I’m fairly certain this blog is going to take the shape of three parts. Maui was three & it was seven days, Puerto Rico was two & it was three days, so we’ll see if we can fit it all into three weeks worth of blogs! This may end up changing forms mid-series but that remains to be seen. So, I suppose, without any further ado, let’s get into it shall we?
Prologue:
I’d always known I wanted to go abroad for my thirtieth, let’s face it though, I want to go abroad at any given time. The original plan for that was Australia/New Zealand but ye olde corona virus saw fit to change that plan along with so, so many others. I love the United Kingdom, I’ve had a mild obsession with it since late high school & always enjoy my time there. Seeing how the UK has reopened & Australia has the door slightly ajar in terms of current tourism, The UK became the logical destination of choice.
As I’m sure many of you know, any great trip requires preparation & planning, long twelve day trips six time zones away on the other side of an ocean, extensively so. I knew I wanted to do London for my actual birthday but I also wanted to rekindle some relationships & do a little work while in country. For those of you that didn't know I was in the process of planning a UK based radio tour when covid hit back in 2020 around the song “When He Was Me,” a song that is still yet to be released. The plan was similar this go round except it was meant to center on “Just Another Late Night,” a song that still has yet to come out….but will soon, I promise. Naturally I didn’t want to do a massive radio tour around a single that no one could stream yet so it really just became a series of small acoustic sets.
I reached out to any & all UK based or affiliated music friends of mine to try & pack my musical schedule but I fear I waited a tad too long to do so & thus only a few things ended up happening. I’m grateful for each of you reading this who offered me support, help, reached out on my behalf, etc. I am so incredibly grateful for each of you!
As the above paragraph would indicate we waited just a touch too long to make those moves as well as buying tickets. Plane tickets that were $650 round trip on the Saturday three weeks before were either sold out or almost double three days later but we managed & the dates of the 13th-the 25th were set.
Evan is much more the type A planner than I am & he immediately set out to make accommodations. He found an incredible house/petsitter for us, got connected with our friends Victoria & Rhys in London who graciously offered us a place to stay, & started mapping out days. I dove headfirst into food planning, as I do, & came across several Michelin Star restaurants that I then attempted to snag reservations at.
The week before our departure was pure mayhem. My 185 gallon reef tank decided to develop a plague, of which I’m still battling, the house required scrubbing, pet food required prepping, laundry needed doing, travel documents, covid regulations, all needed navigating, in addition to our normal duties of work & content creation. We also did a photo shoot in the middle of this for album artwork! We did it though, we got everything together & orderly though it truly came down to the last couple hours!
Part One:
Take Me Back To London
Day One
We made it to bed far later than we’d hoped or expected & thus only slept around four or five hours. Our pre-scheduled Lyft met us at the door at 5:30 AM CST & we departed to the Nashville airport for our 7:20 flight to Washington D.C.. The original plan upon arriving in DC around noon was to meet Evan’s brother who lives in Bethesda for lunch during our six+ hour layover but unfortunately something came up. We also made it to the ticket counter at Dulles for Virgin Atlantic far before the staff had even thought about coming into work. We waited around two hours, grabbing food & a drink or two in the interim. We finally got checked in around 2:30 or 3, had an easy trip through security, if you don’t count Evan getting searched for packing a candle in his carry-on, & made our way to our gate.
I took the opportunity of time to film an Object Writing video for Terminal, which I had already done voice over for. I edited it & had it up within an hour or so. If you’d like to give it a view you can find it here! After posting my Wednesday writing prompt I got up & went in search of snacks. I learned this nifty little thing from my friend Stephen Lovegrove. Any time he flies he gifts the flight attendants snacks; candy, chips, anything else he thinks they might like. His reasoning is that flight attendants, especially on international or cross country flights, are there waiting on you hand & foot for upwards of four to eight hours straight. They deserve a treat & definitely better pay & benefits, but then again, so do most people. We boarded our flight, economy deluxe, & passed our bag of goodies to the steward in charge of our section, he was elated. I also may have dropped my guitar on a teenager’s face as I was trying to get it into the overhead bin, it slid out on me. I felt horrible. After battering a youth we claimed our seats for the next seven plus hours & headed off to Heathrow around 7:30 PM EST.
