Jay Rayner reviews

Sunday, February 05, 2012 - The problem with surprises is that not all of them are nice. A pink macaroon flavoured with Iberico ham served as a petit four is a complete surprise. It's definitely not a nice one. When you are left thinking: 'I wish that had been lemon or raspberry or anything other than this'...Modern techniques are great. They're brilliant. If you want to cook my steak by banging it round the Large Hadron Collider, be my guest. Dehydrate my pig cheeks. Spherify my nuts. But only do so if the result tastes nicer. At Viajante deliciousness is too often forced to give way to cleverness. And that really is the biggest surprise of all.

Sunday, January 15, 2012 - The service, by the familiar inked and bed-headed crowd the restaurant group has made its own, is deft and encouraging. As is some of the food: the chopped liver is bang on. Just like my mama used to make: deep and earthy and dangerous. I liked the pickled herring on a bed of minced beetroot, and the chips and onion rings are the real deal. They serve Big Apple (all pork) hot dogs, which are a wonder...The pastrami in the Reuben sandwich - alongside Russian dressing, sauerkraut and Swiss cheese - is sliced far too thin. Anybody who has visited Katz's will find the sandwiches here disappointing.

Sunday, January 08, 2012 - The menu is completely fluent in modern British, which is to say: food from all over the shop put together in sensible combinations. A plate of thinly sliced smoked venison, for example, with fresh figs alongside properly dressed rocket leaves is a thoroughly pretty plateful; crisp-shelled fritters of salt cod are a little dense but only because they haven't been bulked up with potato. No matter: the tarragon mayonnaise helps them on their way. Prices are noticeably ungrasping: 14 quid isn't much money for a complex dish of partridge breast with confited leg, creamed Brussels sprouts, chestnuts and a generous handful of girolles.

Sunday, January 01, 2012 - With a bit of planning getting a table at a sensible time is doable. The food is worth the effort. Witness a soft onion tart of flaky, buttery pastry with perfectly sautéed lamb sweetbreads and a slick of sweet-savoury jus, or a plate of salt-baked beets with a tumble of burrata, the in-vitro version of mozzarella...My rib eye was simply a great piece of meat, cooked with care and precision. We loved another dish of long-braised short rib, slipping from the bone, with winter vegetables. Sides are worth making space for: creamed sweet corn with chilli and basil or sprouts with a crust of crumbed prosciutto and hazelnuts.

Sunday, December 18, 2011 - For the most part it's good value, if less than cheap. Then again this is Mayfair. A big, rustling bowl of deep-fried squid with a salty chilli kick cost 7.50; a generous pile of jamon croquetas, the shells giving way to something creamy and intensely hammy within, was 50p less. There was a generous plateful of swordfish carpaccio with lemon and rocket to lighten things and, at the heavier end, grilled discs of Majorcan salami sobrasada to spread on walnut toast. The slick of honey was a cloying touch, but the piggyness won through.

Sunday, December 11, 2011 - Best of the savoury dishes was a dolls' house-sized bowl of pea and ham soup with chewy shreds of ham in it. For all its depth of flavour, though, the soup lacked texture. It was just a little too well mannered. By comparison another starter of braised lentils with merguez sausage was decidedly ill-mannered. Just half a sausage loitered near a pile of lentils, which covered an unadvertised lump of ham hock. But the mains were the real problem...10 Cases is a brilliant idea for a restaurant; it just needs better food.

Sunday, December 04, 2011 - The meat was completely under-seasoned and was so much dull, wet cotton wool. I left at least 15 quid's worth of it on the side of my plate, because I simply couldn't be fagged to carry on dragging it through my teeth. The gravy was like an episode of Downton Abbey: it looked all right, but had absolutely no depth...I don't think they'd get away with it outside SW1. They charge like this for such lacklustre food because they know their clientele don't really care about either cost or quality. And it really shows.

Sunday, November 27, 2011 - Perfect gnocchi come baked in a cast-iron pot with a crust of dense cheese. Although the chicken livers on a crostini are a little overcooked, the sauce is so robust you forgive them. A crisp pizza base is spread with melted fontina cheese which at the last minute is laid with strips of smoked salmon so that the oils just begin to run. A thick piece of exemplary raw fillet beef is beaten out to twice its size to be draped over a hot plate to form their 'warm Carpaccio' dressed with serious olive oil and curls of black truffle (a bargain at 10.95)...The joy of this place and this menu is that it can be used for just a couple of drive-by platefuls at the bar.

Sunday, November 20, 2011 - A whole Devonshire crab with chips and mayonnaise was, admirably, just that. A whopper of a whole beast, sprawling off the plate like a hungover student, cracked and cleaned of the less edible bits, and that's it. A (Welsh) Barnsley chop came with peas, carrots and swede mash and was the sort of thing you'd want in a catacomb on a winter's night. My only question hung over the Potted Pig cassoulet, which wasn't really. This was a stew of beans, carrots and sausage on to which had been plonked lumps of pork belly and confit duck. That said, both had skin as crisp as a Welsh winter morning, so I ain't complaining.

Sunday, October 30, 2011 - A king-crab cocktail had lots of pearly fresh meat, as it should do at 15 quid a pop. Steamed sea bass with a silky aubergine puree heavy with cumin was a very precise piece of cookery, and a grilled veal chop would have been a marvel if only it had been allowed to rest properly. A dessert of cinnamon and ricotta fritters was hot and sugary and naughty. Too many other things weren't good enough. Sticky tamarind chicken wings had the thrill of being dirty food served up by the classy Ramsay, until we realised they were no better than the sort you'd buy when completely bladdered from some gnarly KFC knock-off joint in Dalston. And the mark-up! Five small second joints for 8 quid.

Sunday, October 16, 2011 - Australasia, a cavernous brasserie with a messy pan-Asian menu, is so very, very Manchester. It is all glossiness and fragile first impressions...Tuna and crispy shallot rolls were equally overengineered, though there was absolutely no sign of the crispy shallots. Slices of pink beef with a teriyaki dripping sauce were, well, you know, fine. A shredded papaya salad displayed good knife work, but it was completely underdressed. It should have a real crash and zing. This had nothing. The worst dish of the lot was a tranche of blackened cod, which was overcooked and tasteless.

