Matthew Norman reviews

Saturday, November 15, 2008 - The menu, if a tad long ("It should all be on the one page, like a CV," one of us rebuked), is pleasingly authentic, ranging from terrines and snacky treats such as croque monsieur to the luxuriance of those fruits de mer. The service is determinedly Gallic, in the traditional "so ferociously French he must be from Peckham" manner, and we especially enjoyed the theatrical flourishes of a talented maître d'.

Saturday, November 08, 2008 - In its way, Dragon Castle's presence in so dispiritingly hideous a centre of urban deprivation is just as incongruous as finding Jim's sitcom crumpet on the bridge of the USS Enterprise. Certainly it's a shock to walk through a door on such a gruesome main road and be greeted by a gently splashing fountain, and to find an ocular feast of red paper dragons, tassel-strewn lanterns and golden chandeliers so luminescently vulgar, they'd be asked to leave a Las Vegas casino on grounds of taste.

Saturday, September 20, 2008 - Much has changed in the intervening years, and at what is now Hélène Darroze At The Connaught there is more chance of finding confit of syphilitic Peruvian mountain llama than a steak and kidney pudding. Yet for all the veneration of Mademoiselle D - a double Michelin star holder in France and one of the planet's top-ranked female chefs - it is still the service rather than the cooking that dominates…

Tuesday, July 22, 2008 - The room, patrolled by phalanxes of overzealous waiters and pin-striped managers, has a slightly soporific colour scheme of beige, brown and mocha, the pièce de résistance being a metallic ceiling sculpture suggesting a copper-plated Mini Cooper totalled by a juggernaut. Its purpose, apparently, is to lead the eye towards the vista, in our case of the smog covering the Serpentine like a filthy net curtain.

Saturday, May 24, 2008 - 'Is this a tribute restaurant to Sir Alex Ferguson?" inquired my friend hopefully as we took our seats at Saf. Then she added that the acronym by which the Manchester United manager is commonly known "was the only thing I could think of". Mind you, I had asked her to lunch with strict instructions that on no account was she to Google the name of the restaurant to which I'd be taking her, or to indulge in any other research, for fear of ruining the surprise.

Saturday, April 05, 2008 - Waiting for L'Autre Pied to drop its reliance on faddy culinary clichés seems futile, because chefs, like the rest of us, are slaves to the silly little orthodoxies of the age. Perhaps one day Eaves will look back on his current menu and wonder what he was thinking. The tragi-comic irony is that if and when he does, most of us will actually be of a toothlessness to relish those purées, rather than resent them.

Saturday, December 15, 2007 - There are those who believe that Claude Bosi's cooking is the future of grand gastronomy in Britain. Myself, I hope and pray it soon becomes the past, because seldom have I encountered a wider chasm between the opulence of a chef's talent and the paucity of joy to be had from his food.

Saturday, July 28, 2007 - Saka's talent was confirmed by a dish of his own invention which, for Italianate reasoning that remains opaque, he calls murgh aur masala ki milan: a sharp, piquant and spectacularly good chicken in another beautifully spiced gravy. Deep-fried okra was pointless, but sizzling shallots with chilli was as sparkling a side dish as I've eaten in a long time.

Saturday, March 10, 2007 - Within two minutes of arriving at Benja, which promises "a new type of Thai cuisine" based on "the flavours and tastes of Royal Siam", it was to the inspirational advice (expirational advice, technically, but we'll let that pedantry pass) of a certain Anna Leonowens that I found myself turning. "Whenever I feel afraid, I hold my head erect," Missus Anna taught us in song, as she struggled to acclimatise to life with Yul Brynner, "And whistle a happy tune/So no one will suspect I'm afraid."

Saturday, October 14, 2006 - As readers of his autobiography, the startlingly well-written and drolly titled Humble Pie, will know, Gordon Ramsay hated his time in Paris under the aegis of fabled chef Joël Robuchon. "I was like a tortured child," he said a few years ago. "You know how arrogant the French are. Extraordinary." Extraordinary indeed.