I have this rule anytime I fly through multiple time zones. If you’re headed east, fly red eye, that way you can sleep on the flight & wake up when it’s appropriate to be awake in your new time zone. This works best if you can get a seat that lays somewhat flat. On the other hand, if you’re going west then I recommend flying in the morning or early afternoon & staying up for the duration of your flight, that way you land & are tired at a time when it’s appropriate to go to sleep in that new timezone. I haven’t figured out north to south yet, but I’ll let you all know the minute I do!
Day Two
We landed in London around 6:30 AM GMT having logged around three hours of sleep at most. We departed the plane, I snagged by guitar being sure not to assault anyone this time, & we made our way through immigration. If you’ve never been to the UK CCTV is a very popular thing there, it’s basically government surveillance that’s kept in majority of public spaces. It sounds very big brother I know, but when you enter the country they scan your passport & your face & allow you on your merry way. Evan of course got stopped again.
We grabbed our bags & popped onto the Piccadilly Line, making our way from Heathrow to Covent Gardens in what was now the morning rush into London. At the Covent Gardens tube stop we were greeted by Victoria & Rhys who graciously showed us to their flat. When we got upstairs they asked if we needed a nap, the plan of which was an hour & a half. It ended up being around two to three.
Still dreary from travel & frankly starving we decided we were going to walk from Covent Gardens to Borough Market in Southwark. I’d been to London before, Evan has not, nor had he been truly out of the North Americas. So with that in mind we did a little sight seeing along the way. We passed by St. Paul’s Cathedral, all ready for Easter, we crossed Millennium Bridge, then made our way past The Globe to the Market.
At the market I had my sights set on a Scotch Egg from Scotchtails but much to my dismay it had been closed down due to the hardship of covid. For those of you who don’t know what a scotch egg is, it’s a soft boiled egg wrapped in sausage & breadcrumbs. It’s fire. Disappointed I followed Ev’s desire for Fish & Chips & we got in line at Fish! We asked the attendant what to get & he suggested the lemon bream so that’s what we got along with curry sauce, chips, & gravy. On the way to finding a spot to sit down we found doughnuts at Bread Ahead, a pistachio & a blackcurrant cheesecake one & grabbed a cranberry lemonade from a local fruit vendor.
The lemon bream was delightful! It worked really well with the curry sauce & was a very light, flaky fish with, as the name would suggest, a light lemony-ness to it! I wanted to like the brown gravy more than I did but I was more than happy leaning heavily on the curry sauce for the chips as well. Both doughnuts were outstanding though, much to my surprise, I favored the cheesecake one, Evan leaned pistachio.
After lunch the walking tour of London continued. We continued down the bank past London City Hall til we got to Tower Bridge. After crossing Tower Bridge & walking around the Tower of London where we hopped the Circle Line to Westminster. Arriving at Westminster we saw Big Ben, Parliament, & The London Eye before walking back to Covent Gardens to meet up with Victoria & Rhys once more.
We let Victoria pick dinner, since we had already chosen the following day’s. She immediately responded with the question “do you like Batman?” to which I excitedly replied “YES!?” After chilling at their flat for a while, probably passing back out in the interim, we got dressed & were led to dinner.
Through Leicester Square we meandered until we were prompted to enter a rather plain looking office building. We entered into a room that looked like an old library adorned with books like “Alice In Wonderland,” “The Drunken Botanist,” etc., busts & portraits of the Wayne family, & a giant stuffed horned owl. We were shown through the bookshelf to a flight of stairs which descended two stories all the while playing Hans Zimmer’s score from Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. At the bottom of the stairs we were shown through two double doors into a massive 20s style room, complete with jazz band. We had entered Park Row.
