The London Cat Cafe

April 3, 2014September 1, 2022 - Julie @ A Life Exotic 14 Comments

Yes, we really did.

Ever since BuzzFeed announced last year that the phenomenon of the cat café (which is exactly what it sounds like) was coming to London, I knew it had to go on the list. Mostly because I couldn’t imagine the humiliation of answering “no” when anyone, for the rest of my life, said, “Oh, you lived in London? Did you go to the cat café?” Mortificato.

Also, it was because I wanted to play with some cats.

One gloomy grey day a few weeks ago, Amity & I found our way over to east London, wound through the market stalls to the edge of Shoreditch, and stopped outside the startlingly purple façade of Lady Dinah’s Cat Emporium. That is indeed its name.

You really should pay attention to the briefing, but if you’re especially eager you can just skip to Step 3 above: CATS CATS CATS CATS CATS CATS CATS CATS

The little café spreads over two floors. The ground floor is the tearoom, furnished in a charming old-fashioned Victorian style, where you can order from a simple menu. The lower floor is a hodgepodge of couches, bookshelves, climbing obstacles, and cat toys.

The cats roam around everywhere. Let’s be honest, they run the place. They’re all rescue cats, which I think is wonderful.

We were there late morning, when the kitties seemed to be at their spunkiest.

Confession time. This excursion was totally my idea, but it took me a little while to really get in to it. The spectacle of a roomful of grown adults competing for the attention of a bunch of cats was just a little bizarre and awkward at first. But the staff were so friendly and the cats were so cute that pretty soon it was just plain fun!

This little black kitten was one of our favorites. He was super spastic and mischievous, and I later found out that, very appropriately, his name is Loki.

Look at that prowling cat shadow!

Eventually we made our way back upstairs, where the front windows offered a view of bustling Bethnal Green Road.

One of the three little ginger brothers was particularly interested in the passersby… and it was pretty funny to watch the people outside walk past and do double-takes. There were even a few suited-up businessmen who came back to snap pictures on their phones.

This guy tried to get some peace & quiet, but his friends wouldn’t let him have it…

So he leapt up to greener pastures…

I liked that one with the squished face. He reminded me of Crookshanks. His name was Wookie, I think.

Pretty soon he and his buddies realized that if they couldn’t pester each other, they might as well see what we were getting up to.

Loki had disappeared for a while (no doubt up to no good somewhere), but pretty soon resurfaced to try out his best ninja cat impression.

I wouldn’t have thought that a cat café would actually be the best place to swing for refreshments, but the whole place was immaculate – not a stray cat hair anywhere on the floor or furniture. The staff told us that they make sure the cats eat a highly nutritional diet and are groomed daily to keep their coats healthy and shedding to a minimum.

We decided to risk it and sprung for cream tea… which turned out to be an excellent decision, because it was actually one of the best I’ve had in London!

Just as we were finishing up the last buttery scone crumbs, Loki trotted over and tucked himself into bed (literally into bed – there was a tiny cat bed) behind us.

Try and tell me that’s not the most adorable thing you’ve ever seen.

Actually, it seemed to be naptime all round. It was pretty funny to watch the energy levels die off so quickly after all the running around everybody had been doing all morning.

We decided that the mass outbreak of feline narcolepsy was our cue to leave and let the cats have a little snooze before their afternoon customers arrived, so we grabbed our coats and made our way out.

Tiptoeing so as not to wake the sleeping prince of mischief, of course.

He’s almost as cute as the real one…

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Tea at the Ritz

March 24, 2014September 1, 2022 - Julie @ A Life Exotic 6 Comments

Kate is by far my fanciest friend. She liked red wine when the rest of us still thought it was icky, and she can wear big hats and pearls and not look like she’s playing dress-up. As such, I’d been saving one of my big London bucket list items for her visit. So after our day around St. Paul’s, we bundled up and headed off to Piccadilly.

Destination: the Ritz London! Favorite haunt of the likes of Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, Noël Coward, and Judy Garland. Definitely a list we can slip right in to, right?

We left our layers at coat check and presented ourselves to the maitre d’, who greeted me by name and welcomed us as though we were fancy young socialites who dined there weekly.

Tea at the Ritz is an experience. That’s what you pay for, and that’s what they give you. I didn’t realize the full extent of it all before we got there.

We were ushered in to the beautiful Palm Court and seated. The waiter put our napkins on our laps for us – I was really holding in the nervous giggles at this point. It felt like being in a play where I wasn’t completely sure of my lines. Everything was choreographed and executed to make us feel as though we were fancy and important.

It was funny to watch how the charade very slowly started breaking up, though. I think they keep up the front very strictly at first to give you a real Ritzy introduction, but then let the formalities go bit by bit so that you feel comfortable.

