Back by zero popular demand, it was time to visit La Tazza Cafe – a very unassuming cafe on Praed Street.
Alas finances meant 6 months of Gregg’s sausage rolls for lunch, along with the odd M&S sandwich as a special treat, plus fuck walking around in the winter weather on a lunch break, when I could be reading something fascinating like the history of tariffs.
La Tazza Cafe is a very standard cafe, seemingly run by a young couple, serving fully functioning food – or at least it looked like.
The difficult with these places is that it is hard to tell what they do best.
Offerings included salads, breakfasts, steak, paninis, pizza, pasta, omelette, jacket potatoes, fish and chips…I went to a restaurant recently that served one single main. Which was easy…and exceptional.
But what to order here? Definitely not a steak, pizza should be from a proper pizza shop (maybe there was a hidden pizza oven…who knows), paninis I can have anywhere around Paddington…
Service was friendly, and there was plenty of seating for lunch – albeit at the later end of the lunch period. I ordered a chicken Caesar salad which took around 10 minutes to arrive.
There was a sizeable bowl of fun to be had, the lettuce was crisp, the chicken plentiful if not especially juicy, the Caeser sauce more notable in terms of mayonnaise and parmesan than anything else. Some cucumber added the crunch – though I always though Caesar salad was supposed to come with croutons?
Oh well. And you know this salad was screaming out for some Sicilian tomatoes, but I was never going to be offered that here. Maybe supermarket tomatoes…I expect they would have added if I had asked.
£11.00 for a Caesar chicken salad and 20 minutes on a plastic seat isn’t too bad value nowadays, and the portion size was generous.
It’s unlikely I’ll go back to La Tazza Cafe unless I’m craving a jacket potato, but likewise I don’t regret going.
6.2 out of 10.
