Restaurant review McCoys at the Cleveland Tontine, Staddlebridge Northallerton, North Yorkshire.

Based on cruel actuarial calculation, a tontine is an investment that pays an increasing annuity as other participants die off. In 1804, this morbid mechanism was used to raise funds for the Cleveland Tontine, a coaching inn built to serve the Sunderland-London route, which is now the rackety A19. In 1976, the Tontine was acquired by the three McCoy brothers, Eugene, Tom and Peter, who became leading lights of northern gastronomy. When I last visited the Tontine 20 years ago, a meal in the upstairs restaurant was a curious experience in rural North Yorkshire. Packed with parasols, it was like a stage set from Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and the extravagant dishes were equally theatrical.

After four decades of expansion and contraction, the McCoy empire has stabilised in the form of a hotel with basement bistro. Cooked by head chef Simon Whalley, the food is mercifully more down-to-earth (the fish comes from Hartlepool; the meat from Darlington). The operation still displays some odd quirks, not least on the website which reveals that the McCoys "love ... 1950s Middlesbrough bus place name blinds", but fails to give opening hours. When my wife and I visited the bistro for a midweek lunch, inadequate signage (due to be improved) involved us in a north-south-north zigzag on the A19.

Going downstairs in the solid 19th-century structure, we found ourselves transported to a persuasive rendition of a Parisian bistro. Candles glowed on every table. Vines in plaster relief curled on a low, brown ceiling. Charles Trenet warbled "Quand notre coeur fait boum!" from 1938. Framed menus from La Coupole, Allard, Benoit and other great brasseries revealed that one of the McCoys had engaged in some hefty wining and dining in Paris around 1968, rather than participating in the événements.

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Restaurant review Galoupet, 13 Beauchamp Place, London.

It has long been my contention that the simplest way to boost the appeal of our restaurant trade, and so elevate the place of good food in our culture, is to reduce the off-putting mark-ups on wine. So many middle-class eating experiences are tainted by that awful moment when eyes are dragged reluctantly to the farthest right column on the wine list, where some pedestrian Picpoul or charlatan Chardonnay is winking away at a cool four times the supermarket price.

The restaurateur's defence is as predictable as it is invalid: I have to make a profit somehow and everyone else does it too. Alas, this is myopic. My dear fellow, you might make more of a profit by not causing eyes to bleed on reading your drinks menu; and as for marching in step with your peers, leave that to the Army.

Wine is allegedly the central attraction of Galoupet, named after its owners' vineyard in Provence and which by appearances has slipped comfortably into the ostentatious despotism of Knightsbridge. It has a giant Enomatic machine at the front, from which 36 wine varieties can be extracted via a top-up card system. It looks like a spaceship designed by oenophile aliens, and the idea is to encourage contemplation of how different wines and foods best align. There is also a basic retail service, so this restaurant acts as local off-licence for the denizens of SW3.

Unfortunately, this makes buying wine to accompany the food very annoying – eventually. For reasons I cannot fathom, at the end of the meal we are shown the retail list, so that only then is it clear how much extra we're paying for the privilege of sitting in this long, thin room, with its clinically white upholstery and tilted mirrors. The last of these are a nuisance, because by hanging off opposite walls, they make it hard not to spend the meal staring at the back of one's head.

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Restaurant review Bread Street Kitchen, One New Change, 10 Bread Street, London.

One of the many mysteries surrounding Gordon Ramsay is why his cut-the-crap, no-nonsense TV persona is so far removed from the prissiness of his restaurants. On screen he's all blood, sweat and shouting; in his dining rooms it's all lilies, amuse-bouches and murmuring.

Now comes Bread Street Kitchen, the Ramsay group's latest mega-opening in the City, and this time he's doing things differently. It's informal, it's democratic, and it takes its aesthetic from the lofts of Shoreditch rather than the gilded salons of Paris. In short, Gordon's gone groovy. "Drop in and say hello," Bread Street Kitchen's website chummily entreats.

Occupying a substantial slab of One New Change, a shiny development of offices and shops in the shadow of St Paul's, Bread Street Kitchen is just a few steps from Jamie Oliver's Barbecoa, which got there first and nabbed all the cathedral views. Gordon's place is bigger and buzzier than Jamie's, positioning itself as a Wolseley for the City and open from early morning until late at night. As it turns out, the all-day dining option means that a lunch can drag on almost till teatime. But we'll come on to that.

