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Alexandra Palace, London in winter

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Footpath signs at Alexandra Palace

Alexandra Palace from the boating lake

Autumn / Winter lane in Alexandra Park

Abandoned boats, Alexandra boating lake

Sunday Lunch London - The Landseer, Holloway N19

After a cold bike ride around North London Paul and I found ourselves sitting on sofas in the Landseer pub on Landseer Road, just off Holloway Road, N19.

I've known this as a very pleasant pub for a beer or two, and I've also dabbled in a desert previously but I've never eaten properly here and this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

The Landseer Pubs' large windows on a winter afternoon

The Landseer seems to have changed its owner / management a number of times over the last 3 years, sometimes doing food, sometimes not, the menu changing from a proper gastro pub affair and then back to pub grub. It seemed like it couldn't decide if it was a boozer or a swanky gastro bar. Well now it is firmly in the swanky camp and full of people who seem like they earn more than enough - but it is not an unpleasant atmosphere at all.

At £10, the roast is pricey especially when compared to Nambucca just down the road where the untried (by me) roast is a snip at £5. While the £10 is steep, it is just about on the value - the service is good, the beers available are, if not adventurous like the Swimmer, good and well served and the wine lists are very comprehensive. Our lunch took about ten to fifteen minutes to arrive - a good amount of time to know its being done properly. The Yorkshire pudding was fantastic, easily the best bit. Obviously made in the pub and not from a frosen packet, its taste was drifting towards a doughnut - fresh and doughey and beautifully crisp, it was the high point. The veg were all good - large roast potatoes, the cauliflower was beautifully buttery and al dente, fine carrots and excellent flavoursome parsnips as was the beef. We enjoyed our food with a beer, surrounded by large glass windows showing a winters afternoon slowly turning to dark. The only complaint - we should have had two of the fantastic yorkshire puddings.

Beer in the Evening review

Multimap Reference

Cafédirect Dinner Party

Cafédirect are giving away a Bodum dinner set and advice about Dinner Party etiquette. Visit www.cafedirect.co.uk to read more and enter the competition.

Cafédirect Fairtrade Coffee

Cafédirect produce fairtrade coffees - instant coffee, roast and ground fresh coffee and espresso ground coffee. They also produce excellent tea and hot chocolate.

Fairtrade (and not faretrade or fiartrade or even fair trade) coffee is coffee that is brought from coffee producers in a "trading partnership, [that is] based on dialogue, transparency and respect, that seeks greater equity in international trade" - from the Cafedirect website. You can read more about the goals of fairtrade and fairtrade products such as coffee and tea on the fairtrade pages of the Cafédirect website.

Cafédirect choose to go beyond the minimum standards of the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation in producing, paying and investing in the farmers that produce their fairtrade instant coffee, their fairtrade roast and ground coffee, their fairtrade hot chocolate and their fairtrade tea. Cafédirect call this extension beyond the minimum standards of fairtrade the Cafédirect Gold Standard. You can read more about this extended fairtrade practice on their Gold Standard pages.

Cafédirect produce a range of fairtrade fresh ground coffee including gourmet fairtrade coffee, namely Kilimanjaro, Machu Picchu and the new fairtrade roast and ground coffee, Palenque. They also produce an organic fairtrade medium roast coffee and a decaffinated medium roast fairtrade coffee. Visit the Cafédirect product pages to see all their fairtrade coffee products.

Cafédirect also produce fairtrade instant and fairtrade organic instant coffee which is branded as 5065. Check out Cafédirects' fairtrade tea - extraordinary ordinary tea. And finally their fairtrade hot chocolate product Cocodirect is a delicious hot chocolate beverage and in my humble opinion is nicer than Green and Blacks hot chocolate.