If you hadn’t guessed from the above two paragraphs, Park Row is a Batman themed restaurant. The venue is themed after the Iceberg Lounge from Batman Returns & is chockablock with easter eggs & little nods to the films & comic universe at large. We started our evening with a round of drinks, of course all of them being in theme. I got the Bludhaven (Sesame Scotch Old Fashioned), Evan got Matches (Roasted Pineapple Rum Collins), & Victoria ordered The Blue Boy (Blue Caraçao Gimlet) a drink poured from the frame of a print of “The Blue Boy” by Thomas Gainsborough. For our appetizer Evan & I split the “Fit For A Knight” the menu’s Beef Tartare dish & Victoria & Rhys split an order of Fried Oysters. For our main course I got Gotham City’s Savior, an excellently prepared ribeye, Evan got the Mama Maroni, some pretty solid tortellini, & V & R split The Elite, a massive dry aged Tomahawk steak. We skipped dessert, unlike me, I know, but the Row offers a lot of very cool novelty desserts most of which use liquid nitrogen!
After using the Joker themed loo (Harley Quinn for the ladies) we ascended the stairs & walked back through the madness of Leicester Square to Covent Gardens.
Day Three
Day three started with a bit of a rush. Victoria had made lunch plans for us in the City of London & we all wanted to squeeze a workout in. Rhys went with his trainer & Ev & I tried to squeeze into Victoria’s Barrys Soho class but unfortunately it was full. We found a few spots in Barrys Central London & set out to make the class.
I’m someone who, for the most part, can’t workout in the morning & if I do I have to have been awake for over an hour & I have to have eaten something & had caffeine. I think it has something to do with my blood sugar being slow to ramp up in the mornings but if I don’t follow this rule it makes me sick for the remainder of the day. With that in mind we headed north to one of my favorite London coffee shops, Monmouth Coffee Company. Since it was a bright, sunny, warm London day (I know right?!) I grabbed an iced filter coffee & a pain au chocolate. When I asked the cashier which pastry to get her first suggestion was the almond croissant but then she said it, the phrase that permeated the rest of the trip. “The pains quite nice.” So the pain is what I got.
Onward through Russell Square we went til we made it to Barrys Central. We were around twenty minutes early & my mate Ali had just sent me a text asking for an updated bio for the show in Dumfries. Part of my accelerator had been mentored by an artist who now writes bios professionally so I sat outside Barrys crafting the following biography:
“Charlie Rogers is a Kansas-born, genre alchemizing country singer-songwriter based out of Nashville, TN. His genuine, often widely varied sound aims to bridge interpersonal gaps allowing each of us to feel seen & understood.
Rogers has opened for the likes of Brothers Osborne, Russell Dickerson, & Janelle Arthur. He has played CMA honors ceremonies from Charley Pride to Ricky Skaggs. His artist work & writing has been shared the world over & encompasses stages from all over the US to Spain & the UK as well.
Rogers has been a proponent for music his whole life & began singing & writing even at a very young age. His inspiration for his musical pursuits is & has always been to communicate the commonalities between us, especially for those groups who often feel unseen or unheard, often reaching across rigid genre lines to do so.
Rogers’ most recent release, “Obliterated (Acoustic Mix),” received over 100k stream independently & has been features on radio stations & popular playlists throughout the world. Rogers’ plans to release his next single, “Just Another Late Night,” in the next coming months which is to be shortly followed by “When He Was Me” a ballad written by Shay Mooney of Dan + Shay.”
It’s a pretty solid bio, no?!
Seeing as it was Easter weekend Lucy, our instructor, had decided to make class a dirty thirty. For those of you that don’t know what a dirty thirty is it’s thirty minutes on a treadmill, thirty minutes on weights. The normal Barrys formula is usually broken up into several ten minute chunks alternating between tread & floor.