Sunday, October 02, 2011 - The one good dish was a disc of white crabmeat with brown crabmeat on top, and slices of thinly cut toasted sourdough. Deep-fried sweetbreads, however, were a disaster. They had been grotesquely overcooked and were so hard you could have gravelled a path with them. The accompanying charcuterie sauce was over-reduced to a varnish. An onglet steak was OK, but the chips were limp and dull, and the bearnaise sauce had the over-thickened, gloopy quality of something that had been bought in which, given my legal obligation to assume it was made on site, is a shame.

Sunday, September 18, 2011 - The grouse was the one good thing we ate - well hung, the breasts and legs taken off the carcass and served the right shade of pink, the offal spread on toast...It is not merely the mediocrity of the rest of the cooking that grates, or the opportunistic pricing - people who willingly come to a place like this simply don't care - but the shameless attempts to separate you from your cash. There were the aggressively enthusiastic and relentless invitations at top and bottom of the meal to order champagne, martinis and cognac. There was also the outrageous pricing on the wine list.

Sunday, August 28, 2011 - Bang bang king prawn brought a pile of the things, shell on and skewered, beneath a heap of fried-off chillies, garlic and spring onions. You could be obsessive-compulsive and try to remove the shells, but what's the point? Strip the skewer with your teeth, head and all, says I. Best of the lot was the Xinjiang-style fried lamb. Lamb is considered almost too flavourful in most regions of China and so in Dongbei they subdue it under more drifts of salt, cumin, chilli, garlic and spring onions. This is food you will recall for a long time afterwards because your body won't shut up about it.

Sunday, August 14, 2011 - The mains - a rib-eye with Cafe de Paris butter, duck confit with chorizo and chickpeas, sole with broad beans, anchovies and capers - have a familiar urban-rustic feel. More thrilling are the dishes for two: a whole poached sea bass with fennel and samphire, for example or - the one we chose - a rabbit and bacon pie. It arrived in a fiercely hot dish, the puff-pastry lid inflated and golden. It looked right, and was. Inside, the bunny had been stewed until all muscle-memory had collapsed and it was just thick strands of meat spun through with hunks of salty bacon and soft pearl-like silverskin onions.

Sunday, July 31, 2011 - A whole lemon sole, expertly trimmed, seared in butter to the point where its pearly flesh slips from the bone like Venus losing her silken slip (come on, people; I'm in an art gallery) is served with sweet brown shrimps and a beurre noisette. The pecorino filling in a plate of ravioli dressed with truffle oil could do with a little citrus zest to cut through the richness, but the pasta is very good indeed...It is a place where ladies of a certain age can sit, wearing hats. It is a place in which to stop the world. The slight failings of a mere trifle should not get in the way of that.

Sunday, July 24, 2011 - The ribs are listed as 'meaty', and they aren't joking. These are proper, thick-cut numbers, but with the tinge of pink all the way through that you only get from long contact with smoke. They are tender, but not so that they fall away from the bone. And they are properly sauced, in the sticky Texas style. A plate of those is a six-napkin job at least...The chicken has crisp skin and flesh that laughs in the face of dry. An armadillo egg - a cream-cheese stuffed jalapeno, wrapped in spiced sausage meat and then held together with bacon, the whole roasted to a crisp shell - is as close as Texas gets to a delicacy, and is outrageously moreish.

Sunday, July 10, 2011 - To pull off this kind of fusion cooking right now requires poise. For the most part it is there. A perfectly made omelette of sugar-cured prawns, spring onions and coriander comes with a scoop of sweet smoked chilli sambal which is more a tickle than a punch. A crab salad with sugar snap peas and shaved turnip declares a yuzu soy dressing, but is more about the quality of the ingredients than the wanderlust of the chef. A grilled onglet, marinated in miso and tamarind, is a proper piece of beef with a fine smear of aioli on the side, alongside some crisp cassava chips. It is steak frites by any other name.

Sunday, July 03, 2011 - It might have been a disastrous meal, but they had been trying to sort things and it was early days. Some of the food is good. The operation has heart. Now all that fellow feeling drained away. They've spent significant sums setting the place up. They've refitted the restaurant, brought in smokers, hired staff. And at no point did they think a couple of grand spent on a road trip to the Southern US, during which they might have rumbled the smoker capacity problem, was a good idea? That would have been a very good use of their time. Instead a visit to the Red Dog Saloon turned out to be a total waste of mine.

Sunday, June 26, 2011 - Ah yes, the food. Sticky concoctions, summoned from the gates of hell, or the kitchen, whichever is closer. It's the kind of thing you'd get at a Harvester, only with less subtlety and more cynicism...The main courses both cost me around 23 pounds and my innocence. Hard, dry duck confit laid on overcooked peas and mint in a sickly sweet Thai red curry sauce isn't just a bad idea or bad cooking. It's also really bad manners. Large scallops and prawns were grotesquely over-seasoned and served with a saffron and sour cream sauce that had the authentic tang of something with which you'd clean a bathroom sink.

Sunday, June 12, 2011 - We loved cubes of bland tofu under a punchy sauce of sweet miso scattered with sesame seeds, and curls of beef dressed with the citrus burst of ponzu. A stew of long-braised pork belly with a smear of hot wasabi in an umami sauce was an old English dinner - braised pork and mustard - refracted through an Asian lens...The sashimi and nigiri sushi - sweet scallop and sea bass, sea bream and salmon, both its flesh and bright orange roe - did exactly what was required of them. It is not the greatest sushi available in London; the rice is a little stodgy, the knife work occasionally a little ragged. But it is pretty damn good.

Sunday, May 29, 2011 - For mains there were things like snails and bacon or grilled skirt steak with onions and horseradish or a pike and leek pie for two. We chose the other sharing dish, a huge bowl of long-braised caramelised bacon chops with luscious ribbons of fat in a stew of generously sauced beans. It cost 28 pounds; I wonder if it might be possible to sneak in and order it just for one. A sprightly dressed watercress salad cut through the bacon fat and white bean lusciousness...The St John Hotel has been open only a few weeks, but already it feels like the kind of resource that this last vaguely seedy corner of London really needs.

