My birthday was back in June and Dayna set up a surprise dinner for us which also allowed us to tick off another thing on our list – eating at a Michelin star restaurant.

We had looked at a bunch of different Michelin star restaurants months ago when we were thinking about going to one and the top of the list for me was Amaya which serves contemporary Indian cuisine. Dayna doesn’t have the greatest memory sometimes but she definitely does when it comes to anything food related so she booked us in for my birthday. Amaya had a no photos rule as do a lot of the higher end restaurants (maybe to protect famous people from Paparazzi?) so we had to sneak the few photos we got.

One of the rave reviews we had heard was about the Passionfruit Mojito so we went for 2 of those for a pre-dinner drink. Since we didn’t expect to be making many visits to restaurants as nice as this, we decided to go all out and went with the tasting menu with wine matching.

The lamb was so tender and had so much flavour – it was the most amazing lamb I’ve had in my life. Having the perfectly matched wines to go with each dish was also great (and reminded us of when we got to do this with Mum back in Wellington at Logan Brown).

The lamb was so good I had to get in there and use my hands despite being in a Michelin starred restaurant.

Dinner was pretty fancy (and expensive…we just bought flights to Vienna for less) so we had to bring ourselves back to earth by going to see Hangover 3 afterwards.

London Zoo has been on Dayna’s list of things to do in London for awhile and what better way to do that than in the evening with drinks in hand. We heard about Zoo Lates (basically adults only, late nights at the zoo) and managed to get tickets before it sold out luckily.

Half the people there were dressed up as animals and were taking advantage of the face painting on offer. We settled for just grabbing a few drinks and checking out the animals without a million children running around. It was a nice change after visiting the Dinosaur section of the Natural History Museum the other day and being mobbed by kids.

Along with drinks, Zoo Lates also has great food and desserts for sale set up in a market type area. We stuffed ourselves until we could barely walk so set off to check out some animals that were fatter than us.

There’re also random shows going on, a silent disco and play areas with boxing (with giant gloves), ball pits, hula hoops etc but we ran out of time and settled for drinking whilst checking out some more animals.   We did catch one of the shows though.

When we first got to London we went through a stage of going to a musical or show every one or two weeks but haven’t been to many lately. We’ve been trying to rectify that by booking a bunch of tickets to concerts and shows lately to get back in to it and the first show we actually went to was Once – The Musical.

Once is a pretty good movie if you haven’t seen it (trailer below) and the soundtrack translates really well live. At the start of the show and in the intermission the stage turns in to an actual bar where the audience can go up and get drinks and the cast sets up around the waiting gets and plays music to get everyone in the mood. The cast was great too so I definitely recommend it.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=726SFblz9Lk&w=420&h=315]