Christmas weekend (and II): About a Brazilian restaurant, football and a long nite

I should have posted this before Christmas, when I wrote it, but even if it is just for completeness I reckon it worth doing it now.

Just remember the first part of the story (Friday night): I finished sort of wasted, with an injury just above my eyebrow and another in my chin.

So Saturday comes, and we had the Christmas lunch, my first one indeed in London. This is sort of a yearly tradition of my friends over here, and as they do it only once just before going back home it was well renown for being one of the craziest events. To be precise, the tradition was supposed to be a dinner, but Cesar and my self were crafty enough to move it to lunch. The reasons, three:

1. A lunch involves an after lunch, an evening party and a night party. A dinner just a night party.

2. Restaurants are packed on December for dinner, but not for lunch.

3. Barcelona vs Real Madrid

And so we went to Rodizio Rico, a chain restaurant with a branch very close to Angel tube station. The place is one of those Brazilian restaurants that work under an ‘eat as much meat as you can’ basis, for a fixed fee. I know a couple of friends in Spain who would enjoy it quite a lot, promise!

The waiters came in rounds with different treats, as lamb or pork meat, sausages, chorizo, and so on. There was also a salads and appetizers buffer for those who preferred it (I tried just the olives, which were surprisingly excellent). I have always thought that this concept, eat as much as you can, is overrated and frequently it is deceiving. It was the case, especially because at some point the waiters visits frequency slowed down really a lot, making more difficult to grab a piece of your favourite meat. It wasn’t too expensive, though, and the really impression was that having in mind we were too many people, it wasn’t really such a bad deal at all.

Of course, the chat on the lunch was all about my wounds, Teo’s wounds –remember I left him right after some stupid bastard punched him for no reason-, and how bad the Mojito’s at that place were. And football, of course, and how good friends we all were, even when the real thing was I had met some of them just the day before. I really felt like I had known them for a while, a long while.

By the way, the people on the lunch that day (most of them carried on for drinks later): JuanFran, César, César Jevi, Jason, Vladimir, Lorena, Auxi, Pablo, Teo, Justin, Diana, Belén, Jim, Ainara and Mariana (some more people came, but I cannot remember their names, sorry). Also Isa joined us later on.


With our meat belly prominently shaped, we went all of us to an O’Neills pub which was just besides the restaurant. This particular O’Neils was nice enough, compared with the sometimes poor standard they offer: good mood and quite quiet, especially after the Premier game finished. It was fairly big and most of the people didn’t smoke, which had as an obvious consequence the fact that I didn’t have to go to the freezing terrace all the time again and again. Also, music was loud but tolerable.

We had quite a lot of drinks over there (in my particular case mainly beer and scotch) and most of us even watched the Barca-Madrid there, enjoying the trademark drink or this pubs chain: Red Guinness. The game was crap for a Real supporter, you already know that. And even while I had a great time swearing to some stupid Catalanians –stupid because they were really stupid, not because they were Catalanians, don’t get me wrong - when Casillas stopped the penalty, this at the end backfired as they had the chance to laugh at last.

Anyway. After the game we went to a classic, The Mucky Pup. I owe a post to this pub since long time ago, so I promise it will be my next post. I’ll just say here that, as always, we had an incredible time until the closing time (1am) and we drunk too much (as always too?). Just that.

As the next-and-last step, and once we realized we weren’t going to be allowed in any place in the area, such bad was our state and also our look, we went to Jason’s place, in Old Street. I cannot really post anything in detail about what happened there, not without some of the people involved permission… I’ll brief it in simply four words: We Had Big Time. I may add that we had plenty of laughs, some singstar and even a very weird conversation with an sparking lamp (or an alien who just landed from Mars, depends who you ask about). Even some tv. And we didn’t have class A drugs, if that’s something that worries you. And, eventually, after saying goodbye to Teo and Pablo, who were meant to flight back to Spain the following day, I arrived at 9 o’clock in the morning to my place. Definitely too much of a weekend.