The London Restaurant Festival is here!

L’Anima is excited to be participating in the first ever London Restaurant Festival, taking place across London from Thursday 8th until Tuesday 13th October. Special 2 course lunch and dinner festival menus (£25 for lunch and £40 for dinner) will be offered in the restaurant beside our a la carte menu. As part of the inaugural London Restaurant Festival, one of the most sought after events are the pop-up restaurants in the London Eye.

For each night of the festival, after the Eye closes to the public, one of the capsules will be become a ten seat restaurant for one night only featuring some of London’s greatest chefs and restaurants. Please find the schedule here.

Or to enjoy our special festival menu here.

Hope you can make it and celebrate with us!

Two new vongole videos

All is happening so fast. Two  New video are out already and Francesco is teaching us all about emosion & parsley.

As we all know perfection is achieved through the smallest of details. and this time Francesco shows how much content can be put in those. In an almost scientific approach we can now understand how can a creamy texture  be created with no dairy involved.

But I should let the maestro speak for himself below.

Second video tries to explain what parsley brings to the party and which type will work best with the vongole.

Please remember to send out tweets that explain why YOU are in love with Vongole and could end up in our private dining room with your plate full.

and the winner is….

After collecting all the votes that helped us chose the right wines for l’anima’s new wine list, a winner has been named!!!

@saradaher has just won a bottle of each of the winning wines as well as a chance to visit l’anima’s backstage complimented by a bottle of Prosecco!

I have already contacted Sarah via Twitter and hope to see her soon at l’anima.

Gal

And now that it is over …

Well after all the hype and commotion it is nice to say we’re finally done. It seems much longer but it’s only been a week since this site first went live. The expectation was there but I never thought that so many people would get involved, browse the pages and vote.

First of all a huge thank you to all those involved. To Dan Coward (@bibendumwine) & Rob McIntosh (@thirstforwine) who both helped to pick up my strange idea and then shape it to something someone other than myself could understand. To Denise Medrano (@thewinesleuth), Anthony Rose (@antrose33), Jamie Goode (@jamiegoode) & Douglas Blyde (@douglas_blyde) who were all kind enough not only to give us some of their precious time but also to promote and blog about the event. A special thank you to Francesco Mazzei who supported me and helped all this come true.

And obviously I am grateful to every single one that clicked in, showed interest and had fun with our project as much as we did.

Big congrats to the BIG winners of the week team 3

This has been such an extraordinary week that my head is filled with new thoughts for future projects.  I have learned so many things through being involved in the process. Tasting with more experienced tasters is important. Although I might disagree with some of their conclusions, their views are important. I got a different angle to that which I’m used to getting on my own. This will undoubtedly affect my future choices.

Updates on further thoughts and new projects will be found here as soon as I make up my mind!

Gal

Congratulations to Team 3

An initial, quick post to congratulate Dan Coward and Denise Medrano, aka Team 3, on their success in the vote which closed last night. They came first by a substantial margin with their fun style and interesting wine choices, and we look forward to adding these three wines to the list.

Gal Zohar will be adding his thoughts in more detail on this blog later today, and announcing the winner of the prize to come down to L’Anima for a personal tour (and maybe even taste some wines) as well.

Thank you everyone who watched, tweeted, voted and supported this activity. The level of interest and support was extremely encouraging and we hope to welcome as many as possible of you in the restaurant in the near future.

More news and details later.

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Thank you for an amazing reaction

There has been an overwhelming reaction to our wine event this week. Thank you so much for taking part and making this such a fun experience for all of us involved.

When we started planning this event we expected that some people might enjoy the idea of seeing this wine tasting and getting involved, and that our friends, customers and maybe those especially interested in the latest ideas would come and take a look. However, watching all three videos means dedicating almost 15 minutes of your time which is a BIG commitment, so we were aware that we might not receive too many votes.

Well, yesterday we overshot our mental target for the entire 2 days of voting and already have over 100 votes for the wine list and dozens of supporting messages on twitter. Amazing! This site received 1500 views in a single day from countries across the world, and the event has been mentioned in blogs and magazines in the UK, USA, Scandinavia, India and beyond.

Thank you again, and do please keep the votes and comments coming in, we really appreciate it, and if you are in London, please come by and say hello.

Impressions of the tasting

After the tasting, Robert McIntosh of The Wine Conversation, spoke to Gal Zohar about the event and the reaction it had received on the day of the tasting: