Archive for The Cross

a mere £1,500 dinner

Posted in Travel, Wines with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 5, 2024 by xi'an

As a one-time patron of the X on Kenilworth, I received an invitation to join the fundraising Bocuse d’Or UK gala diner, at a mere £1,500 each (with the helpful addition that 10 tickets would cost £10,500!]. Despite being partial to foie gras, buckwheat, scallops, Jerusalem artichokes, and vin jaune, methinks I will pass the offer since the wine list is not included…

Bocuse d’Or UK Fundraising Gala Menu

Canapés
Smoked duck doughnut, celeriac, Perigord [sic] black truffle
Cured trout aged in beeswax, timut pepper, pickled Potimarron, dashi jelly
Mushroom tuile, wild mushroom parfait, Douglas pine (vegan)
Seaweed tartelette, oyster and Coco bean sphere, Petrossian caviar
Cracker with Duperier [sic] foie gras, Gewürztraminer jelly, sancho pepper
Marco Zampese, Hélène Darroze at The Connaught

Shetland mussel bavaroise scented with turmeric
Lemon gel with fresh coriander and buckwheat grains
Daniel Stucki, The Lecture Room & Library at sketch

Hand-dived scallop, citrus beurre blanc and Petrossian caviar
Jean-Philippe Blondet, Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester

Megrim sole filled with truffle flavoured mousse baked in puff pastry
Vin jaune and langoustine sauce
Alain Roux, The Waterside Inn

Grass fed, 60-day dry aged beef
Jerusalem artichoke, crones, black garlic
Matt Abé, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay

‘Core apple’
Clare Smyth, CORE by Clare Smyth

“Anvil”
Caramel mousse with our miso, apple and spruce
Simon Rogan, L’Enclume

“Like a kid in a sweet shop”
Edward Cooke, The Fat Duck

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a war[like] week

Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life, Wines with tags , , , , , , , , , , on April 29, 2015 by xi'an

crossbThis week in Warwick was one of the busiest ones ever as I had to juggle between two workshops, including one in Oxford, a departmental meeting, two paper revisions, two pre-vivas, and a seminar in Leeds. Not to mention a broken toe (!), a flat tire (!!), and a diner at the X. Hardly anytime for writing blog entries..! Fortunately, I managed to squeeze time for working with Kerrie Mengersen who was visiting Warwick this fortnight. Finding new directions for the (A)BCel approach we developed a few years ago with Pierre Pudlo. The workshop in Oxford was quite informal with talks from PhD students [I fear I cannot discuss here as the papers are not online yet]. And one talk by François Caron about estimating sparse networks with not exactly exchangeable priors and completely random measures. And one talk by Kerrie Mengersen on a new and in-progress approach to handling Big Data that I found quite convincing (if again cannot discuss here). The probabilistic numerics workshop was discussed in yesterday’s post and I managed to discuss it a wee bit further with the organisers at The X restaurant in Kenilworth. (As a superfluous aside, and after a second sampling this year, I concluded that the Michelin star somewhat undeserved in that the dishes at The X are not particularly imaginative or tasty, the excellent sourdough bread being the best part of the meal!) I was expecting the train ride to Leeds to be highly bucolic as it went through the sunny countryside of South Yorkshire, with newly born lambs running in the bright green fields surrounded by old stone walls…, but instead went through endless villages with their rows of brick houses. Not that I have anything against brick houses, mind! Only, I had not realised how dense this part of England was, this presumably getting back all the way to the Industrial Revolution with the Manchester-Leeds-Birmingham triangle.

My seminar in Leeds was as exciting as in Amsterdam last week and with a large audience, so I got many and only interesting questions, from the issue of turning the output (i.e., the posterior on α) into a decision rule, to making  decision in the event of a non-conclusive posterior, to links with earlier frequentist resolutions, to whether or not we were able to solve the Lindley-Jeffreys paradox (we are not!, which makes a lot of sense), to the possibility of running a subjective or a sequential version. After the seminar I enjoyed a perfect Indian dinner at Aagrah, apparently a Yorkshire institution, with the right balance between too hot and too mild, i.e., enough spices to break a good sweat but not too many to loose any sense of taste!

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at The X

Posted in pictures, Running, Travel, Wines with tags , , , , , , , on March 15, 2015 by xi'an

TheX

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