Bread Street Kitchen opened a year later than planned, and apparently cost £5m. When you walk in, you can immediately see why. This isn't a restaurant, it's a small town, with its own microclimate; a monumental space, seating 250, criss-crossed by gantries and flooded with light from wraparound 20 foot-high windows.

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Restaurant review The French Laundry at Harrods, Fourth Floor, 87-135 Brompton Road, London.

This is not a restaurant review. I didn't pay for my dinner and you won't be able to eat at this establishment. So this breaks all the rules – which means you can take the mark out of 10, below, with a pinch of salt. But the 10-day pop-up version of The French Laundry (open till tomorrow) should not go unmentioned because it is, quite simply, extraordinary.

Regular readers will know from John Walsh's masterful interview in the 25 September issue with Thomas Keller, chef/patron of the three-Michelin-starred Californian institution, that his temporary home in Harrods is not an overture to opening a London outpost. Rather, this is the maestro allowing us Brits the chance to experience his food without jetting over to America, by jetting himself, 30 staff, plenty of tableware and inordinate amounts of butter to the UK.

The wisdom of this decision must be judged by what is on the plate. It must surely have been Harrods' decision to create an anteroom to the restaurant with astroturf and fake lavender plants on garden furniture. It puts one less in mind of the Napa Valley than B&Q. A facsimile of the original's blue door swings open for the big reveal, but instead of a light-flooded, luxuriously appointed room, the temporary French Laundry is more of a generic conference centre. For £250 a head (without wine), I want to be bathed in atmosphere, not noticing a blown lightbulb, and a clump of exposed plug sockets and extension cables.

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Restaurant review, Summer Lodge Country House Hotel, 9 Fore Street, Evershot, Dorset

Evershot, in West Dorset, reeks with literary association. It turns up in Tess of the D'Urbevilles as "the small town or village of Evershead" where Tess pauses on her way to call on Angel Clare's parents: "She made a halt here and breakfasted a second time, heartily enough – not at the Sow and Acorn, for she avoided inns, but at a cottage by the church." The church is St Basil's (patron saint of hoteliers, I expect) and the poet George Crabbe was rector there. Had poor Ms D'Urbeville lived a century later, she could have had her breakfast at Summer Lodge, a former dower-house whose grounds were part-designed by Thomas Hardy, when he was the local architect.

It's now a country house hotel of sumptuous, indeed fabulous, excess: its décor and furnishings so plumped and primped, so louche and luxuriant, that you find a tut-tutting puritan lurking in your conscience, muttering: "This is too much." The lounge in which we sat before dinner is full of plush fat sofas. The ruched gold ball-skirted curtains are the kind of thing that used to be seen on the shoulders of the Duchess of York. On two tables, left there as though by an eccentric ducal host, are at least 100 bottles of whisky, gin, brandy, rum and Armagnac. There's a huge fire in the grate – unlit on this warm night – and a big portrait on the wall of a troubled Hispanic beauty in a frock, from the school of post-operation Frieda Kahlo.

As we took all this in, along with our (huge) G&Ts, the amuses-bouches arrived: delicious tiny arancini, a miniature Waldorf salad with the blue cheese heftily predominant, and a mini-burger, with tomato relish. A plate of enormous green olives added to the general air of opulent over-stuffed-ness.

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Restaurant review Midsummer House, Midsummer Common, Cambridge.

You want to talk about money? Fine, we can talk about money. A few weeks back I reported my grim experience of the two-Michelin-starred Gidleigh Park in Devon, a joyless corporate retreat charging £110 for a five-course tasting menu with coffee and petits fours (though other, shorter menus were also available). In the process I managed to infuriate some of you by seeming to be one of those spoilt rascals who gets paid to write about food and manages, somehow, not to enjoy it. My beef with the place was that the prices were wholly unreasonable, despite the excellent food.

