Disclaimer: This visit was a PR invite but all opinions are my own.

I was recently invited to Cosmo, an all-you-can-eat buffet with cuisines from around the world, along with my friend Kitty. There are a few Cosmo restaurants across the country but I went to the Bournemouth one which I think is pretty new, another one near me is in Southampton.

Depending on which day you go and what time, the price for the all you can eat experience ranges from £19-£21 which in my opinion, is a pretty good price for what you get. They also add a 3% service charge which again is not bad.

The restaurant

My first impressions of the restaurant were good as the walkway from the front door to the front desk was stunning with lots of pretty pink flowers. It was also very busy which is a sign of a good restaurant. Although it was busy, the food was plentifully stocked at all times and it was all still hot.

I get a little apprehensive of buffets when thinking about food that has been sitting there but I could tell that their standards were high when it came to looking after the food that was out.

Another thing that I found really cool was they had robots! It was the first time I'd ever seen them in a restaurant before. These robot device things (whatever they are called) took plates away and they can also sing happy birthday. I am not very good at describing it but it was so cool and you should go and see for yourself!

The food

There was such a large range of food from all over the world. We started on the left-hand side with all the Asian dishes, then got to the European dishes. After that, there were burgers, etc and a carvery.

I mainly had Asian and Italian food. In true buffet style - I piled my plate(s) with a random mix of food. My favourite food was probably the Chinese food and the mac and cheese.

I would say this restaurant is very family-friendly and would be great to go to for kids' celebrations. There is a lot of picky-eater-friendly food, which was good for me too.

For dessert, there was a chocolate fountain, along with many other cakes and an ice cream machine - the chocolate fountain alone is enough to impress me.

I believe the soft drinks like Coke, Fanta, and so on are refillable, but with cocktails and alcoholic drinks, you have to pay per drink.

Related: Best pizza in Salisbury

The service

I couldn't fault the service at all it was brilliant. Even though you are left to your own devices a lot while going up and getting your own food, the staff were still really attentive and asked us how our food was. They were also super speedy at clearing plates away (this is needed when you are going up to get multiple plates).

Overall, I really enjoyed my meal at Cosmo in Bournemouth. The restaurant had a really nice interior, good food, fab service, and robots! It was a great experience and I'd definitely recommend going. All you can eat for around £20? Bargain.

Related: Blacklock Covent Garden review

Would you try Cosmo all you can eat buffet?

One of my favourite accounts to follow on Tiktok and Instagram is @foodguidelondon. It's run by a woman and sometimes her daughter and basically, if they have been to a restaurant in London and have enjoyed it, you will want to go!

One of her favourite restaurants in London is Blacklock, so I had to give this a try, especially because I recently went to London on a Monday and they do special deals on a Monday!

Blacklock is a steak restaurant that does sharing steaks so it's great to go with a group or for date night with just the two of you. I think they have a few restaurants across central London, and we went to the Covent Garden branch.

On Mondays, their steaks are at butcher's prices so the Porterhouse steak that we had would have been £9 per 100g but we got it for £6 per 100g. Our steak was 700g which for two people is about 12oz each.

The steak

If you are vegan, you should probably stop reading now.

We had the Portherhouse steak which is effectively a T-bone steak with mainly a sirloin cut, with a little bit of fillet down the other side of the bone.

They cut the steak for you which is great and the fat down the side was really easy to see and cut off.

For a starter, we tried the Cull Yaw crumpet, I only had a bit because I have a bit of a weird thing about crumpets, but the meat on it was amazing! It was slow-cooked mutton, I wasn't expecting much but it was really tasty.

With our steak as the main, we got the chips, the kale and parmesan salad (tried to get some greens on there) and the garlic and marrow rub for the steak, along with the gravy - which by the way, was the best gravy I've ever had.

Related: Flesh and Buns London review

We had the steak cooked rare as I was sharing and didn't mind as much, I would normally have mine cooked medium-rare but I still really enjoyed it - especially with the accompaniments.

I feel like Blacklock is quite an indulgent restaurant and would be perfect for a celebration, especially if you pay full price on any other day that isn't a Monday.

There were 2 of us and we paid around £50 each for a bottle of prosecco to share, a starter to share, the steak, 3 sides between us, and 2 steak sauces. There was also a 12.5% service charge added too so overall, I didn't think this was too bad. And I love getting money off so I'd definitely try to go on a Monday if you can, but it would be worth going any other day too because the food is 10/10!

