Corney and Barrow Romantic Restaurant With Wonderful Wines.

Outdoors under a glass canopy with trees and lanterns a heater above your table for two, or indoors with magic music, what a wonderful setting for a meal and a drink.

Oh dear - what fun spell checker is having. It wants to turn c o r n e y into corner, and barrow into borrow.

Corney and Barrow
Devonshire Terrace
(near Liverpool Street station)
www.corneyandbarrow.com
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.

The Best Sweet Riesling From Corney & Barrow

I love sweet wines. I like muscat grapes, dessert wines, cocktails such as vodka and orange and Baileys. I enjoy Prosecco and cava and Champagne as an aperitif. Most reds are strong and dry and bore me, so I am always looking for a medium sweet, a sweet, a sparkling a pink wine.

I was in heaven when I went to a wine tasting hosted by Corney and Barrow. First the venue is a delight, and easy to find. It's a hidden gem. We walked from crowded Liverpool Street station, which has McDonalds, a Caffe Nero with no toilet, and a large Wetherspoons pub (later you can read my previous post on the station). From the busy street outside we disappeared into a pedestrian alley, into a tree lined square with a view of the Gherkin, then through lanterns bordering the stairs with heaters overhead which looked like torches, reminiscent of a Roman stage set.

In the secluded, elegant candle-lit darkness was the Corney and Barrow Restaurant. Beyond that the private room with four wines. At the start was a table of Rieslings from 2015, only a year ago, the new wines, and already Corney and Barrow are running out of their allocation.

I'd had Riesling before. I have studied about 20 hours and then a day at WSET (Wine and Spirit Eduction Trust) taking the level one exam which is roughly equivalent to an NVQ (vocational qualification for people serving wines in shops or restaurants). My husband has taken levels two and three and is studying for the diploma which consists of about nine exams taken over two years or longer. So I am forever hearing, "You can smell the petrol in Riesling".

In the Sixties and Seventies, like the rest of the British wining and dining world, I was into sweet wines and drank Mateus Rose, Black Tower, and had no idea of any regions nor any grapes.

Later, it must be the case that most of the Rieslings I have tasted in my short knowledgeable era of wine tasting have come from Alsace. I have now, thanks to Corney and Barrow, discovered the Rieslings from the Mosel region. I am told that the Mosel region consists of blue slate banks on three rivers, and the region was known by the names of the three rivers and areas, until somebody decided to simplify the name to make it more memorable. So now the region and the wine growing area are called simply Mosel.

I must have tried a dozen wines, started with the driest ending with the sweetest, and every one of them was delicious. Just to see whether I was simply in a good mood, I went over to the other three sets of wines, dry reds. Did I like all of them? No. Not one of them.

I was most interested to hear about wines grown on the side of Mount Etna. Fascinating.

However, if I had to choose a wine to drink or buy it would now be a Riesling from the Mosel.
Corner and Barrow have several restaurants and attached bars with extensive wine lists. You can also buy wine from them. They have offices in London, other parts of England, Edinburgh, Hong Kong and Singapore. You can also find them on Facebook, twitter and Instagram.
www.candbscene.co.uk is their blog.
www.corneyandbarrow.com
More about the restaurant and bar in my next post.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.

Liverpool Street Station's Food, drink and toilets

We arrived at Liverpool Street station in London, on our way to a wine tasting, and wanted to coffee and cake or food first at Liverpool Street station because wine tastings often give you only dry crackers and one doesn't want to drink on an empty stomach.

Liverpool Street station is edged with cafes bars and restaurants and shops, like so many stations nowadays in central London, such as Bond Street (mostly underground), Baker Street station, Paddington Euston and many more. You can stop at a station eating place before continuing on to your destination, or arrange to meet a friend at a coffee bar or pub, or stop there for a farewell drink or meal, before going off home in different directions.

Having travelled into central London from a distant suburb my first thought was a toilet and I didn't want to buy coffee from a kiosk or small shop, and then have to leave others eating or drinking whilst running miles across the station. The toilet advertised was down a flight of stairs and cost 30p. What - 30p!