Well, it will hardly make your weekend, but I am thrilled to report that, as you would expect, two-Michelin-starred food doesn't have to be so forbidding. It can even come at a significantly better price. Still expensive, I know, but at Midsummer House in Cambridge there is both a 10-course tasting menu for £95 ("Taste of Midsummer") and the seven-course tasting menu for £75 ("Taste of the Market") I sample, which is outstanding. In other words, if you're going to save up for a starry Michelin meal, you should exercise more, not less, discretion – and heading to this Victorian villa just off central Cambridge is about as sharp a choice as you could make.

There is a remarkable absence of pretension about Midsummer House. Architecturally, it is underwhelming – a plain townhouse on the bank of the River Cam, adjacent to the common on which an excellent annual fair is held, and opposite the rowing houses of the universities' colleges, wherein some students obtain levels of fitness their peers think obscene.

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Restaurant review The Asquith, 11 Newhall Street, Birmingham

I've managed to nab a table at the hottest new opening in town. And not just any town – this one has just been pronounced the food capital of Britain. The chef is Michelin-starred, and well-known to the public as a former winner of TV's Great British Menu. The cocktail bar, managed by a recently crowned National Bartender of the Year, has already been open for a few weeks, to pump up anticipation. But hang on – why all the empty tables? Where are the food bloggers? How come the couple nearest me are having a whispered argument and I can hear one of them hissing, "I told you we should have gone to Café Rouge..."?

Birmingham may be, according to the food magazine Olive, Britain's foodiest city, with three Michelin-starred restaurants and a host of local-hero producers. But there's a lack of sizzle around the restaurant scene, judging by my visit to brand-new arrival, The Asquith. If this opening had been in London, it would have been PR'd to the rafters, and rammed with well-wishers and early adopters. But whatever Birmingham's foodies are doing this opening weekend, they certainly aren't at The Asquith.

Which is a surprise, seeing that this is the latest venture from Glynn Purnell, poster boy for Birmingham's food scene and probably the city's most talented chef. He made his name at Jessica's, in Edgbaston, before setting up on his own with Purnell's, where he serves modern French food of rare finesse and invention.

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Restaurant review Rules, 35 Maiden Lane Covent Garden, London.

I hadn't been to Rules since the mid-1980s and all I remembered of the place was a heavy atmosphere of dark wood, hefty carpets, thick sauces and sturdy-bottomed English lunchers. Heaviness was my main impression; but then history, of a dense, richly-flavoured kind, hangs around Rules like mayoral chains. It's England's oldest restaurant, founded by Thomas Rule in 1798. It's been owned by only three families in 200 years. It's seen off nine English monarchs. It turns up in several novels: the adulterous couple in Graham Greene's The End of the Affair enjoyed their first lurve tryst here over a furtive dish of seductive onions.

When in 1971 it was threatened by the GLC with relocation to another site, John Betjeman wrote to the public enquiry, calling Rules "an excellent restaurant... its interior on the ground floor is unique and irreplaceable, and part of literary and theatrical London". Thackeray and Dickens chowed down here. Generations of actors, from Buster Keaton to Larry Olivier, strutted and fretted here. And as everyone knows, George VII, when still Prince of Wales, used to heave his royal tumtum up a secret staircase and romance Lily Langtry.

Enough of the history, I hear you cry. But dear reader, Rules is a phenomenon because of the history. Walk into the hushed, plushy, murmurous interior and it wallops you in the face. A texture of English hedonism and yeoman greed, green-room gossip and nursery puddings, Jorrocks and JB Priestley. This place is as English as treason – authentic Englishness, not some Downton Abbey version.

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Restaurant review Petit Mange, 29 Magdalen Road, St Leonard's, Exeter.

Charlotte Lloyd-Wrigley, the 23-year-old entrepreneur behind Petit Mange in Exeter's St Leonard's suburb, deserves a lot of respect. Asked by the city's Express and Echo whether opening a new restaurant in a recession was wise, she said: "It's always going to be a bad time to open a business. You could say, 'We can't open now because of the recession,' but we have priced for the recession and there are still people going out every night of the week in Exeter."

Exactly. That is precisely the risk-taking spirit that will drag our country out of recession, and the prices in this new venture, replacing a restaurant called The Cat in the Hat, are certainly reasonable. St Leonard's is a calm, relatively affluent part of the city, and meant to be a foodie village in its own right. There is a butcher, fishmonger, bakery, delis and cafés. Petit Mange is pitched as an upper-end food experience compared with these neighbours, which it could yet be. But not without major and obvious improvements.

