Rugby themed pubs don’t usually do a lot for us here at AZBarLondon, but occasionally we scrum down and just get on with it. For F we’ve decided to check out Ricky Casanova’s local in Finsbury Park, the Faltering Fullback, a rugged establishment if ever there was one. Someday AZBar is going to come to you from somewhere less salubrious, but not this day.

We’ve been taking our viewer feedback pretty seriously here and everyone has been mauling us about the lack of information on the actual bars themselves. Our initial reaction is to direct people to Beerintheevening.com, a place where no one knows your name, but everyone knows a little something about most pubs. Fair enough, but we like to get a little bit more up close here on AZBar. With that in mind we’re introducing a new feature, the 3 second review. Take a look, we think you’ll like it.

View video here.

AZBarLondon did it’s first ever back to back this week. The result was E and F on the same night. We did it the night of the Champions League quarter finals and just like the matches themselves it was a night of two halves.

The first 45 minutes was spent at the Edinburgh Cellars, 125 Newington street, between Highbury and Stoke Newington. Check out our full review below. While it wasn’t a bad spot we didn’t feel at all inclined to stay beyond one drink. We drained our Cracks in the Jacks and left for F quick enough.

View video here.
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We wrote last week about Londonization, chain eating, the pleasure of knowing the same over-priced menu on ever high street. Well what are we going to do about it? We’re going to tell you what, right here on TrashBlanc.com we’re going to find the very weakest links in an all too familiar rusty toilet chain. Nobody is going to be spared. If we see what we think is a self replicating food emporium, we’re going to KAM IT HARD.

And we’re going to back that camera action up with some good hard facts. Like just who owns these cookie cutter outlets drowning London in a sea of ubiquity. And why the UK is a particular victim to this widespread lunching malaise.

Now we’ve got to lay down some guidance here as to how we approach this task. Sure MickeyD and the King are bigtime chains, but they’re not even trying to fool anyone. They’re saying “We’re cheap, we’re shit, we screw the planet daily, but hey, we sell 50 gazillion burgers worldwide per hour so fuck you pal”. Point absolutely taken.

No, we’re after the likes of old man Carluccio. The sly conieving types who pretends to inject class into the market until you get home to find your house knocked to the ground, your children gone, and a plate of very average blue cheese gnocchi being sold at £9.95 in their place. We’re not standing for this shit.

So here’s the chain of shame. It’s not definitive by any means, you comment and we’ll add.

• Carluccio
• Apostrophe
• Hamburger Union
• Busaba Eathai
• Gourmet HotDog
• Strada
• Eat
• Pret a Manger
• Pizza Express
• Leon
• Paul
• Ping Pong
• Wagamama
• Yo Sushi
• Wasabi
• Miso

TrashBlanc get’s back to London on Tuesday and the first stop is going to be a trip to the personal trainer to lose the South-By-Belly. After that we have a ton of video and written SXS-Eeats to get live so stand by.

In the mean time we’re fully up to speed with our photo uploads. Check them out at flickr.com/photos/keepingitfake

Everyone should have a dream in life but few of us really do. The Ice Cream man does though. To give away a half a million sticks of frozen dairy throughout the US. A truly amazing individual

Watch video here.

Here at TrashBlanc.com we like to think we go the extra mile so that you don’t have to. We bite the burgers, finger the fries and taste the tacos so that you can get straight to the good stuff. 8 out of 10 times we come away with exactly what we put in. Three dollars worth of bland bananas. But every once in a while we hit the mother lode.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Stoney’s Pizza Van is something special. Check it out.

Overall rating ****
(out of 5)

Price: $3 per slice.

Video’s here.

We’ll have more on our trip to the wonderful Hula Hut out by the lake in Austin, but for the moment you can check the Trash Blanc lowdown on the Mexican Margarita. A little sweeter and greener than the standard tequilla cocktail, this house drink started off our last night at SXSWi with some style.

Overall rating: *****
(out of 5)

Price: $4 per shaker of liquid goodness.

Video’s here.

We’ll have our Nuclear Taco event video up later, but for us here at TrashBlanc.com the taco show was well and truly stolen by the Ice Cream Man. In fact, he may well have pilfered our entire SXSW food experience. In terms of right time, right place, right man, this guy hit a three run home run.

His stated goal is to travel the world and GIVE AWAY half a million ice creams,

“If I can do that I can do anything”

An obvious next question is how many have you given away so far mricecreamman. But TrashBlanc.com had brain freeze and we were thinking of nothing but blue food colouring. We had two ice creams, paid nothing and gave four TB stars to the man in the van.

Looking at theicreamman.com website, we can’t help feel there’s a more than a little corporate payola going on, but we’ll resist cynicism for the moment. Lick it up.

Overall rating ****
(out of 5)

Price: $0 per ice cream.

TrashBlanc doesn’t always have to enter a premises to bring you the full lowdown. This time it’s the 710 Room on Red River Street.

Watch video here.

SXS-Eats: The 6th St. Pizza showdown part II.
TrashBlanc.com takes it to the house for the second in our heavyweight pizza reviews. Check it.

Overall rating: * */2
(out of 5)

Price: $4 per spinach/mushroom slice.

Video’s here.

SXS-Eats: The 6th St. Pizza showdown part I.
TrashBlanc.com takes two for the team on 6th Street. We go where you doughn’t want to and take slices at Papparazzi Pizza and RoppoJo’s. Priced at $3 and $4 respectively neither stood out from the stodgy crowd of eateries on Austin’s party street. First through the sausage machine that is the TB review is Papprazzi.

