The food seemed fresh as it took them a little time to make it.  The vegetarian dumplings were really tasty and you got six of them, so enough to share! Even though it said on the menu that they were steamed, they had crispy edges, so I’m not sure if they had been fried a little. Either way, they were good and they went well with the fried garlic and soya sauce.

It was a tough choice to decide whether to go for the Thai green curry with rice or the Pad Thai! Finally, I decided to go for the vegetarian Pad Thai noodles! Great fried rice noodles with carrots, bamboo shoots, baby corn, egg and crushed peanuts. This dish was just a bit too saucy towards the end of the dish. If I had to change anything about the Pad Thai is that I would make it a little less sweet and also I would add some tofu to it.

Thai Pepper is a small intimate restaurant with lovely friendly staff. One thing to note is that Thai Pepper is only open during the evenings and not in the day time.

Thai Pepper, 115 Finchley Road, Swiss Cottage, London, NW3 6HY

Our Rating:
3.5 out of 5 stars

The main dishes were also very flavoursome. The risotto verde was quite a big portion. It had a light fresh taste to it, mainly because of the fresh green vegetables. The risotto had lots of broad beans and large slices of courgettes. It didn’t really have much spinach or green beans.

The penne alla casa was a baked pasta dish with chicken, pancetta, spinach in a mushroom sauce. We were surprised at how oily and greasy this dish was; something that we would not have expected when referring to pasta. It still had a good taste to it though.

We went for the full three courses and had dessert to complete our meal. The sorbetti was specified on the menu as being two scoops of sorbet. It was nice that the waiter let me have one scoop of ice cream and one of sorbet. The flavours were all good!!! We had refreshing mango sorbet, creamy strawberry ice cream and my friend had the blackcurrant sorbet. She said that the blackcurrant one was quite sharp.

The biggest problem that we had this particular Zizzi was that the service was extremely slow. All in all, we were there for hours and that was due to us waiting so long for the attention of the staff and for our food to be served. It was not like the restaurant was that busy or that they were understaffed. It was a good job that we had the starter right at the beginning of the meal, otherwise we would have been totally starving by the time the rest of our food would have come.

Zizzi, O2 Centre, 255 Finchley Road, London, NW3 6LU

Our Rating:
3.5 out of 5 stars