Imagine a family of five, parents and three children, all wanting to go through a turnstile, if only to supervise the children, on arrival at the station, then again after a couple of drinks, whether beer, wine, water, juice or caffeinated coffee stimulating the bladder. That would be £3 just to go to the toilet!

We hurried on and I saw a large pub, a Wetherspoon pub, my favourite. I reckoned a large pub must have a toilet. Besides they have a food menu so it was worth while checking them out in case I needed to go back later.

Sure enough, a huge pub with elegant, traditional decor, and a Ladies toilet (up lots of stairs) with grand seats in the toilet. I tried sitting in one. Not very comfortable. But great to look at. Would be good, height, low so if baby fell its not far and you can reach the clutter of baby's nappies and so on placed on the floor, suitable escape for a nursing mother.

After that we found a Caffe Nero. One of our number wanted not beer - because we were off to drink wine anyway, but coffee. A good thing I went to the toilet in Wetherspoon. Opposite then outside the front entrance to the station at the top of the station steps in a colonnade was a Caffe Nero, a family favourite.

They offered an excellent coffee and cream, a great blueberry yogurt muesli, newspapers you could read for free and others you could buy. But no toilets!

Finally, on my return trip through the station I stopped at the information desk and asked, "Is there a coffee shop or restaurant with toilets - where you don't have to pay 30p!"

"Yes," she said, "Upstairs in McDonalds." So that's the place for food, drink and toilets for families.

I picked

Liverpool Street Station, Kindertransport memorial

This is the memorial on the concourse, the central area of the station. I was surprised it was so small. We had walked past it without noticing it, on an inconspicuous corner. When I started checking in Wikipedia I discovered that there is a second memorial outside the station. Other statues depicting the children are in Berlin and elsewhere.

Kinder is german for child. Transport is transport. The German language has more compound words than English.

As you can see from the plaque, the children arrived at Liverpool station. They had boarded trains in Europe, at Prague (Czech), and Vienna, Austria, to escape the Nazis. The children came from Germany as well. It was 1938. The lucky ones were just in time.

The word sponsors refers to the fact that the British government required £50 per child, a lot of money in those days, to cover costs. British people, Jews, such as the Rothschilds, and other benefactors, such as the Quakers, had to find enough money, which I thought was to cover the costs of schooling and other expenses for each child, but according to the Wikipedia article it was expected that the children would later need fare money to travel to rejoin their parents, which, alas, never happened.

Sir Nicholas Winton organised the children's escape and lived to a grand old age. Read about him in Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Winton

You can read more in the book: Into The Arms Of Strangers.

Photos copyright Angela Lansbury, 2016.
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.

Kindertransport statues on stations in UK and Europe

I'd read about the statue on a London station showing the Kindertransport children and Winton who organised the transfer of endangered children to London, from 1938 to the eve of WWII in 1939, saving the childrens' lives. When I went to check for a photo on Wikipedia I discovered photos of statues at stations all over Europe. 

Frank Meisler Kindertransport memorial (2006) stands outside Liverpool Street Station.

From Wikipedia, whose caption says it's a tribute to the British people for saving children from Nazi terror. Who were the heroes who helped? Nicholas Winton who organised the transport. But he did not do it all alone. Who else? The Quakers, the members of Parliament, the people who raised the £50 per child required, a lot of money in those days, so the children would not be a burden on the state, the welcome committee who met the children and found them hostels, then the kind and generous families who took in the children, not just for a few days, or weeks, or years, but because some of the parents of the children died, for life.

Gdansk statue at station. Gdansk is a Polish city on the Baltic coast.

Winton's Prague memorial created by Flor Kent.

The Kindertransport is one of the good news stories to come out of WWII.

The children ranged in age from the smallest to teenagers. Some went on to Canada and the USA.

December 2nd, the date of the first transport, is celebrated as Kindertransport Day.

I have just shown the statues you can see on stations when you travel. For details of statues and the history of the Kindertransport see the Wikipedia article on Kindertransport.