Sunday, May 22, 2011 - The two starters displayed an immense suppleness. One brought a seared fillet of red mullet on consomme flavoured with coriander and pickled ginger. It was gentle, the flavours all but will-o'-the-wisp. It takes a very confident cook to know not to over-punch when the ingredients are this delicate. And then on the other plate, the exact opposite: a lasagne of fresh white crab, made with tissue paper-thin leaves of pasta and dressed with a seafood reduction that was so powerful and rich and decadent I didn't know whether to eat it or dab it behind my ears...In a meal that did all the right things at all the right times, dessert was a very special kind of right, an effortless display of skill and bloody good taste.

Sunday, May 15, 2011 - Deep-fried olives, stuffed with anchovy and sage, are saltiness squared. But what's a little hypertension between friends? Then there are the sliders, the three-bite burgers in a soft sweet bun: ground beef with nuggets of bone marrow, lamb with pickled cucumber or, best of all, a hunk of salt beef with dill pickle and a slap of mustard. Oy and vey. We liked a deep-fried soft-shell crab, and a heap of shoestring fries like a bird's nest and mixed greens spiked with chilli. Only the mac and cheese missed the mark.

Sunday, May 08, 2011 - Baby back ribs spoke of that long, slow cooking and came dressed in a fabulously boisterous chilli-bashed marinade that made my lips tingle. A long, equally slow-cooked beef short rib, with the sort of dark sticky outside I dream of, had me tearing at the bone. But that was it. Just those two dishes. I wanted the menu to be dominated by a roll call of great barbecue cuts and options, by outrageous sizes and marinades and burnt ends and hot links. Instead it was a few mediocre starters and a bunch of steaks.

Sunday, May 01, 2011 - Kaosan is a simple family-run restaurant with space for about 25 people. The menu is short, cheap and packed with flavour. Skewers of pork, still smoking from the grill, arrive with a sweet-sour chilli and tamarind dip that makes you open your eyes wider....Larger dishes are mostly curries and salads: a hot and sour green papaya salad with chilli, or a terrific larb gai, the famous salad made with minced chicken and dressed with a fruit bowl's-worth of lime juice and many other good things besides. A dark, coconut milk-rich massaman lamb curry had one of those sauces you just couldn't help spooning straight from the bowl.

Sunday, April 24, 2011 - We order a long-braised, chicken-stuffed pig's trotter and it comes with piped ribbons of perfect mash with wild garlic. A crown of pigeon is a little overcooked, but tastes of a bird that led a proper life, and is accompanied by a scoop of impeccable black pudding. The wine list is short and gloriously priced...What it doesn't have is much in the way of desserts. Oh, they are there, but Owen Brown isn't that interested in them. A treacle tart is OK, but rough and ready. A baked apple stuffed with sultanas is undercooked. Still, they stock very good ice creams by Mrs Dowsons.

Sunday, April 17, 2011 - The long menu reads well, better than almost any other Ramsay menu in years. It is classy comfort food, a list of old fashioned things which you just know that, like the room, have only been given a lick of modern polish...A 'Dingly Dell' pork chop, cut thick, grilled expertly, is a truly wonderful thing. My companion cuts off the ribbon of fat. I steal it. A Cornish fish stew is far less so. The main ingredients - clams, mussels, a bit of mullet and so on - are of good quality and cooked well. The sauce is a thick, creamy affair and just completely wrong. It needs bite and kick, a rough edge or two. Instead, it is trying to be on best behaviour.

Sunday, April 10, 2011 - We ate one good dish: crisp, warm samosas filled with a lightly spiced minced chicken and a mint raita for dipping. A bowl of ginger rice with a fried egg wasn't bad either. The rest worked on that carefully calibrated scale between awful and mediocre...We had run up a bill of over 140 pounds. Far better versions of all these dishes can be found at a third of the price elsewhere in London. As we left I consoled myself with a single thought: this is one restaurant I will never have to visit again.

Sunday, April 03, 2011 - We loved fat seared scallops with a slick of umami-rich chilli jam alongside (shredded) green apples and pickled daikon, and some equally big prawns in a tomato sauce flavoured with fennel and feta, that simply demanded to be spooned straight from the dish. Far less successful was a stodgy baked stilton cheesecake, a quiche by any other name, and not a very good one. No matter. At the end there was a scoop of chocolate ganache with crunchy peanut brittle and a cooling dollop of creme fraiche. Better still was fresh churros with, for dipping, a hot chocolate sauce and a saucer of sugar, blitzed with fennel seeds.

Sunday, March 20, 2011 - To start, order banh cuon (rolls of slippery steamed rice pastry encasing minced pork and chopped mushrooms) or goi cuon - summer rolls. There are crisp, meaty spring rolls and with all of these a spicy peanut sauce or a sweet fish sauce with a hefty chilli kick. None of these costs more than a fiver and each is enough for two...There was an intriguing beef casserole served with a baguette, the liquor to which had a subtle ginger and garlic end so you knew which part of the world it came from. There was long-braised pork belly on a pile of sticky rice quickly soaking up the sweet, dark juices.

Sunday, March 06, 2011 - Every plate looks like it's had its rims polished furiously with a tea towel by a bloke who finds order in his world by positioning overworked, underflavoured ingredients just so. Don't offer me a ballottine of chorizo with my quail breast that tastes not at all of chorizo. Likewise don't call a mediocre terrine of pork a roulade just because it sounds clever. The best dish was a fillet of beef, served rare, with a mustardy carrot puree and a silly coffin-shaped piece of 'pan-fried' dauphinoise. If it's pan fried, it ain't dauphinoise. Which this wasn't. It was a kitchen trying far too hard.

Sunday, February 27, 2011 - None of these dishes is the exercise in miniaturism that Blumenthal practises at the Fat Duck in Bray. They are bigger, more boisterous; a hug rather than a tickle. But the same absurd obsessive-compulsive attention to detail has gone into all of them, and it shows. I am aware that I am regarded as being too much a friend of Blumenthal's. I could therefore overcompensate by bigging up the criticisms. But sod that. What use am I if I'm not honest? So here it is: Dinner may be expensive, but it's also bloody lovely. Save up.

Sunday, February 20, 2011 - Chabrot is small and demure, and perfectly slathered in Parisian bistro tropes and cliches. But it is done with such precision and intent and fondness that you can not begrudge it...Our main courses ranged from the simple - two large prawns seared on the plancha, dressed only with lemon, olive oil and herbs - to another of true French classicism: a Savoy cabbage leaf stuffed with veal, chestnuts, foie gras and ceps. It sounds like an aneurism on a plate. Instead it was thrillingly light and fresh and came with a translucent non-sticky jus that was the sum of all of its parts.