After being thoroughly destroyed in a basement studio just north of Russell Square I grabbed a brotein shake & a Barrys London tank & began the speed walk back to Covent Gardens. Our initial plan was to get back to the flat with around thirty minutes before we needed to depart for lunch buuuuut class had gone over & we were running rather behind. We ended up getting there, showered, changed, & manicured within the span of around fifteen minutes.
We took the Circle Line to the City of London, a pristine, shining metropolis of a city. We were once again ushered into what appeared to be a normal office building but after ascending thirty-nine floors in the matter of just short of as many seconds we found ourselves in SushiSamba! While technically a chain, SushiSamba limits its locations to the most scenic & picturesque. This location of the restaurant has a panoramic view of London & features two outdoor patios, one with an outdoor bar, along with the massive bay windows that encompass the entirety of the restaurant.
Lunch began with a round of drinks as we waited for our table; for Rhys, a lager, Victoria, a Tangerine Spritz, Evan, a Café Millionaire (a twist on an Espresso Martini), & Me, a Kiffirinha (a twist on the Brazilian Caipirinha). Though each of these drinks were incredible in their own right it was the second round that brought the fire. Everyone ordered the same as before except me who ordered a clarified Piña Colada Old Fashioned. When I say this drink was the hit of the table I mean it. The fomo from the rest of the group was real!
For lunch we split a few different things; edamame, wagyu gyoza, toro tiradito (toro, yuzu soy, wasabi pickle, black truffle, & yuzu caviar), the Samba London roll (tuna, salmon, hamachi, avocado, asparagus, onion, hishiho mayo, crispy yuba, & yuzu dressing), & the tiger maki (crab, tiger prawn tempura, beetroot yogurt, & red onion). The Samba roll was my favorite, the Tiger Maki, Evan’s.
After lunch we basically had a free day & decided to make our way up to Shoreditch. We made a quick detour through Spitalfields Market to grab a juice & peruse before heading to what has been rated the second best bar in the entire world, Tāyer + Elementary.
If you hadn’t caught on yet this Friday was definitely a day filled with drinking…sorry Mom. V&R had taken off of work to join our escapades & we were taking full advantage of it.
Tāyer + Elementary is a quant little Shoreditch craft cocktail spot. The esthetic is very modern Industrial meets Scandinavian in design & it’s laidback simplicity creates a very soothing environment. The bar is a bit of a two in one. Elementary operating weekdays & afternoons, Tāyer taking over for the late weekends. The Bergamot Margarita & the Frozen Yuzu Margarita were popular amongst the rest of the crew, on the other hand I got one of the best Nigronis I’ve ever had in addition to an off menu drink that I still have no clue what it was. I remember it being piney though! Does it live up to the title of second best bar in the world? Yes. Yes it does. The drinks are creative & endearing, the menu is constantly changing & allowing more & more room for experimentation.
Now rather decently buzzed we made our way back to the flat. As the years go by day drinking seems to get harder & harder, rest was needed.
As aforementioned dinner had been decided by Ev & I at Kricket. Kricket is one of my favorite London stops. It’s traditional British Fare mixed with Indian in a fun chic locale. We arrived a tad early for our reservation so we were escorted down to their new speakeasy SOMA Soho. Much like their upstairs neighbors SOMA Soho takes the traditional flavors of India & integrates them into craft cocktails. I got the Almond, a whiskey soda highball meant to taste like marzipan, Evan got the Coconut, a coconut/grapefruit fizz, & Rhys got the Chai, a chai sour. Victoria ended up with wine terminating her voyage on the day of liquors.