The service

The service was also as good as the food. Our waitress was lovely and very knowledgeable. She explained the menu to us very well as we hadn't been before and she filled up our glasses of water and prosecco so often that we barely had to touch them ourselves.

I definitely want to go back on a Sunday to try their roast dinners now!

Related: Gordon Ramsay Bottomless Street Pizza review

Will you be adding Blacklock to your list?

One year on from finishing university, this felt like a good time for a life update as I am generally adulting way more than I was when I had just finished uni.

When I was a student I called that the "free trial" of adult life because you are technically an adult but for me, uni felt like a transition stage before the real thing. Then once I'd finished uni, I would refer to myself as a recent graduate, or say I'd "just finished uni" but it's a year on now.

Graduating uni - one year on

So in the last year since leaving university, I moved back home and started a job pretty much instantly after finishing my last assignments and dissertation. It was good to finally be earning some £££ after the student life I have to say.

My original plan after uni wasn't to move home, probably like a lot of students but I have been enjoying it and everyone is at different stages at this point in their life.

After working in my graduate job for a year, I was promoted into a more senior role which I will be starting over the next couple of months! This is something I'm so proud of because I really didn't expect this one year on from leaving university. 

Related: Making friends as an adult: the low down

When I left university I had no clue really what I wanted to do or what I was good at, I just wanted a job but now that I have been working in marketing as a social media coordinator for a year, it's reassuring that I am good enough at my to be put forward for more responsibility at this stage.

I am going from a Social Media and Communications Coordinator to a Digital Communications Officer, basically a fancy way of saying I will be doing more technical digital marketing stuff than I have been doing up until this point.

New car who dis?

I am writing this on my new car day, which is another life update I need to share! So I had my fiesta since I was 17 and just passed my driving test, I did a blog about passing my driving test too haha that's how long I've been blogging.

Today, I said goodbye to Frankie the Fiesta and got my second car, a 2018 plate Volkswagen Polo. I had wanted a polo to be my second car but I always said I would wait until after uni when I had a job so that's what I did.

I loved my old car but she was getting on a bit and it was definitely time to get a new one, I'm so proud of my new car, and I will be showing it off until further notice.

Mo' money mo' travel

I have always been interested in World War 2 and the Holocaust, even more so since I visited Auschwitz in 2017 and saw some of the horrors that went on there for myself. 

Ever since then I have watched a lot of documentaries and films about the Holocaust and have started reading a lot more about it too.

I am also an avid TikTok user, and when Lily Ebert and her great-grandson, Dov, came up on my 'For You' page, I couldn't stop watching their videos. If you have TikTok, I'd definitely recommend watching Lily Ebert's videos here.

In these videos, Lily talks about her experience as a survivor of Auschwitz (along with other camps) and answers a lot of questions that she gets. 

Lily is a 98-year-old Holocaust survivor, she was sent to Auschwitz when she was 20 along with her family who were all from Hungary.

The book

In the book, Lily describes her experiences all the way from prior to being taken to Auschwitz, to her life after the war up until 2020.

As aforementioned, I have consumed a lot of narratives around Auschwitz and the Holocaust so I am very aware of some of the brutality and awful things that happened to people. But reading this from a real-life Holocaust survivor, I could feel the emotion that Lily was putting into the book, having experienced it herself.

Related: 5 reasons why books still matter

The book was structured in years, each chapter was a different year of Lily's life and she went into a lot of the details about the atrocities she experienced - which can't have been easy to do.

Due to the topics discussed in the book, sometimes reading it can be quite difficult and upsetting. But when I was feeling this, I had to remind myself that I was reading it from a place of privilege. It is so shocking to me, all the awful things that happened in the Holocaust, but none of that has happened to me and I, along with everyone, need to be educated about it.

In terms of the structure of the book, I really liked the way it was in chronological order over the different years of Lily's life and I liked that Dov (Lily's great-grandson) had written a few parts in it too. Most of the book is from Lily's perspective but Dov explains how they created TikTok and wrote the book. He also explains a bit about how he thought Lily was feeling writing the book.

Should you read this book?

Yes! I would recommend this book to anyone. I believe that we all need to know about the Holocaust and do as much learning about it as we possibly can. Reading Lily's promise, along with watching her TikTok videos is a great way to do this.

A lot of the documentaries out there are really helpful, and they have been constructed by historical experts, but oftentimes, they weren't actually there to experience it. Lily was there, she saw it, she felt it.

Related: My experience at Auschwitz-Birkenau

Have you read this book? I'd love to hear your thoughts. If not, add it to your list ASAP.