Monday, January 31, 2011 - It's fancy, though the food is far less so. It is a reliable solid Italian that has served a particular louche, British public over the years. There is a lunch menu at 19.50 for 3 courses, and from that a starter of hot grilled smoked mozzarella oozing across the plate with a cherry tomato and olive salad and anchovy mayo did not feel like the budget option. That said, crisp curls of deep-fried calamari served in a boat made of greaseproof paper was worth the extra expense. Main-course pasta dishes are huge bowls of carbs, cooked so they still have some bite and give, dressed with lots of the advertised ingredients, be it a dense, gamey ragu of wild boar, hunks of lobster or a scarlet sauce of tomatoes cooked down to their essence.

Sunday, January 16, 2011 - The all-important lamb chops had a good amount of meat on them, a proper cheek-coating crust with a not unwelcome citrus burst at the end as if they'd been doused in lemon juice as they came off the flame. Seekh kebabs - minced lamb - were soft and tender and not overly fiery. The stars, though, were pieces of tandoori fish...The dry lamb curry which should be a dark, dense - and yes, dry - burst of flavour, was here slippery and wet and deflating. A special of quail curry simply proved that smothering small bony birds in sauce is not such a great idea.

Sunday, January 09, 2011 - A shortcrust tart of Dorset crab is made with rust-coloured brown meat and a pastry that cracks and crumbles in all the right ways. A salad of bitter endive, blue cheese and chives comes with a mustard dressing that makes its presence known. A thickly coated gratin of thinly sliced Jerusalem artichokes with hazelnuts has the kind of crust that has you picking away at it with a spoon. That dish was the last vegetarian moment before some serious meat cookery, which relies on slicks of huge-flavoured jus, and a lot of hot fricassee and saute action. The mains read complicated but make sense on the plate.

Sunday, December 19, 2010 - In London he cannot raid the Nordic larder, for that would be against doctrine. Instead, the ingredients are distinctly British. But what he does do, pace Noma, is reject those French or Mediterranean foodstuffs which would make his dishes something other. So no olive oil or olives. No tomatoes or bulb garlic. No chocolate in the desserts. He is more likely to season with vinegars than salts, to rely on smoking and pickling and leave ingredients raw where possible. The result is subtle and, for being unusual, intriguing. Smoked scallops, only just cooked through, come with a julienne of apple and a leaf of bright apple jelly; glazed sweetbreads are paired with lightly pickled onions and hidden under a sheet of crinkly milk skin.

Sunday, December 12, 2010 - Charging 9 quid for rather good crispy squid looks opportunistic. By contrast, 11.50 for a big bowl of their thick, luscious fish stew, the liquor boasting a big peppery end and swimming with shellfish, was a bargain. I was less keen on their sardines on toast, each opened out and spread with a thick garlic and parsley persillade, and grilled...Our service was not all that. Finger bowls were not delivered with our langoustine, and our wine order was completely forgotten. If this happens to me when they know what I'm doing there, what does it say about the service for others?

Sunday, December 05, 2010 - When the frittura di pesce Portofino for two arrived it was so large, so volumous, that I became suspicious I had been rumbled and they had decided to deep fry the entirety of the day's catch just for me. Then I saw exactly the same dish being heaved on to another table - a pile of golden, lightly battered king prawns, knotted squid tentacles and sizable scallops, leaving the plate almost greaseless...The same was true of ribbons of good tagliolini in a ripe tomato sauce with a hint of chilli and the contents of half a lobster at under 17 quid, the whole rested prettily on the emptied shell. Calves' liver, with the smokey char of a proper grill, came in an unfinishable trio of thick slices with a butter and sage sauce, and rare as requested.

Sunday, November 28, 2010 - The food is not earth shattering, but it has a reliable Gallic heft which is reassuring. On the menu cauliflower soup is first referred to as Creme du Barry - Comtesse du Barry, mistress of Louis XV, was obsessed by cauliflower - and the dishes are rich with the likes of duck confit, chicken livers and sauces mounted with enough cream to put a herd of Friesians on overtime...Best of all was a very good cote de boeuf, served with truly crunchy chips and a Bearnaise sauce we watched Oliver make. Desserts were not a strong point, but at least there was a list of cheaply priced good wines.

Sunday, November 21, 2010 - Not everything was appalling. The 10oz rib eye was fine - not without flavour, not tough, served medium rare, as asked. Likewise the service, by a nice Hungarian chap, was good. I worry he's wasted there. But that good steak set everything else into relief. A starter sharing platter with rings of deep-fried calamari appeared to have all the texture and flavour of surgical support hose. A bolus of breaded chicken breast was desperate and dry, skewers of prawns simply odd. Spare ribs were the colour of an old lady's velour sofa and edible, in the sense that I ate them.

Sunday, November 14, 2010 - I suppose I should apologise for ordering the pork belly. But this one was so good, the crosshatched, crisp, honeyed crackling giving way to completely rendered meat, that I'm not sure who I'd be apologising to, other than the pigs. A few sticks of salsify and carrots, a slippery carrot puree that had been passed and passed again, a disc of black pudding, a sigh of contentment. A chicken breast on a bright, light jus, with a heap of cavolo nero dressed with a garlic and tomato vinaigrette is nobody's idea of innovative. But who the hell wants innovation when all the essentials are in place?

Sunday, November 07, 2010 - The restaurant is a snug of wood-lined rooms and feels like a village inn. Service, sadly, is in keeping with that at too many Chinese joints: the best you can hope for is efficiency; mostly it's a masterclass in brusque...'Yard-long' green beans with planks of crisp Chinese bacon was a big black rustling pile of umami, was irresistible. Against that the braised brisket with pine nuts, smoked bamboo shoots and chilli seemed almost light. It wasn't. This is powerful wintry food served in cosy surroundings at ungrasping prices.

Thursday, October 28, 2010 - Hartnett's food here is very much an extension of her personality. Sure she can do big and solid, but she also has technique by the gallon, which allows her to do serious stuff to ingredients while still retaining their essence...Of the mains, the star was a hunk of slow-braised osso bucco, complete with glistening cylinder of marrow, on a thick puddle of wet polenta, the whole thing dressed with a meaty jus and some glazed Chantenay carrots - so you can pretend some of it is good for you.