For dinner we order way too much food. Kricket is meant to be shared so you order plates for the table & pass them about. Let me see if I can get all of what we ordered here. We got Pistachio & Date Kulcha, Bhel Puri, Samphire Pakoras, Grilled Butternut Squash, Cornish Sole, Keralan Fried Chicken, Beef Boti Kebabs, Kashmiri Lamb Ribs, Burnt Garlic Tarka Dal, & Malai Tandoori Paneer. The fried chicken & butternut squash were my personal favorites! In addition to our smorgasbord we got a bottle of wine to split, while Rhys partook in the Dark Matter, a green chili rum margarita.
Quite stuffed & intoxicated we stumbled through the bustling Soho Friday night back to the flat where we slept like rocks. If you’d like to know the level to which we were intoxicated, I am entirely lacking photos from Tāyer + Elementary on…
Day Four
HAPPY THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY TO ME!!!!!!!
If you couldn’t have guessed by the previous day’s events we woke up rather hungover. Not a great way to start a birthday I guess but I wouldn’t change a thing! After showering, dressing, contemplating the meaning of existence, it was once again time to set out.
In my Michelin search & my “Top Restaurants In The World” search one place came up consistently, The Clove Club. Having been awarded their second Michelin star back in February & being the foodie that I am I absolutely had to go celebrate my birthday there! However when I went to book the only available reservations for the 16th were at noon. Fine by me! Boujee Birthday Lunch it is!!!
We take the tube to Hackney, greeted by another glorious day in London. The only problem with the glorious nature of the day was that Evan & I had planned for UK spring, you know, dark & rainy, soooo we were a tad warm to say the least. We arrived at The Clove Club & were the first ones there, probably because we booked the opening slot but I felt a bit like an elderly couple going to get the early bird special.
We were very poshly greeted by a lovely hostess who asked if we needed anything before our seating was ready. Yes. Coffee. Lot’s of coffee. She then proceeded to bring us two excellently crafted pourover coffees.
When at little last we were sat I was greeted at the table by a birthday card from the staff in addition to a very well travelled Somm/Scuba Diver from New Zealand. He explained our tasting menu options, long or short, as well as the drink pairing options, wine, tea, or a mix of both, & off we went!
The thing with tasting menus that they don’t often advertise is the series of snacks you are presented before your “actual meal” can begin. In this case our snacks course consisted of a few things. The first thing we were brought was a Spring Herb Broth. Bright, green, herbaceous, & warm it was a very welcomed welcome gift to the two of us. Next was a crab snack, presented in the hollowed out shell it was a thin wafer like tart piped with a custard made from the crab. It was salty, creamy, & savory with that subtle crab sweetness. The third snack came on a bed of pine branches. It was a Buttermilk Fried Chicken Bite with Pine Salt. Tender, juicy, scrumptious with just the slightest alpine notes from the salt. The last snack item was a molten lava Escargot Bon Bon. I say it was molten lava because the interior cream was boiling. Encased in a delicate fried shell the escargot bon bon was an adventure for the pallet for sure! I thoroughly enjoyed it!
Our first course was delectable; a nice cut of Hot Smoked Wiltshire Trout atop an almond milk & watercress cream, served with Petrossian Caviar, brown butter almonds, & a crispy bit of the trout skin. Almost like a lighter more buttery salmon the trout was perfectly smoked & the combinations the textures brought to the dish were next level!
The second dish was the star of the show, Raw Orkney Scallops with Roasted Hazelnuts, Clementine Gel, Mushrooms, & a Black Truffle Butter on top! This is the dish that they claim won them their second Michelin star! The scallops literally melted in your mouth & the bright citrus paired perfectly with mellow earth notes of the truffle & mushrooms. Truly a stand out worthy of the star it received!
Course Three, Scottish Langoustine. If you don’t know a langoustine is about halfway between a prawn & a lobster, though technically a part of the lobster family. This dish came with a squashed slice of Green Tomato & was covered with a White Beer Emulsion. On the side it also included some sort of Aioli. This dish was sweet yet acidic, the malt nature of the beer played nicely with the brighter notes of both the crustacean & the tomato.
