"I'm gonna have a beef baby!"

Apologies again for the absence. I have realised that I'm either not doing anything interesting so there is nothing to write about, or I'm doing lots of interesting things so I'm too busy to sit down and write about it! This post will therefore be just one of a couple that I'll write today to share some of the fun things that I've been doing this weekend! (Warning: on reflection, after I've written the full thing, I've also realised I've written more of an essay than a blog post. Go and get a cup of tea before continuing to read.)

It all started with my impending departure from London. Nothing gets you to plan and book things you want to do like a big old deadline of a one-way flight.  My friend Heidi and I had been discussing, over the course of 2011, two events that we wanted to get into our diaries:

1) Go to the Warner Brothers Harry Potter Studio Tour in London (technically just outside of London in Leavesden, but I'll try not to be pedantic)
2) Eat the 7-course Beef Tasting Menu at Hawksmoor Guidhall, a steak restaurant in the City

Like many things we were enthuastic about these ideas but hadn't really committed to them, the former because it required booking quite well in advance, the latter because it meant booking quite well in advance AND £700 per table (with 10 people, it was £70 a head, before wine).

However once 2012 rolled around and the clock started ticking on my time in London, I decided to get my butt in gear and nag Heidi into getting out her calendar and finding a time for these things. We booked the Harry Potter for Saturday 28th of April back in January, and once we rounded out our group of 10 with friends and family who were interested, booked the Hawksmoor in March for Friday 27th of April.

Then everyone at work started nagging me about organising a karaoke session before I left, and somehow Thursday 26th of April was the best date that worked for everyone. So my social calendar for the week ended up looking like this:

Thursday 26th - karaoke (booze up)
Friday 27th - Beef Tasting (wine up)
Saturday 28th - Harry Potter

You're probably thinking oh well that's ok, at least the Harry Potter isn't a booze up! You'd be correct except that after the Harry Potter I then went to Babs' birthday drinks (booze up!)

Back to the Hawksmoor. The reason why it was important to mention karaoke is because English people cannot do karaoke sober. Unlike how it is for Chinese people, karaoke with the English is not an arena for solo power ballads, but for manic screaming of songs accompanied by Spice Girl dance moves. This, for a culture that is mostly fairly reserved but thankfully also fairly alchoholic, requires a fair amount of pre-requisite alcohol. So by the end of Thursday evening, I'd had a pretty big night out (and shush to you all who say, but May, you are Chinese, so doesn't that mean you could have refrained from alcohol and just gone along to the karaoke sober with your full arsenal of Shania Twain songs at the ready? Shush to you. When other people drink, I drink. And I get drunk faster than all of them so I'm the first one drunk). And with the memory of my hangover from a couple of weeks ago, I started Friday fully prepared to fight the battle of the hangover. This meant a bowl of cheerios at home, followed by a cream cheese bagel at work, greasy chips and pasta bake at lunch, and three pints of water throughout the day. Hurrah! I left work at 5:30 that day feeling mostly still fresh as a daisy, if a little bit sleepy on the train ride into the City. But with the amount of food consumed it also meant I wasn't half -starved like I should have been, to prepare for the gluttony that awaited me. Still, I responded to the emails from Heidi (proclaiming "Ladies! It's Cow Day!!!!") and the more poignant response from Jamie (simply "MOOOOOOOOO") during the day with appropriate enthusiasm. 

I fully acknowledge this lack of planning was a massive schoolboy error on my part. But I also know that I can eat like a horse (often eating bigger portions that Keith, who is almost a foot taller than I am), so I still thought I could handle it. So I was still wildly excited when at 7:30pm we sat down in our cushy leather booth and perused the following menu:

• Beef Tea
• Tongue & Tail Salad
• Turbot & Shortrib
• Steak Tartare: Beef vs Veal
• Beef shin macaroni
• Bone-in Prime Rib, Porterhouse, Hawksmoor Sausages, Beef Dripping Chips and Salads
• Suet Sticky Toffee Pudding with Clotted Cream

Seven courses with some part of cow in all of them! I was in HEAVEN. I thought of course with a seven course menu the portions would be tiny, but they weren't. They were full sized, and they were DELICIOUS. The beef tea, which was best described as either a thick broth or a thin gravy, served from a teapot into blue and white delicate china cups, was interesting. The tongue and tail salad were flavourful. The turbot (a white fish) and shortrib was presented on a dollop of the creamiest mashed potatoes I have ever eaten. By the time I got to the steak tartares, I knew better than to smear it all over the thick slices of yummy sourdough toast that they'd laid out in baskets - carbs were going to take up too much room. But by the time I got to the beef shin macaroni (the one course which had stuck in my head ever since we'd looked at the menu online) I knew I was going to be defeated. Thankfully, or disappointingly, depends how you want to look at it, the beef shin macaroni (which arrived in a VAT, I kid you not) was fairly lacklustre, the macaroni slightly greasy and the beef shin a hunk of tough meat at the bottom of the VAT which took two men to hack to pieces. I didn't finish all of the portion ladled out to me. By the time the prime rib, porterhouse steaks, and hawksmoor sausages made its way to our table, I could only have two bites of porterhouse steak and half a chip and couldn't manage any more. At this point in the meal I think I had my head in my hands and just let everyone else chatter away around me. And although I was first to start wanting to lie down, fairly soon all 10 of us were trying in the most polite manner to sneak in a nap in the middle of dinner. That still didn't stop me from having 3 bites of my sticky tofee pudding at the end - the clotted cream was just too delicious to forgo.

3 hours of gorging ourselves, and we were all rubbing our bellies like we were about to explode. When I looked down it really felt like I was carrying another human (baby cow?) inside me, and I was not the only one who proclaimed that it felt like I was carrying a "beef baby".

It was delicious, it was spectacular, it was something I'd highly recommend doing once and never again, unless you're a big fan of the meat sweats.