Sunday, October 24, 2010 - The curious thing about this, the frustrating thing, is that the food isn't bad. It's not earth shattering, and I'm not even sure I would ever choose to eat there again. But almost everything we tried was well made and properly seasoned...They've got the food right. What they've got wrong is the concept. It has been over-thought, over-sold and, unlike the food, completely over-cooked.

Sunday, October 10, 2010 - There are booths and banquettes upholstered in green leather, and café-style tables with chromium edges, walls full of dodgy photos of the Rat Pack and a menu which, with its steaks and burgers, bellows 'diner'. For the most part, the cooking is spot on. They serve mammoth portions of big-flavoured food designed to soak up the beer. Thick pieces of quality bread smeared with a big, sticky mix of ham hock and trotter burnished with sesame seeds...A salad of Orkney bacon with soft duck eggs and spinach was underdressed but pleasing all the same. A sweet onion tart overlaid with a disc of very good goat's cheese was terrifyingly sweet, but alongside a glass of bitter ale worked very well.

Sunday, October 03, 2010 - Platform cannot do desserts; it's not worth wasting words on them. What it can do is meat. So there are ham hock terrines and rillettes of Gloucester Old Spot. Best of all were warm slices of confited beef, with the sort of tumescent, just-crisp amber fat to make a cardiologist wince, and sweet dark fibrous meat, served with wild mushrooms and the bitter crunch of watercress. Not far behind was devilled chicken livers, in a dark puddle of powerful cayenne-boosted sauce.

Sunday, September 26, 2010 - It was the steaks that were the real problem. If you are going to run a steak house, serve proper bloody steaks cut to proper sizes. The 300gm ribeye was a nice enough piece of meat but cut far too thin. And it would have helped if they'd brought the shallot and garlic butter I'd ordered rather than the claggy peppercorn sauce I didn't. More depressing still was the New York strip which was just a small, flat sirloin. The New York strip comes from the sirloin, but it is not the same thing. Presumably the team behind Redhook has eaten in the New York version of what they are trying to do. So why have they got it so wrong?

Sunday, August 15, 2010 - The room, with its open kitchen and bustling, young, mostly non-Indian waiters, has a jolly buzz and when they bring all of us in the queue a glass of hot chai - sweet milky tea flavoured with cardamom - I begin to hope that everything will be fine. There are some good things here, with the emphasis on the word 'some'...From the list marked 'small plates', the most successful is the Dishoom calamari. Their dark, pungent sticky lamb chops rubbed with black pepper and chillies were very good indeed, the outside deeply charred, the meat still pink. I would come back here for a plate of these.

Sunday, August 08, 2010 - We asked for an omakase for two. It started magnificently, with four cylinders of white crabmeat, tightly wrapped in nori with a fine dashi broth. That was followed by slices of sea bass sashimi, arranged as an albino peacock fan tail, each carrying a dot of sticky plum sauce, and on the side a small bowl of ponzu, which we were invited to pour over. In that combination of the subtle and the sharp, the clean and the precise, it was exactly what lovers of Japanese food get most excited about.

Sunday, August 01, 2010 - Zucca's big selling point is a lengthy list of antipasti at astonishingly good prices. A generous plate full of carpaccio of sea bream came dressed with olive oil, salt, pepper, lemon juice and curls of fresh red chilli...A veal chop, with crisp, caramelised fat and a heap of well-seasoned wilted spinach, was a simple dish full of simple virtues. Another of curiously meaty squid, chargrilled and curled, sprinkled with red chilli and laid on borlotti beans was equally good. The only duff notes were rather ordinary desserts.

Sunday, July 25, 2010 - The menu is short, self-confident and ever-changing. The success of a cannellini bean bruschetta had less to do with the beans themselves, good though they were, than the wonderful olive oil, the crunch of salt and the aromatic green herbs. The true stars of the piece, though, are the pasta dishes. Wide, butter-yellow ribbons of papperdelle came with an earthy stew of wood pigeon, in a ripe gravy that insinuated itself into every corner of the dish. Tagliarini was mined with nutty, intense brown shrimps and fine strips of courgette and chilli. It was perfectly seasoned and judged.

Sunday, July 11, 2010 - A gazpacho, with a scoop of tomato sorbet, was vivid and light and fresh and lots of other words that are pressed into service to denote summer. Better still was a dark, sticky dish of sweetbreads, roast cepes and beautifully turned roast potatoes with a hunk of long-braised veal cheek...It was an enjoyable meal, but we couldn't quite shift the sense that it had been enjoyed in the wrong place. I am pleased for these lonely travellers. But I am less pleased for the chef. He deserves better.

Sunday, July 04, 2010 - It took 40 minutes to deliver a goat's cheese mousse with Parma ham and peas from the set price menu and a salad of black pudding, apple and soft-poached egg from the bar menu. They weren't bad. Nor were they great. There were broad beans in among the peas, which were chalky. The salad was too much underdressed frisee with crumbled black pudding. It was food. We ate it. We were hungry.

Sunday, June 27, 2010 - The ground-floor dining rooms are another orgy of beige. It looks like someone has been invited to go crazy with a John Lewis charge card. I can't believe the people responsible for this place stayed awake long enough over the visuals to approve them. Against this background, the food was always going to have to work very hard to take off, and it never quite manages it. It is all professional, well executed and - a foie gras starter aside - error free.

Sunday, June 20, 2010 - It gives me absolutely no pleasure at all to award the restaurant, officially overseen by Michelin-starred chef Tom Aikens, the title of this year's laziest restaurant concept. The combination of greed, sloth and lack of ambition is frankly breathtaking and all the more dispiriting for the opportunity missed...And so to the main course options: a burger, a steak, a chicken salad, a salmon salad. It's a wedding buffet in Basildon. What it isn't is worth prices in the mid to high teens. The best that can be said is that those responsible have occasionally done some nice shopping.

Sunday, May 30, 2010 - Bar Boulud is great. New York has always been more adept at doing the smart, buzzy urban brasserie than we are, and this feels like that sort of animal, from the hefty bare floorboards through the slick lighting and the red leather banquettes to the big open kitchen. It has an energising rush and clatter...is a kitchen that knows what it's doing with pressed bits of slow-cooked animal. Best is its coarse country pate, and another of chicken liver, pork and cognac. If their home-cured ham is a little indifferent, pink folds of thinly sliced salami, the colour of a baby's cheeks, are salty and fatty in the right way.