One by one, the iPhones started peeking out around us. Fellow tea-goers Instragrammed their spreads. The penguin-suited waiters leapt into action and offered to take photos, explained menus, even chatted a bit.

(Kate’s photo)

We got lucky with a lovely table right at the front, so we had a perfect view of the quartet playing ballads and jazz instrumentals all evening. The whole place was bathed in soft golden light and it was like being transported back in time. We felt like we were two of the Crawley sisters on a visit to town! (We promptly had a furious but silent fight over who had to be Edith, and eventually decided that Kate was Mary and I was Sybil. Pre-death, obvs.)

We started, appropriately enough, with tea. No wait, we started with champagne. Bubbles first, then tea. Or bubbles and tea at the same time. That’s okay, too.

I had oolong and Kate had the Ritz Royal Blend, both poured over antique silver tea strainers.

We moved on to the tastiest little finger sandwiches you can imagine. With great force of will, I ate these slowly and delicately and not all at once as a sextuple-decker sandwich. It was a little tempting. From left to right:

Cheddar cheese with onion chutney
Scottish smoked salmon with lemon butter
Cucumber with cream cheese, dill, and chives
Egg salad with chopped shallots and watercress
Chicken breast with horseradish cream
Ham with grain mustard mayonnaise

To finish up, we had an assortment of little tea cakes (top tier in the photo above) and a pair of perfect, soft, warm, fluffy scones with strawberry jam and Cornish clotted cream. Add to my countless victories of the night the fact that I did not scoop the clotted cream out with my hands and lick the dish. IT’S JUST SO GOOD.

At one point, the waiters bustled out of the kitchen with a round of little cakes for about half of the tables (birthdays, anniversaries, or otherwise), and this jaunty violinist popped right up next to us to serenade the celebrators up close!

We sat and caught up on the past year of our lives (Kate’s about to finish law school in Boston), while enjoying a last cup of tea. I loved the charming forget-me-not patterned china.

Our waiter obligingly snapped a photo for us. When I tell you this man was dedicated to his job, it is an understatement. He enthusiastically grabbed the camera, surveyed the room in both directions to decide on the best angle, and finally climbed right up under an indoor palm tree to get this shot. The palm fronds were hanging down in front of his face so all you could see were his lanky tuxedo-ed legs sticking out. It was the funniest thing. I tried to get a picture of him taking a picture but I wasn’t quick enough. Oh well, good story.

(Kate’s photo)

Even the powder room was swanky! Yes, I took pictures of the bathroom. I told you I was not classy enough to be there.

After nearly two hours of high society elegance, we graciously curtsied and swept ourselves away in to the night (no actual curtsies or sweeping was involved, but it’s a nice image, yes?).

So following a rather less ostentatious exit, we took a little stroll through Knightsbridge to enjoy the city lights. We popped in to a little, nondescript pub for a pint of Guinness, a magical elixir which sufficiently washed away the last of our aristocratic airs and dropped us firmly back on our starving student feet.

We tucked those feet in to a passing black cab and tried not to fall asleep on the ride back to Fulham, humming the last tune the quartet had played and mulling over our favorite finger sandwiches. Tea at the Ritz is obviously not going to be a regular haunt of mine, but it was a really special one-time London experience, and one that probably hasn’t changed much for decades and decades!

I don’t know about Kate, but I sure felt like I was playing dress-up… and who wouldn’t love that?

Climbing St. Paul’s

March 13, 2014September 1, 2022 - Julie @ A Life Exotic 5 Comments

I’ve been a little MIA the past couple of weeks because (1) it’s almost the end of term and schoolwork has increased by a NOT COOL AT ALL degree, and (2) I had a Geneseo friend in town!

Kate and I became friends during the very first class of our college careers, when we sat next to each other on the couch in Welles and immediately bonded over our professor’s super weird jokes and the 518. Fast forward to now and Kate’s finishing up her final year of law school in Boston and, in a completely bizarre twist, she lives in the same building as my flatmate Chelsea from NZ. Magical worlds collide.

Anyway, since Kate is taking the bar exam this summer and then immediately becoming a super professional grown-up lawyer, she figured she had better take advantage of her spring break this month… so she came to London!

We had lots of adventures during her week here, and one of my favorites was our “St. Paul’s Day.” I’ve determined that you have to have a dedicated St. Paul’s Day when you have a visitor in London. There’s so much to see in a relatively small area, and the views from Millennium Bridge are second to none.

We took the tube to London Bridge and did my usual walk through Southwark backwards (I stick to what works).

It was beautiful, glorious weather! Flawless blue sky with only the occasional cottony clouds scudding past overhead.

We took our time walking over Millennium Bridge so that we could appreciate the views, and stopped for a couple photos, which make it look like Kate was taking her Hobbit friend out for a walk.

