fish on the right for the right bowl).

Soon after, other courses started coming…

…including this salad made of octopus, squid, shrimp and more in a mustard dressing…

…and mackerel with vegetables to be eaten together.

During the meal, I talked with the hostess and later an Italian from Rimini who sat next to me (he was with a Japanese woman who worked at Nobu London).

The time started to really fly by…

…especially when I got into the second half of the dinner – the nigiri.

The first two pieces I ate immediately because I wanted the experience of eating them right away.