Overall rating *
(out of 5)

Price: $3 per cheese slice.

Video’s here.

There isn’t enough weeks in the year for TrashBlanc to properly review all the bars in Austin. But over the week of SXSW we’re going to bring you the ones that stand out. Red Eye Fly on 7th and Red River hits the spot for us. It hosted SXSWi’s Café Fray on Sunday night. It also hosted TB’s crack pool team as they took on the locals.

Heath the owner, friend to the stars, is booked 6 nights per week every week of the year. Quite the gent, he gave us the lowdown on south-by and graciously let us beat him once out of four occasions.

But one feature of the bar stood out above all else. The poignant tribute to Dimebag Darrell. We’ll let Wikipedia fill you in on DD, needless to say, a bigtime TB hero.

So cheers Heath, see you later in the week.

TrashBlanc.com has had some great drink since arriving in Texas. Good local and Mexican beer served cold and with a smile. Just the way we like it. How we don’t like it is mixed with stout and named after one of the most murderous group of mercenaries of the 20th century, the Black and Tans.

Quick history lesson for readers who think the B&T is a marketing creation concocted by Diageo (who should know better) to shift more Bass and Guinness.
The Tans were leftovers from the first world war sent by the English to quell some troublesome Irish in the early 1920’s. They did this with some relish and not a little wanton destruction. We’ll leave the finer points to the historians to argue about on Wikipedia, suffice to say these guys were major bad-asses.

So to the beer, or rather beers, and let’s leave the history in the paragraph above. WTF!!! Seriously. For our European readers, a B&T is half a pint of stout poured gently on top of half a pint of Bass, or some other variety of red/amber beer. This notion is hideous. It’s like whiskey and tonic. Or pizza and pineapple. Simply wrong.

In a former life TrashBlanc spent some time serving these monsters to clowns on the South New Jersey coast. Our inner stat absolutely guarantees people who order this shit have dramatically lower IQs, have shorter lifespan and have real trouble getting laid. Guys (and it usually is men), word of free advice from TrashBlanc. Give it up.

Mayo Holly finally turns up which means we can start taking a look at meat filled dishes here on TrashBlanc.com. And no better start than a burger review outside BD Riley’s on 6th Street.

Overall rating ***
(out of 5)

Price: $8.95 for burger and fries.

Video’s here.

Drinking at SXSW we’ve learned here at TrashBlanc.com can be a tricky activity. Sure there’s plenty of free drinks sponsored by the likes of Google, Frog Design and lots of other companies trying to retain a level of cool they once had (or is that me being cynical). But they’re not really free. Payment takes the form of hour long queue surrounded by the type of people who think said queue must mean there’s a kicking party inside. Guys, there isn’t. We’re all geeks.

However, sometimes the geeks do get it right, Saturday night at SXSW being a great example. Instead of joining a line in downtown Austin, the collective intelligence that is Twitter decided on the wonderful Gingerman bar on West 4th. No freebies, no queues and somewhat unexpectedly no hard liquor. Instead there were over 80 draught beers on tap and an outside patio full of ‘Internet Famous’.

TB ignored the celebs in the back and sat at the bar for some Texan hospitality. In terms of beers, Arrogant Bastard was going down a treat, and there was one punter whose eight horse accumulator came in when he saw the bottles of Westmuler Triple in the fridge. No doubt he was caught in a Trappist. So a pretty impressive selection of yeasty hoppy goodness then. Our tipple of choice for the evening was a Hacker Pschoor Oktoberfest. No, we hadn’t heard of it either and we can only describe it as an amber viking of a beer. Red, rough and likely to rape and pillage a small Irish village if left to its own devices. We had a second pint before leaving and we’ll be back before the end of the week.

TrashBlanc.com has utterly disregarded its closely held environmental beliefs and flown from its London HQ to SXSW in Austin, Texas. Now, the last thing this place needs is more people blogging the conference. So we’re not going to bother. We’re going to instead keep doing what we do best. Track down the trash food and blanc it up. We’re going to be ably assisted by our close friend Mayo Holly who’s just landed so stay tuned.

It’s been a while since our last episode but Ricky Casanova has his phone back and he knows how to use it. For the letter ‘C’ we stopped by The Coach and Horses on Greek Street in Soho. Unfortunately our camera battery decided this was the day it was going to give us only three minutes of filming, which of course may not be a bad thing.

A special shoutout to TrashBlanc friend BeatmasterV who kindly agreed to partake in this episode’s crack in the jacks. Truly awful BV, thanks for nothing.

The more astute of you will notice we’ve ditched YouTube for the infinitely better blip.tv. We’ve also introduced a level of daylight and sobriety into proceedings. Not sure if they’re connected. We’ll let you know next time.

Next up, the Dolphin.

Donovan Smoke and Ricky Casanova return to the keepingitfake fold for a special limited run treading the boards in London Town. However, these boards lead to only one destination: the local bartender.

Throughout the ‘08 Smoke and Casanova will be ticking off their very favourite letters and hopefully finding some new favourite bars and clubs from the veritable alphabet-soup of London drinking holes. There will be the strictest disipline adhered to as the fearless duo start with the a-list and end no-doubt with some hard earned zzz’s. So stay tuned for a bumpy ride.