Sunday, May 23, 2010 - A main of lamb - two pink cutlets and a roll of braised breast with a trompette jus and wild garlic puree - was big boys' food. Which, for various reasons not unrelated to my boyness and bigness, suited me perfectly. We finished with infantilising desserts: a banana cheesecake with salted peanut butter ice cream, and a riff on rhubarb, including a pot of crumble dressed with an impeccable custard...Even now Sheffield, which has wells of money and taste, is not overendowed with good places in which to eat. That makes the Milestone even more welcome.

Sunday, May 16, 2010 - Inamo's shtick is an interactive menu. Pictures of menu items are projected on to the table in front of you. You order your food. It arrives. What larks...With all these bells and whistles, most of the food is about as good as it needs to be. It succeeds best with the smaller dishes and when it sticks to the Japanese end of the Asian repertoire, the one exception being long-braised honey-roasted spare ribs in XO sauce. We liked slices of seared wild boar rolled around asparagus and enoki mushrooms.

Sunday, May 02, 2010 - Flavours are big and the essentials carefully managed. They make very fine pasta, for example, of the soft, silky, egg-yellow type, used here in ravioli of venison. The meat is long-braised to a tangle of glossy fibres, the pockets dressed with soft cubes of roasted pumpkin and an artery-hounding sage butter. Discs of more pumpkin turn up deep fried, drizzled with a slick of honey and with crumbly lumps of a mild goat's cheese, the whole sprinkled with oregano. It is a very simple, very effective plateful.

Sunday, April 25, 2010 - The design of the room, a successful effort to bring curves into a space of corners, is clever. If only the food had all the fun of the fair, too...A starter of expertly cooked sweetbreads, a stew of choucroute below, a julienne of carrot above, is solid French cookery. Roast langoustine with watercress soup could knock the ball out of the park were it not that the langoustine were overcooked. Main courses are similarly ho-hum. What should be a killer combination, lobster tail and pork belly, delivers both ingredients monotonously.

Sunday, April 18, 2010 - The fresh, spring-like stew of peas, ham and barley was rich and comforting and savoury. But what really made it was the boudin, the guinea fowl turned into the very lightest of mousses before being poached and caramelised. Bloody hell, but it was good. A disc of braised hare, the very darkest and densest of meats, came with a sauce so black it sucked the light out of the room...There's a strong wine list, with lots of choice under 30 quid, a smart front of house operation and a bill that doesn't make you feel you've been violated. It's what restaurants are meant to be like.

Sunday, April 11, 2010 - Main courses collapse in on themselves: tough lumps of duck with a "pastilla" of the leg, which is nothing of the sort. It should be crisp, light, sweet and, for what it's worth, triangular. This is a log which could have your eye out. Black truffle gnocchi, which had all the texture of those swabs used by dentists, were a travesty...They could have a very nice place here. Service is charming and efficient. There's a great list of serious steaks. They can actually cook. Right now they are trying to cook the wrong things.

Sunday, April 04, 2010 - First up, on its own dainty burner, a small wok-style bowl of "dry pot" chicken, the on-bone pieces pressed in against whole garlic cloves and hunks of fresh ginger. Aromatic fragrant fish was one of those dishes which rewarded hard work. It arrived, bones and all, so that you had to trim away to get at the lovely, batter-crusted white flesh, dressed with black beans, chillies and garlic...It was a big lunch for two people, but the flavours were so utterly compelling, the hit so addictive that we kept going back, both knowing that there would be a price to pay.

Sunday, March 28, 2010 - The fondue Savoyarde (a mix of Emmenthal and Beaufort with Comte) sounded serviceable, and we very much liked the toasted, seasoned croutons for dipping. But the fondue itself was a dismal affair, starting with the moment when they poured on the kirsch and set fire to it. Flambeed cheese? "It's under-seasoned," Pat said. "They've rubbed the pot with too much garlic, and it's separated." She was right. A glassy layer of liquid lay atop the molten cheese, and the flavour was shallow and dull.

Sunday, March 14, 2010 - There is one item served occasionally at the Canton Arms, a re-opened pub in Stockwell, south London, which best sums it up. That is the foie gras toastie. It is the meeting place of scuzz and appetite...We chose the six-hour braised shoulder of blackface mutton. It arrived as a casserole dish so we could help ourselves. The sheep had been taken to that point when it could be carved with a spoon, the liquor speaking of a virtuous interplay between aromatics and meat...I will definitely be returning, probably often.

Sunday, March 07, 2010 - Char sui buns, while hardly exemplary, were soft and light, and the sticky, sweet, porky filling did the job. Strands of squid, though showing that rubberiness that comes with a pause in the deep freeze, had at least been greaselessly deep-fried. I loved the seafood in a scallop and prawn dumpling, which had a pleasing bite, but the sticky rice-flour casing was far too thick and gelatinous...It might well be possible to get a glamorous meal here. Ours just hadn't been it.

Sunday, February 14, 2010 - The fact is that for a long while this sort of food (which, done well, can be fabulous) went out of fashion. That's what places like the Goring and the old pre-Ramsay Connaught were for. But now you can get it for much less money at restaurants across London - Mark Hix does this kind of stuff, as does Richard Corrigan - and you don't have to endure the glowering mood. Clearly there are people who like the Goring, or it would not have survived for a century. Sadly, I'm not one of them.

Sunday, January 03, 2010 - Blimey, it's impressive. In places, the food also matches. I sometimes run out of space before I get to dessert and it would be a tragedy to do so with Galvin La Chapelle. Their rum baba is quite simply the best I've ever eaten...Their lasagne of crab, more a light egg-bound mousse than a heavy pasta dish, is as good here as it was the first time I had it at the original Galvin bistro in Baker Street. A raw marinated tuna loin with spiky aubergine puree is a surprisingly well-structured dish. I expected yawn-worthy subtle; I got brisk, bold flavours. So clearly I admire Galvin La Chapelle very, very much.

