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The "Asia" on Regent Street, Cambridge, UK

Christoph Steinbeck — Tue, 05 May 2009 12:36:59 +0000

Following a recommendation by a colleague, I went to the Asia on Regent Street in Cambridge. They describe themselves as pan-Asian but I felt that there was a bit much emphasis on the indian subcontinent to be truely pan-asian.

The interior is “basic”, simplicity rules, and I had a nice table with a view on the convenience store on the opposite side of the street. I started with a glass of their favorite australian Sauvignon Blanc, the coriander crusted scallops and some prawns in oyster sauce batter. The main course was a Penang Beef with a bowl of plain rice. The sauce there was really excellent but the beef was of shoe-sole quality, really disappointing and incredibly hard to chew. The pistaccio Kulfi for desert was again very good.

While so far the service was quite good, I then did not manage to catch anyone’s attention to order a coffee for more then 15 min and then decided to leave. That kind of spoiled the otherwise quite nice experience. I’ll probably go again and give them a second chance. Overall a 4 on my scale from 0 to 10 for the food and also for the service.

Open Access Journal of Cheminformatics now live!

Christoph Steinbeck — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:00:51 +0000

I’m delighted to announce that the first open access journal of our field, the Journal of Cheminformatics, is now live and has published its first articles. Journal of Cheminformatics is a new open access journal from Chemistry Central publishing peer-reviewed research in all aspects of cheminformatics and molecular modelling. It is run by Editors-in-Chief David J. Wild (Indiana University) and myself (European Bioinformatics Institute).
Amongst the launch articles are an Editorial by David J. Wild on Grand challenges for cheminformatics, a Commentary by Steven M. Bachrach on Chemistry publication – making the revolution and last but not least an article by Tony Williams and coauthors on Computer Assisted Structure Elucidation (CASE), one of my own fields of research.
You can view articles and submit your manuscripts at www.jcheminf.com. Please share this information with your colleagues working in the field of chemical information who may be interested in this new journal.

The Hilton in Bonn, Germany

Christoph Steinbeck — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 13:02:30 +0000

Quite a contrast to the Renaissance Hotel in Cologne, where I stayed yesterday, is todays stay at the Hilton in Bonn, Germany’s former capitol village. The run-down place confirmed experiences with previous hotel of the same chain. While my room was nicely renovated, the communal areas of the hotel made me feel like in a eastern European hotel during cold-war times. The location next to one of the ugliest bridges in the world – the Kennedy bridge – ruins the only potential plus of this hotel of being directly located at the river. My mood dropped even further when I discovered that the hotel does not offer (I would have payed for it) decent newspapers for breakfast – only one crappy stock-market publication they get for free. As a plus I should mention that I was allowed a late check-out without any problems and most of the staff was friendly.