I’ll pause for a moment while you wipe the tears of laughter from your eyes, Mom.

Anyway, it’s not so bad if you cut off our legs:

(Kate’s photo)

Har har. Moving on.

I am allowed to look like a Hobbit when I’m standing in front of a gigantic cathedral!

(Kate’s photo)

St. Paul’s was looking lovely…

…but our tummies were rumbling so we had to put our sightseeing on hold until we’d had lunch. We went to the B.O.B.’s & Co. popup above The Rising Sun pub, which Amity and I had tried out last month and given rave reviews. They had me at “lobster rolls in London.”

I wish I could say we’d been adventurous and tried something new, but we actually ordered the exact same things that Amity and I had done. It was all just so dang good that I couldn’t bear to deviate! We split the ahi tuna tacos and seared scallops apps, and each got our own lobster roll (with housemade mayo and fresh dill) and plum margarita. Okay, maybe two plum margaritas. Everyone knows that the best thing before a strenuous climb is heavy food and a few drinks, right? No?

(Kate’s photo)

Oof. Worth it.

Anyway, following that fantastic feast (I’m alliterating like crazy today!), it was just a hop skip & a jump back to St. Paul’s.

We paid our entries and picked up the free audio guides, then proceeded to wander slowly through the cathedral for about half an hour, listening to the history and descriptions of different features. We also got really good at starting our audio guides (which were actually iPods – #swanky) at exactly the same time.

The inside of St. Paul’s is breathtakingly beautiful. I’d been inside a couple of times before, but always on a Sunday, so I didn’t go much farther than the doorway or the last row of seats so as not to disturb the services. The ornate mosaics and intricate stained glass windows in the middle part of the cathedral were astounding!

No photos are allowed in the interior, but I did snap this one of the screen on my iPod so you can see how St. Paul’s is actually two stacked domes with a conical piece between them.

This was a particularly brilliant design of the architect, Sir Christopher Wren, who realized that the lower dome was necessary so that people could clearly view and enjoy the detail from inside the cathedral, but a higher dome would be needed for it to be seen and make an impressive statement from far away.

We made our way up the wide, twisting staircase to the Whispering Gallery, which is at the base of the lower dome and still inside the cathedral. The perfectly circular gallery runs all the way around the dome, and the arching ceiling above your head carries whispers all the way across to the other side. It’s like the part of Grand Central Station where you can hear people talking from across the way.

Kate and I split up and tried to whisper to each other from across the dome, but were overshadowed by a very enthusiastic St. Paul’s employee who was scurrying about and whisper-shouting “WHISPAH! WHISPAH! HELLOOOOO EVERYBODY! WHISPAHHHH!” It was hilarious, but unfortunately I cannot give you a conclusive statement as to whether or not the Whispering Gallery actually works.

We headed up some more steps to the Stone Gallery, around the base of the higher dome. The clouds had rolled in since we’d been down on the ground, but it was still bright and vibrant. I can’t even describe the view.

Objectively, I know it’s a lot of gray with a bunch of cranes in the way, but to me it was just the most beautiful sight. I was having a real mushy moment with London that day. I just kept thinking, “I love this city.”

Looking back across Millennium Bridge:

The bell towers tolled 3:30 while we were up there. I loved that you could see St. Paul’s while standing on St. Paul’s!

We ducked back inside to make the final climb up to the tiny Golden Gallery, around the pinnacle of the tallest dome. The staircase is pretty crazy. When you look up, it looks like this:

And when you look down, it looks like this:

But when you reemerge into the fresh air, it looks like this! Well worth the 528 steps from the ground up to this point.

I really didn’t want to go down. It was sort of how I felt at the top of Arthur’s Seat. I just wanted to stand there and look and look and look and I would’ve been happy.

We made a couple new friends and swapped photos with them.

(Kate’s photo)

And took a few more twirls around the gallery. Name those London landmarks!

We even had a direct view on to the roof of St. Bart’s Hospital…

… which is where Sherlock jumped from in “The Reichenbach Fall.”

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But never fear, I kept a weather eye on the place to make sure that Bento Tinderbox wasn’t sneaking back to try again. All good.

We took a last glance around before heading back down the harrowing staircases. We also peeked into the crypt for a few minutes, which I’d like to go back and revisit more thoroughly, but unfortunately they were closing up and we had to hurry on.

Bizarrely enough, when we got back outside the sky looked like this again.

I actually double checked my photos to make sure I hadn’t gotten them in the wrong order – nope, I took that one after we climbed the dome. Crazy London weather.

One great part of having a visitor was that it allowed me to play tourist in lovely London town again! Aye, she is a beauty.

A Life Exotic

The story of a girl with too many homes

london

The London Cat Cafe

Tea at the Ritz

Climbing St. Paul’s