French Style Ealing Eatery & Big Idea #186 is 'The Novel'

A table -Mais Oui

On Friday we had a meal at relatively new  Restaurant in Pitshanger Lane - It’s a French eatery trading under the name Chez L'Ami David and although it had a  limited menu this was no bad thing the food and wine being suitably French, tasty and well cooked. The Maître D was full of  the French variety and very much on the case. The restaurant has a special Birthday Menu to celebrate a year of trading and it offers excellent value for money.

Having been in a location that was recently  a Thai restaurant and amongst other cafe's it's well poisoned but Reviews of this place (like so many) are mixed, the Ealing Gazette was particularly harsh but we'd definitely go again.

Big Idea Number 186 is 'The Novel'

A novel is defined as  A fictitious prose narrative of book length, typically representing character and action with some degree of realism

Prior to the Novel assuming hegemony of the literary works the epic poem was the dominant form but around 300 years ago this changed and a novel which is considered to have  led to this change was  the succcesful Novel Don Quixote satirising what had gone before in those overblown epic poems.
Daniel Defoe, a Brit was another big figure in creating the modern novel with works such as Robinson Crusoe (this book said to set on  Caribbean island of Tobago.).
Other key and important figures include Charles Dickens and (for me anyway) Graham Greene who specifically denoted some of his works as Entertainments.
The last 100 years has seen much stretching of the form and although some devices now scream out cliché the novel retains strong popularity amongst large sections of the reading population be it in a traditional book or kindle type device .