Sunday, December 20, 2009 - Kitchen W8 proclaims itself a neighbourhood restaurant, and I suppose it is, but only if you live in the sort of neighbourhood where everybody can afford to wear mink-lined knickers...We liked very much the taster of salt cod beignet, the crisp exterior giving way to something rich and heart-congesting inside. A game consomme had a depth of flavour you could swim in, and the frothy bacon cream on top added a soft, luxurious edge. A moment's admiring silence, too, for a side dish of crushed butternut squash with chestnuts and beurre noisette....Other things were, well, bewildering.

Sunday, December 13, 2009 - A main-course assiette of veal - a beignet of the sweetbreads, darling little rounds of the loin, a rosy red piece of the tongue - is smart and detailed without being overwrought. Best of all are two expertly cooked breasts of grouse, the right shade of crimson on a lightly acidic blackberry sauce...But none of that - not the quality of the ingredients or the precision of the cooking or the slick if overly starched service - can detract from the fact that the experience was essentially joyless.

Sunday, November 15, 2009 - The food itself is bizarrely patchy. A smoked salmon terrine was accomplished dinner-party food, as long as the dinner party was held in 1974...However, a plate of bresola, served at the correct temperature and cut generously so you got the big, sweet, meat-on-the-turn flavour, came with lots of fresh, peppery green herbs...They have it in their grasp to be so much better. All they need is some charming door staff, cold tap water and uniformly good food. Is that such an unreasonable thing to expect?

Sunday, October 25, 2009 - On a weekday night all the tables around us in the bistro were filled with people happily eating off each other's plates. The menu is admirably small but the flavours are enormous...Baby squid in the Basque style brings an earthenware pot with sweet curls of seafood, perked up with smoked paprika on a bubbling olive oil stew of peppers, onions and garlic. You clean out the bowl with your fork, then with your bread, and finally with your finger. Likewise a Catalan-inspired dish of prawns roasted with huge amounts of chilli and garlic in a tagine-style pot had us chasing the sauce around the edges...

Sunday, October 18, 2009 - Aqua Nueva is a restaurant from a different era - the era that ended a year ago when Arctic winds suddenly blew through the City. Recession? What recession?...A couple of the things we ate were impressive. They hand-cut their ham very well and serve it at the right temperature...A tranche of sea bass, accurately cooked, was booted from one side of the plate to the other by an overly salty broth. Across the top lay a thin, transparent flap of jelly, a redundant modernist touch which brought nothing to the dish.

Sunday, October 11, 2009 - Sometimes the thought of those queues is off-putting. I crave a Tayyabs hit without the hassle...Spiced, minced lamb Seekh kebabs were fresh and juicy, the crisp grilled exterior giving way to something altogether more intense inside...A butter chicken masala had a deep and intense sauce, soft with dairy fats, sprightly with fresh green herbs, loaded with meat which hadn't seized up in the process. Alongside this, a bowl of pale yellow dhal with a baby aubergine which had been roasted to baby-food softness was a welcome calming influence.

Sunday, September 06, 2009 - Silk Road advertises itself as serving the food of Xinjiang. It is a simple, brightly lit room with communal tables and benches, and a reassuringly short menu. The most familiar plate of food was a pork fillet stir-fry with curly black fungus, in a sauce spiked with chilli. Less familiar was the big-plate chicken - a sizable bowl of a light, savoury chilli broth bobbing with pieces of chicken on the bone. Alongside the chicken were large pieces of potato braising nicely in the liquor...

Sunday, August 30, 2009 - A lot of the food here is earthy and French. The coarse toast with parsley-ballasted garlic butter, snails and bacon is one of the best things I've eaten this year. The duck skin scratchings, all crisp fat and crunch and salt, made me feel giddy and ashamed at the same time. But there is also space here for sweet Jamon de Teruel from Spain and nutmeg-spiked potted shrimps from our shores...They are doing a roaring trade. It just happens to be a great restaurant, one which serves duck scratchings. Need I say more?

Monday, August 10, 2009 - The whole mood of the place - from the cast-iron gateway off the suburban Bristol high street, down the terraced alleyway, heavy with pots of herbs they use in their cookery, to the vaulted dining room - shouts: "We want you to have a nice time," as does the price tag. At lunch three courses is a storming 20. In the evening it is just 28. For what you get, that is wonderful value. I'm even willing to overlook the vivid paintings of Italian scenes, art that makes the work of Jack Vettriano look subtle.

Sunday, July 19, 2009 - It is a stylish French brasserie for people who are gloriously sentimental about them; it is 'comme il faut' realised in acres of crisp linen and banquettes the colour of limpid jade. It is a slice of Paris, only with waiters who seem genuinely pleased to see you...It is summed up by a starter of lobster mousse. The 9.50 price tag looks hefty, but not for what arrives: a perfectly light mousse, surrounded by a ripe shellfish bisque and layered with pieces of tail meat the size of silver dollars.

Sunday, June 28, 2009 - Keelung is certainly a grown-up space, all clean, dark wood and shiny wine racks, plus an icy display of seafood in the window...A couple of the dishes were good but one of those, the crispy chilli beef, was only ordered to see how they managed an old stager: beef that crunched between the teeth, a sauce the colour of Dale Winton, not too cloying, a little heat...From the bizarrely named night-time market tapas menu came a dry piece of braised pork in a pleasingly soft pancake.

Sunday, June 07, 2009 - A few of the dishes were great, particularly the rich Dorset crab on toast with chopped egg, parsley and lemon juice, which looked and tasted just like one of his newspaper recipes, as did a French onion soup with a punchy local cheese crouton and a crisp wafer of pancetta-style ham. A five-hour slow-roast piece of pork was perfect - ooh, the crackling - and the chocolate brownie at the end was one of the very best I have ever eaten, the crisp surface giving way to a deep well of rich, soft chocolate loveliness.

Sunday, May 10, 2009 - Gandolfi Fish, a spinoff of the nearby Café Gandolfi, a Glasgow landmark these past 30 years, has almost everything sorted. The black-tabled, mirrored room is made for chatter. The service is impressively efficient and engaged, given there are just two of them for a bustling room. The menu is mostly sensible without being overwrought, and makes enough of good Scottish seafood without you fearing that something unspeakable involving bagpipes might be about to happen. And most of the food really is fine.