A split-level bistro, it has awful décor. Where we are sat at least, the work of a local artist, selling at around £300 a pop, is pure splodge on canvas. There is an unpredictable music selection bursting out of a single iPod dock, which tonight plays Brahms, Oasis, Kings of Leon and Kelis in sequence. I would expect only marginally better at Timepiece, the city's biggest club, where Lloyd-Wrigley used to work.

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Restaurant review, The Beckford Arms, Fonthill Gifford, Wiltshire.

It gives your dinner added spice to know you're eating it on the premises of a notorious degenerate. And the names 'Beckford' and 'Fonthill' summon up a chap who, in the early 19th century, was thought by many to be "the most evil man in England".

He was William Beckford, author, occasional MP, art collector, builder, critic, traveller and sexual predator. His debut fiction, Vathek, written in three days and two nights when he was only 21 and in the grip of heaven-knows-what stimulant, was one of the earliest English Gothic novels, a big influence on Lord Byron, who called him "England's wealthiest son" – Beckford inherited the equivalent of £110m from his dad, who owned slave plantations in Jamaica. Scandal engulfed him when he was exposed in the newspapers as a bisexual sadist and paedophile, once discovered in the act of whipping a 10-year-old boy. He had the enormous Fonthill Abbey built to his design, but it featured a massive phallic tower which collapsed one night, bringing the roof down, in 1825.

The eyes of the weary traveller on the A303 from London fall with delight on the Beckford Arms, on the old Fonthill estate. It's a big white inn covered in ivy and lit with welcoming lamps. The bar has been modernised to look more like a sophisticated country house than a pub. The tables and chairs are as lumpy and bandy-legged as Mrs Patmore in Downton Abbey, but the décor is on-trend: more Farrow & Ball than Colefax & Fowler. There are sofas, newspapers and a blazing fire in the sitting-room, wall-hangings in the dining area, and eight bedrooms

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Restaurant review, HKK Broadgate West, Worship Street, London.

The "bespoke Cantonese fine dining" restaurant HKK is the latest opening from the Hakkasan group, which scored a Michelin star with the original eponymous restaurant and, more recently, has given Londoners the haute (and strange – beef with candyfloss, anyone?) Japanese Chrysan.

HKK occupies the same anonymous metal-and-glass City carapace as Chrysan – financiers must have the same enhanced sense of gastronomic direction as they do for sniffing out advantageous interest rates. Once inside, sitting on a banquette in the surprisingly modest dining-room, things take a turn for the posh.

I suspect that only I see the resemblance in the po-faced installation above the central food station to pink buttocks (it's a collection of round bone china peaches that bob about, lit with rosy hue). I snigger. My banquette neighbours pull their iPads a little closer.

I receive a menu – a change to HKK's original ethos of offering only an epic eight-course set lunch (£48) or 15-course dinner (£95). Chef Tong Chee Hwee's idea was to take the best available produce and use both traditional and modern techniques to send out unknown dishes that delight.

Now there's an à la carte section, so I'm guessing not everyone liked the idea. (I imagine a captain of industry murmuring, "Chef Tong, I think you've delighted us long enough.") But since I've nowhere to go this afternoon, I choose the eight-course lunch tasting menu, while Mr M (a late sub for my cancelled lunch date) goes temporarily veggie.

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Restaurant review, Massimo Restaurant and Oyster Bar, London.

It happens sometimes in a foreign city. You leave the tawdry, neon-lit sprawl of the main drag and wander down an unpromising side street, only to stumble across The Perfect Restaurant – golden and gorgeous and oozing relaxation and low-key glamour. Emerging hours later, as though from a dream, you forget to note the name of the restaurant or the street, and when you return, you never manage to find it again.

Weirdly, given that I'm meant to know all about new restaurants, a version of this happened to me in my home city the other week. A friend invited me for dinner at a new hotel I'd never heard of, The Corinthia, which opened earlier this year on Northumberland Avenue, a street off Trafalgar Square that appears on the Monopoly board but otherwise doesn't feature very largely in London life.

We had a perfectly OK meal, in an expensively bland, modern British restaurant. And then we set off to explore the rest of the hotel. Creeping down marbled corridors, past shadowy cocktail bars, we arrived at a discreet, unmarked door. 'Ah, this must be Massimo – let's look!' said my friend, and I agreed, though I had no idea what Massimo might be.

