Last week, we dropped into Zuma and were simply thrilled. Zuma is a Japanese restaurant located in Knightsbridge, rather close to the Box Wood cafe, Petrus and Harrods.

Not only did they serve a wonderful Wagyu fillet but also my favourite foie gras, lobster tempura and jumbo king prawn with yuzu peper…a few of the dishes we savoured. The ambience was great, and I’m definitely going back for more!

The following day we decided to visit the Berkeley, and have our senses challenged at Pétrus.

My love for watches, and all things mechanical watch related, are challenged by one thing and one thing only - my love of food, defined as “Gastronomie” by the French. Pétrus, was simply a wonderful experience and such a relaxing evening it was.

Any special meal is accompanied with Champagne, and the 2003 Bollinger cuveé was no exception. The starter I had was the ‘Foie gras: pan fried, rhubarb poached with Lapsang tea, quince and hazelnuts’, along with the ‘Aberdeen Angus beef fillet: roasted and glazed, pomme Anna, Italian artichokes and pepper jus’ cooked the way I like it.

The deserts were equally thrilling, and the service we received was just right - the waiters were not over bearing and were extremely obliging and friendly.

After our meal we had the pleasure of meeting Marcus himself in the kitchen on our guided ‘mini’ tour. Compared to Gordon Ramsays @ Claridges and Marco Pierre White’s L’Escargot, Pétrus is definitely in a league of its own, and is highly recommended.

Zuma and Pétrus are both going down on my list of favourites, as I will be back for more - once again for their culinary genius to completely engulf my senses.

This is a video review of my TTIIC.

Hope you like it!

Our trip to Edinburgh was definitely a short one, but it did allow me to spend some time to reflect on something I really enjoy: my passion of single malts.

I normally enjoy Glenfiddich and their Solera reserve, along with the blended Jonny Walker Blue Label (of which I still have an unopened bottle sitting at home), Jack Daniels to Chivas Regal.

The Glenfiddich and Solera reserve would be the true single malts of the bunch, but I wanted to try something different. A couple weeks back I ordered this lot, and as you can see - I now have my work cut out for me.

The 15-year old bottle would be a classic Balvennie, in the sense that it oozes it’s characteristic honey flavour. The colour is also definitely rather light for a whisky and one enjoying such would easily be fooled to believe that it was not 40% alcohol/vol - it is actually 47.8%/vol!

The 12-year old DoubleWood is much more distinctive, and its sherry notes are quite striking, yet, blended with hints of honey and vanilla. I quite enjoy the DoubleWood quite a bit…

This bottle, however, is something else - as it is extremely smooth, almost creamy. Yes, definitely creamy…and silky smooth. Again the classic flavour of honey captures ones senses, leaving for a nutty (dry?) finish that lingers for a while.

I have only sampled each bottle a couple times now, purely to nose and taste each blend - to directly contrast and compare.

My journey has only begun, as I have not even begun to break out those Cubans I have stashed away

I received this email from my host yesterday, explaining why the site went down for a better portion of the day.

At 7:40am this morning, one of our air conditioning units failed in the cage at the One Wilshire building, the building’s maintenance department dispatched an engineer to attend to their unit, which is now fully operational. Unfortunately as a result of this, some of our servers in the One Wilshire building were in danger of overheating and were shut down as a precautionary measure. All servers are either up or in the process of being up at this moment.

We greatly apologize for the inconvenience caused to any of our customers who have accounts on the Los Angeles datacenter servers, one of 4 datacenters we use for hosting.

I also received an email informing me that I had a ‘vulnerable’ version of Wordpress installed. Nothing new, it needed updating so today I have updated the CMS software to the latest available version.

As expected…something broke Wordpress has ditched the older ‘wp_categories’ table and has now gone for a taxonomy system involving a tag+name id system.

The php used to implement the post counts per category in the header menu had to be modified and now does this:

$numPostsCat = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $wpdb->term_relationships where term_taxonomy_id = $catID");

rather than this:

$numPosts = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status = 'publish'");

This also meant that the function had to be called not using the actual category id’s (term_id) but rather the assigned term_taxonomy_id.

It sounds more complicated than it really is, but at least I was able to sort it out.

I have been quite fortunate to get in touch with a kind gentleman who had many Rolex goodies for sale.