Another fish course number four was that of a fillet of Cornish Monkfish. Delicately prepared the flakey white monkfish was then topped with a hot pot of its skin, Swiss Chard, & Sichuan Pepper really giving it a savory bitterness that ended up feeling much hardier than I’d anticipated from such a light fish.
Course five, the last of the savories. This course was a Dry Aged Middlewhite Pork. It sat upon a bed of Bagna Cauda, a traditional Italian “fondue”, & was paired with a crispy thousand layer potato & artichoke. I didn’t expect savory/sweet Italian from The Clove Club but I guess that’s my error in assumption!
Now onto my favorite courses.
I mean the above statement not because I think the dishes in question were the show stoppers of the afternoon but because my unrelenting sweet tooth demands it.
Dessert course one was a Grilled Habañero Granita, or as my bud Beau called it, flavored ice. It sat atop a Wild Plum Sorbet as well as something creamy that I’m not quite sure of. The dish was fire & ice. Spicy, yet very cool & refreshing at the same time. The plum had a slight saltiness that honestly made me want to take the ingredients & make them into a margarita.
Apparently The Clove Club is famous for their Gateau St. Honoré, a pastry so named after St. Honoré (no shit), the patron saint of pastries. Theirs has some nice bits of Rhubarb in the center that added a very nice tartness to the overall sweet, custardy pastry! I think it was my favorite dessert of the evening!
Next came more Rhubarb, a very popular British ingredient I quickly learned along with blackcurrent. Along with the Gateau came a Yorkshire Rhubarb Sorbet with Ginger Ale Gel & some form of crumble underneath. It was an excellent pallet cleanser to “end the night.” Only it wasn’t…
You see tasting menus also often like to include a dessert snack course at the end where you get little things like truffles & macarons. This menu was no different. Our tasting snacks were an Array of Chocolates; Milk Chocolate Macarons, Hard Shelled White Chocolate Truffles, & Dark Chocolate Ganache, meant to be consumed in that order. It’s hard to mess up chocolate y’all & each of these were exceptional!
Thinking we were done I went to get up but was met with a slice of Gold Foil Opera Cake & a candle with “Happy 30th Birthday” inscribed on the plate in chocolate. It was absolutely darling.
Overall I would say The Clove Club has more than earned its two Michelin stars. I wish I could remember the wine pairings to add in here but I unfortunately forgot to write them down. I will say this to the Somm team over at the club, this was truly the best pairing I’ve had with a tasting menu! Each wine was unique & interesting & enhanced the flavors of the food with expert precision & visa versa. This made for an excellent birthday lunch & I’m beyond blessed to have had the experience!
After lunch I reached out to my friend Kim Logan (+ The Silhouettes) to see if we could snag a quick hang. Kim traditionally lives in Glasgow & frequents Paris with her band but was in London for her boyfriend’s band’s show the night prior at Helgi’s in Hackney. We hopped the bus & headed the couple of stops to meet her.
She met us outside Helgi’s with a massive hug & ushered us in. The crew were packing up their gear from the previous night so while they did that we sat in the bar & chatted. It was mostly music bus & mutual friends but it was nice to connect in person!
After they left to return to Glasgow we walked through Hackney towards Bethnal Green to grab the tube back Soho way. We grabbed coffee at Mare Street Market along the way & made a mental note to come back because she was cuuuute!
Back in CG we slept off the day & the night before’s alcohol & calories before meeting V&R for dinner at Temper Soho.
Ev & I were still pretty full from lunch but we ordered a few things to get us through the night; Cheeseburger Tacos & Wood-Roasted Sea Bass.
After dinner we went to a wine bar back in Covent Gardens called Plume! I was feeling bubbly for my birthday & got Champagne, something somewhat uncharacteristic of me (I tend to drink red.) Post night cap we walked the streets of the Theater District before ending our last evening in London fulfilled & full of love, booze, & incredible food.
END OF PART ONE