Sunday, April 26, 2009 - My assumption is that this restaurant has been in the works for 18 months, and the investment was so far advanced when the economic weather darkened that they had reached the point of no return. Their location, literally in the shadow of Canary Wharf's tarnished glittering stumps, only points that up. They will have to raise their game - by offering better quality or reducing their prices and doing away with the fripperies - if they hope to make it through.

Sunday, April 19, 2009 - There is much that is absurd about the place, from the waiters' pink waistcoats, to the ornate interior, designed to look like the dining car of some fine Edwardian train (all leather banquette, brass rail and lamp light), to the chrome toasters they bring if you order breakfast. Happily, though, there is a steady hand at work both in the kitchen and front of house, which makes all of this more than acceptable.

Sunday, March 22, 2009 - There was a perfectly cooked tranche of red snapper, the flakes of fish separating, pearly and clean, alongside a generous pile of dusky jollof rice, roasted plantains and a fiery tomato salsa to introduce the various ingredients to each other. Jerk lamb came with a slick of a deeply spiced gravy and another huge pile of rice and peas. At the end was one of the best executed chocolate fondants I have seen in a very long time… I have said time and again that we still have a long way to go before we have a fully developed food culture, but there is an optimism in this venture which shows exactly how far we have come.

Sunday, February 22, 2009 - Looking down from the ground-floor gallery, the first thing you see is the restaurant area, hemmed in by clever slate-grey curving walls that make it an organic part of the building. For the real joy, though, you have to wander beneath the gallery, where there's a bakery, patisserie, chocolatier, wine shop, cheese shop and charcuterie… But all of this would be worthless if the brasserie was not up to snuff. Happily it is. The menu is long, and all the salads and pasta or rice dishes are offered in starter portions as well as main-course size. This has to be a smart move. Smarter still is the fact that it exceeds expectations.

Sunday, February 15, 2009 - This is not a menu for the adventurous. Every single main course, from the choucroute garni through the onglet to the braised trotter and sweetbreads - all priced at around £12.50 - was welcome for being so blindingly obvious. Duck confit was every middle-class Englishman's Dordogne holiday. The skin was crisp and salty, the potato cake that came with it rudely luscious. From the changing list of daily specials the loin of veal, served from a trolley - I love that sort of theatre - was without fault.

Sunday, January 18, 2009 - No designers have had anything to do with Kikuchi. It is a small, brightly lit room with a few tables and a sushi bar, commanded by one man...Their selection of sushi, at £24 for 12 pieces - two-thirds the Buddha Bar price and 10 times as good - brought sweet scallop and silky strips of otoro (belly tuna), a little turbot and some mackerel, some slippery, ripely female sea urchin and jewel-bright orange salmon eggs that burst pleasingly against the roof of the mouth.

Sunday, November 09, 2008 - Here, they treat ingredients with the utmost care and sensitivity. It's also a smart space. Where Tapas Brindisa is all bare wood, an attempt to build a local artisanal vibe for City boys just over London Bridge, this is sleek and airy: white and olive-green tiling, a vault at the back where there is a bar next to the open kitchen. The only problem is the tables, which are tiny. A meal here is part feast, part jigsaw puzzle, as waiters and diners collaborate to find space.

Sunday, October 05, 2008 - Hanging on the walls of Launceston Place are sombre, brooding pictures of bare-naked trees in winter holding their own on a frosted field. The walls are dark grey and the carpeted floors only a slightly lighter shade of same. Even allowing for the backlit pieces of colourful glassware propped up here and there, the effect is serious and concentrated...

Sunday, September 21, 2008 - A conversation with my companion, upon reading the menu at Market in Camden Town. 'Well, I know what I'm going to have.' I shake my head: 'You're not having that.' He looks at me. 'I haven't told you what I want yet.' With a world-weary sigh, I say: 'You want the pig cheek, trotter and apple pie and you can't have it.'

Sunday, September 07, 2008 - It was with regret that we laid down our chopsticks and admitted defeat. It was the unfinished whole crab that hurt the most: chopped up, then flash-fried in a light batter, it lay amid a pungent, rustling nest of dry fried red chillies, garlic, salt, chillies, Szechuan peppercorns, and more chillies, a thrilling mountain of white and red...I will just have to return to Gourmet San. It is a small, spartan restaurant on a rather unlovely stretch of east London's Bethnal Green Road. It is also proof that the relatively recent hunger for genuine Szechuan food has reached a certain maturity.

Sunday, August 31, 2008 - At number 9 Denmark Street was the Giaconda Cafe, where David Bowie found his musicians and the Clash drank tea in downtime from being awfully cross about a lot of things. But those days are gone and now naturally enough the site has been reinvented as a restaurant called the Giaconda Dining Room.

Sunday, August 03, 2008 - Other than the choux pastry, my one quibble is with the computerised booking system, a feature of so many new restaurants these days. It forces the receptionist to ask for your first name when you make a booking. I don't want to be on first-name terms with these places. I don't want to marry them. I want lunch. So I have taken to refusing to give them anything other than a made-up surname. When the restaurant has proved itself they can have the rest. Which, where Quo Vadis is concerned, is now.

Sunday, June 22, 2008 - Towards the end of my first visit to Hix Oyster and Chop House, when I had eaten deep-fried sand eels and a salted ox cheek and green bean salad and crisp-skinned roast chicken, another diner asked me whether my presence there was not altering the nature of the experience. To be specific, he referenced Schrödinger's Cat, which at first I thought might be a menu item I had missed, the chef here being a rustic sort of chap.

Sunday, February 03, 2008 - And that sums up the place. Sake No Hana is a genuine attempt to introduce people to something new. It's not their fault that some of us have come across this sort of thing before. The fact is there's no pleasing some people, and in this case one of those people is me.

Sunday, January 20, 2008 - A restaurant is more than a menu. A restaurant is the menu and the room in which it is eaten, the glassware and the napery, the waiters and the buzz, and the sense of wellbeing you get from being there. Or at least most restaurants are. Le Cafe Anglais is different. It really is first and foremost a menu, a beautifully written one. It is poetry in four dozen dishes. If all you had to guide you were the words on the card you would want to be there. It is swoon- and dribble-worthy.

Sunday, December 30, 2007 - Ducasse is capable of brilliance, but apparently he doesn't think London deserves that. The bandwagon has rolled into town, but all the key musicians have been left at home. My advice: stay outside the door and admire the twinkling lights. It's cheaper and won't make you mad as hell.