We pushed open the door, and by God, there it was – the Dream Restaurant. A vast, elegant, Deco-ish brasserie, a sepia-tinted tableau of steam-age glamour, with its own lost tribe of interesting, arty-looking customers. Acres of conker-coloured leather banquettes stretched into the distance. Huge, hemispherical light fittings set the mosaic marble floor twinkling, and a parade of candy-striped Corinthian columns lent the room a fantastical, cartoonish dimension, like the Wolseley reimagined by Dr Seuss.

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Restaurant review The Balcon Sofitel St James, 8 Pall Mall, London.

Having returned from a week of eating rough-hewn slabs of ibérico ham and messy heaps of paella in southern Spain, taking Sunday lunch at a new brasserie in London seems a good way to ease gently back into dismal, autumnal English urban life by way of some refined dining.

The first items placed on the table – a little dish of saucisson and two baskets of bread – are more holiday fare than swish city offerings, but there's a significant difference in the surroundings. The Balcon is within the Sofitel St James, part of the French luxury-hotel group; it used to be Brasserie Roux – care of the legendary Albert – but it was a slightly soulless roll-out conceit. The chef, Vincent Menager, arrived a couple of years ago, a long-time Sofitel hand. Now he's been given sole control. And introduced some soul.

His menu blends classic French and British produce and techniques to appeal to West Enders without scaring off the trad hotel clientele. Charcuterie is from Trealy Farm in Monmouthshire and Mas le Rouget in Cantal, France; Herefordshire snails come with Mas air-dried ham while wild Devon mussels marinière arrive on Welsh rarebit. There are rotisserie dishes and slow-cooked rib-stickers, grilled meats and fish and some tarts and tartines for lighter meals, as well as the aforementioned charcuterie plates – 16 of them. The salad section is small but well-formed, although quite what steak tartare is doing there is anyone's guess.

We're directed by friendly, textbook-French staff towards the items in bold on the large-format menu; these are chef's signature dishes. No argument from me – the pike custard with King's Lynn brown shrimps, crustacean velouté and sourdough toast (£10.50) is both pretty and delicious, an unctuous, delicately flavoured confection with punchy shrimps scattered on top and a jug of rich sauce.

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Restaurant review The Hansom Cab, 84 Earls Court Road, London.

The unique selling proposition about The Hansom Cab – an elegant Victorian boozer near Kensington High Street – is that it's been bought by Piers Morgan, the TV personality and former journalist. Mr Morgan is a curious figure: a chap who seems to revel in being disliked and to enjoy the popular consensus that he's a conceited git. By cunning and chutzpah, he has snagged himself a corner table at Planet Celebrity, advising Tony Blair, high-fiving Simon Cowell and making himself agreeable to the vice-presidents of CNN.

He bought The Hansom Cab last December, in a joint venture with his younger brother Rupert, who used to manage Guy Ritchie's ancient (est 1760) Mayfair pub The Punch Bowl, and with Tarquin Gorst, who co-owned it. (Tarquin, Piers and Rupert, eh? I can remember a time when London pubs were owned by people called Nobby, Del and Sid.) After the purchase, Morgan did lots of celebrity-schmoozing in the pub; I suspect the place is meant to attract the kind of people who'd travel miles to clap eyes on James Corden or Freddie Flintoff.

One's first impression is of cramp. It's a gastropub that's got too much bar and too little restaurant. The marble bar protrudes so far into the room that the dining tables are squashed against the wall. Eaters have to contemplate a lot of strangers' bottoms at eye-level. In the back bar, things are more stylish: lots of fancy Victorian engraved glass and black-painted walls covered with framed Jak cartoons from the Evening Standard and monochrome photographs of Parisian artisans. A porcelain pelican broods menacingly on the bar. The place looks welcoming. But you still feel you're dining in a long train carriage.

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Restaurant review Cut at 45 Park Lane, London.

Vulgarity takes many forms, and some are more tolerable than others. Wolfgang Puck, the Austrian-American who transformed popular eating habits in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, specialises in a type that is forgivable because it is honest. There is nothing worthy, ethical or sanctimonious about his latest opening, at 45 Park Lane in London's Mayfair; rather, it is unapologetically ostentatious and expensive. You visit knowing vast sums of money will change hands, and expecting to be extremely well fed. Both those things will most likely happen, so you will leave happy, which, after all, is the aim of the ritual.

