Bus-Baked Bread

Since Claire hadn't yet ventured east in her wandering around London, Bob and I decided to take her to see Brick Lane at its Sunday best--crowded with people buying, selling, and eating all manner of goods in the sunshine. This pile of bicycles made for a very Brick-Lane shop display:

The area is always undergoing gentrification, and when we stopped at our favourite bagel place to introduce Claire to the joy that is their salt-beef bagel, we noticed a new shop had opened up next door--one that has our favourite word as its name!

While the menu is filled with Swedish treats, the prices are definitely of the new Brick Lane, so we'll probably be sticking to our bagels. Another relatively new addition to the area is Rootmaster, a vegetarian kitchen and restaurant in an old routemaster bus parked near Brick Lane:

With the kitchen on the lower level of the bus, and seating upstairs and outside, the menu looks great and it's definitely on my list of places to try. After all, where else can you get "bus-baked bread"? Speaking of baking, after we finished wandering around Brick Lane, we took Claire to a completely different area of town, in terms of geography and ambiance: Hampstead. We didn't end up doing much wandering around its fantastic, narrow lanes though, and instead stopped for tea at our favourite Hampstead tea joint, Louis Patisserie, for some old-timey ambiance and a few sweet Hungarian treats.

Here are Claire and Bob before we dug into our strawberry tart, poppy-seed slice, and various hot beverages: