I’m staying right in the city centre, bang next to a Cardiff nightlife hotspot: Chippy Lane.
It is interesting to walk down this stretch and look at the various fast food options, a few of which have been here since the 1950-60s. My son showed me which vendors he and his friends frequent after nights out on the town - some chippies are open until 4 am.
those look delicious!
They were! But a bit smaller than I was expecting.
Morning coffee at Kin and Ilk, a Cardiff based coffee shop chain. I visited the St David branch.
Cortado was £3.80. They took their time making it, so I had high hopes but the cortado was not made well.
I don’t think I’ll bother with this cafe again.
Cardiff was truly living upto its reputation as the rainiest city in the UK. It hasn’t stopped raining since I arrived.
Cardiff market entrance in the rain:
I nipped in to take a photo of the current menu of the pierogi place, as requested by my son:
They had toy plush pierogies for sale too!
Lunch at KeralaCafe (153-155 Crwys Rd, Cardiff CF24 4NH)
Wasn’t too busy on a Saturday lunchtime. Service was sweet but slightly haphazard. Seems like a family based operation with a one man crew in the kitchen.
Beef pazhampori was randomly served first, way before anything else.
It was really good. The plantains were perfectly cooked - crisp and puffy on the outside, sticky and melting on the inside. Matched really well with the beef curry. Only one piece of beef was too chewy and gristly to finish.
Then the waitress changed to the primary school-aged daughter of the owner, very carefully making her way across the room with the tray of drinks: mango lassi and fresh lime soda. The lime soda was less sweet and no added salt as requested. Very refreshing.
Beef dry fry - fantastic textures and flavours on this. My son went over to the bar and got half a lime to squeeze over.
Ghee roast dosa:
With the full complement of chutneys and sambhar dal:
Finally my kallappam arrived, which were lovely to mop up the rest of my beef curry from the pazhampori with.
This was a great Malayali food experience, very reasonably priced.
That dosa 
looks great!
Genatsvale (21 St Mary St, Cardiff CF10 1PL)
A lovely dinner at this restaurant in the city centre. Our first time trying Georgian cuisine.
We tried a tarragon flavoured soda. Bright green, very sweet with a pronounced aniseed flavour. I ended up ordering some sparkling mineral water (a Georgian brand apparently from Georgian mountains) to water mine down. On its own, the water had quite a strong mineral taste.
Started off with pkhali - spinach, carrot, green bean and beetroot pâtès, and aubergine rolls filled with walnut paste. Very enjoyable.
Mains: kidney bean stew, lamb skewer (didn’t come on an actual skewer but we presume was cooked on one), and beef and pork mini dumplings (pilmeni).
Ordered some cornbread (mjadhi) to finish off the rest of the vegetable pâtès.
A pretty extensive list of Georgian wines. I had a glass of white wine (Rkatsiteli).
We were only 3 people and weren’t super hungry, so we decided we would have to come back another time to try the khachapuri and khinkali.
I would definitely come back to explore the rest of the menu.
Those Georgian sodas are almost undrinkably sweet. A good friend and I visited our local Georgian cafe and tried both the berbere and the pear soda. We did the same as you did and diluted with the exact same Georgian water (which was hella expensive!).
The pkhali look great! What did you think of the eggplant rolls?
Eggplant rolls were excellent! I might have to learn how to make them as there are no Georgian restaurants in my town.
They’re a major PITA to make, but probz worth the effort if you can’t get them anywhere. I can’t remember which recipe I used, but they are likely quite similar to one another.
Thanks - always nice to have a fancy-ish vegan recipe up one’s sleeve for vegan/vegetarian guests coming over for a special occasion.
I wanted to try the pear soda but they had run out of it. Maybe next time!
Well, you’ve been warned. It’s like drinking candy.
I see you’re flying the flag of the land of my fathers as your avatar. Diolch yn fawr.
Didn’t realise you had Welsh ancestry. It’s interesting to be in a part of the UK with bilingual signage everywhere.
Dad’s mother came from Hawarden, where her family farmed. Situated almost on the border with Cheshire, I think the village is mainly anglophone. An ex-colleague lived in Wrexham once told me the language thing is very complex in that area. You might have one village that generally speaks English, while another a couple of miles down the road generally speaks Welsh as a first language.
Although we’ve not been for some years, the village pub (Glynne Arms) had very decent food at lunch.
Madhav (59 Lower Cathedral Rd, Cardiff CF11 6LW)
This is an Indian/Afro-Caribbean grocer with a café called Maruti attached to it. It’s very bare bones and basic as a cafe but bigger than we expected. Interestingly, the owners seem to be Maharashtrian - cuisine from this part of India is hard to find in UK restaurants.
The menu, on a battered piece of laminated paper:
Various cold beverages, mainly imports from India, in a fridge near the counter.
Started off with samosas, 3 to an order. The pastry was one I’d not come across in a samosa before, similar to the fried dough in a poori. Very tasty and fresh - piping hot but not soggy from microwaving. Standard filling of potatoes and peas.
We ordered the thali and misal pav. I thought I had taken a photo of the thali, but it was just a sideways photo of the chef/server/owner of the place!
You can see the thali in the background of this photo:
Everything on the menu is vegetarian. The thali was great - all the curries (a dry potato curry, a dry cabbage curry and a more liquid curry of carrots and black eyed peas) and the dal were excellent. We didn’t have the kachori as it was really oily. The chapatis were nicely made. Sadly, the misal part of the misal pav was a miss - too salty, I think from a fistful of chanachur (Bombay Mix) that had been added in.
The grocery is very well stocked with a huge variety of Indian products and many African and Caribbean products as well.
Fresh Feast (46-48 Charles St, Cardiff CF10 2GE)
A Chinese restaurant with a wide-ranging menu. We went here on a cold and rainy Sunday evening. It wasn’t very busy and the only other customers were a few Chinese students. Ordering is via iPad. They didn’t have the biang biang noodles I was interested in (they said none of that type of noodles left). So I went for dan dan noodles instead. Son ordered Lanzhou beef noodle soup (with hand pulled noodles). And we got a XP seafood fried rice to share.
Tap water served in these little jugs to drink directly out of (we were each given a small jug and no other receptacle to drink from)!
The servings were enormous.
Beef noodle soup:
Dan dan noodles. More soupy than I expected. Very salty. The noodles (same as in the beef noodle soup) were excellent though - great texture.
Forgot to photograph the fried rice, but also an enormous portion. Prawns were cut up into smaller pieces, with the bulk of the ‘seafood’ being surimi. A few squid tentacles found in the depths.
We packed up most of the dan dan noodles and fried rice to take away.
Those have got to be the soupiest dan dan noodles I’ve ever seen. And the beef noodle soup looks like it’s been made with … chicken broth? Huh.