Puck opened his first restaurant, Spago, in West Hollywood in 1982. It was renowned for its haute-cuisine pizzas. Three decades later, he has become probably the world's most celebrated steak chef, mainly because of the branches of The Cut he has opened in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Singapore. Now it has come to London, sitting by the Dorchester hotel.

The interior might, as some critics have suggested, resemble an airport lounge; if so, its visitors must be flying first-class. The dark-tan leather sofas, sparkling cutlery, immaculately uniformed doormen, gleaming table-lamps and marble flooring all ooze money-no-object. The main room is deep and thin, almost corridor-like, on the ground floor and adjacent to the whizzing sports cars and restored Routemaster buses of W1. On the table next to us, a posse of young executives with over-gelled hair spend 35 minutes inspecting their nails, after which David Haye, the recently retired heavyweight, turns up dressed neck to toe in black. The Cut is the sort of place where boxing champs keep their entourages waiting.

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Restaurant review, Roti Chai, 3 Portman Mews South, London.

Uh-oh. I used to think that the Indian restaurant at the end of my road was my perfect partner. I've been so loyal to it over the years that at one point I just ate "on tick" and paid at the end of the month. But like a marriage that's lost some of its excitement, recently I've been finding the tarka dahl a bit, well, lacklustre. I've tried branching out from my usual order to spice things up, but I think we need a break.

I may have found a new love in Roti Chai, an "Indian Street Kitchen" tucked away in a mews behind Oxford Street in central London. It may not have the virtue of being on anyone's doorstep, much less mine, but it's definitely worth cheating on your regular with.

Open since summer, Roti Chai has been created by Rohit Chugh, who wanted to bring a taste of the all-day street food of India that fuels the bustling country to London. It's like a typical Indian railway canteen – if the trains were run by the staff of Monocle or Wallpaper magazines. Plain refectory tables and chairs are neatly arranged, while across the back wall, a well-stocked bar and view into the kitchen reveal finely choreographed activity.

Kitschy faux-adverts in classic Indian style proclaim "since 2011", and at the front desk there's an artfully chosen range of spicy products to buy. It's all very agreeable – and on a Friday night the place is full, with everything from an office outing of 20 to dating couples. Downstairs is a restaurant proper – "Dining Room" – which has round tables and soft lighting and its own bar area; the food samples dishes from all over the subcontinent. Looks promising, but it's the snacky "Street Kitchen" at street level that really appeals.

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Restaurant review The Pig Hotel, Beaulieu Road, Brockenhurst, New Forest, Hampshire.

Announcing its presence on a sign with a brass silhouette of a cheerful porker, The Pig Hotel sits in the heart of the New Forest.

"Welcome to the Forest," says the short, extremely pretty girl at Reception, giving you the key to the Tamworth Room (many of the rooms are named after pigs) and you soon feel like you've stepped back to a calmer, simpler, more rustic life. The bedrooms are in the country house's old stable yard. They have wooden floors. A key design feature is the hefty log pile in a rectangular wall-space. An old-style telephone, the kind you dial with your finger, sits beside the bed. The bath is old and claw-footed. An old-style leather-clad Roberts radio is tuned to Radio 4 (of course). It's wonderful. This hotel room is the accommodation equivalent of comfort-eating. It's newly and beautifully renovated but it feels at least 50 years old.

It takes a while to put your finger on the prevailing influence. The Pig is a sister restaurant of Lime Wood in Hampshire and both are deeply in thrall to the shabby-chic, traditional-with-a-twist style of Daylesford. The restaurant is a conservatory bolted on to the old house, but it's been done up as a Gardeners' Question Time dream of a greenhouse. The glass roof slopes down to a long window. Led to your seat by another short, amazingly pretty girl, your eye is drawn by a hundred details of watering cans, climbing plants, wooden trugs, wooden crates, terracotta pots of thyme and rosemary. It's set-dressing of a comprehensive kind. No greenhouse in history ever had such a patchwork floor of Moorish tiles. No garden shed ever boasted such a giant pine dresser or such a vast, UFO-like chandelier.

The menu is rather archly divided into six sections. 'Piggy Bits' are pre-starter snacks, 'Starters and Small Plates (Or Bigger!)' are more substantial hors d'oeuvres, 'Literally Picked This Morning' are foraged dishes, fresh eggs and fish, 'Forest and Solent' are the main courses, including The Pie @ The Pig (steak and Old Thumper ale with bubble'n'squeak), The Pig's Hampshire bacon chop and Dorset cockles and Cornish mussels. 'Garden Sides' offer greens, onions, pumpkins and potatoes from The Pig's much-vaunted walled garden of home-grown produce. It crosses your mind that they're trying to emulate the vegetable garden at Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons, plus the restaurant-in-a-greenhouse that is Petersham Nurseries plus Mrs Patmore's kitchen in Downton Abbey...

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Restaurant review Young Turks at The Ten Bells 84 Commercial Street, London.

The original Young Turks wanted to reform the calcifying Ottoman Empire and raise its standards closer to those of its Western rivals. Their name has since entered our language as a general term for thrusting and precocious types, who often have a predilection for subversive art and radical politics. In its latest invocation, it now also refers to a wonderful food collective whose latest venture is an exhilarating coup at the Ten Bells pub on the edge of the City of London. That, too, is a part of the world that has been calcifying of late; and in terms of food at least, the Young Turks have raised its standards closer to the City's West.

The chefs are James Lowe and Isaac McHale. Lowe was previously head chef at St John Bread & Wine, which is barely yards away from his new redoubt. McHale has worked at a pop-up at the Pavilion Café in east London's Victoria Park and as development chef at The Ledbury. Their credentials are excellent. A third comrade, Ben Greeno, is currently working in Sydney. The front-of-house operation is run by the convivial pair of Daniel Willis and Johnny Smith, who hail from The Clove Club, a dining crew in Dalston. "We are young and ambitious, have worked in some of the best kitchens in the world, and now we want to do things our way," their website declares. And you can tell.

The Ten Bells is (in)famous for its attendance by the victims of Jack the Ripper (the pub was, from 1976 to 1988, renamed The Jack the Ripper). Its ground floor is always packed, though rarely with City types, who thankfully prefer the bars closer to Liverpool Street station. In the far corner, italic neon letters and an arrow point to a door which says, "No Entry – Toilets are Downstairs". But behind the door is a steep, battered wooden staircase leading up to a sign saying, "Live East, Die Young", and a single room overlooking Commercial Street.

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Restaurant review Aurelia, 13-14 Cork Street, Mayfair, London.

I've been eating in a lot of spartan, hole-in-the-wall restaurants lately. Places where the furniture is reclaimed from an old factory, the staff are reclaimed from a Kooples poster, and you can eat anything you like, as long as it's a big hunk of meat.

Don't get me wrong – it's great that London has got its own scruffy, borderline-fetishistic dining scene. But sometimes, as a break from all this gastro-machismo, wouldn't it be nice to go somewhere pretty and be treated like a laydee?

Aurelia is just the place for that. Depending on your perspective, it's a reminder of the old days, when ladies were made to feel special and the gentlemen paid the bill. Or it's a ridiculous throwback to a past geological era – the Permatan period, perhaps – when Continental restaurant managers flirted gamely with ladies of a certain age, while white-jacketed barmen conjured up overpriced Bellinis.

Aurelia is the latest thoroughbred from the family-run stable that includes Zuma, Roka and La Petite Maison, and its modern Mediterranean cooking is apparently inspired by the Aurelian Way, the Roman coastal road to Spain.

Posh Italian, in other words, with a side order of Jamon Iberico. But head chef Rosie Yeats has spent the past few years cooking modern Japanese food at Roka, so Aurelia promises to be more than just another upmarket Mayfair trattoria, even if the Aurelian Way never made it as far as Kyoto.

Read more at http://www.independent.co.uk/

Restaurant review Union Jacks, 4 Central St Giles Piazza, London.

Boak. It's a horrible word, really. Boak. But it does sum up how I felt after putting the food at this week's restaurant in my mouth. Boak. Sorry Jamie.

I feel bad because I've got a lot of time for Mr Oliver, whose grand ambition extends to some really rather good recipes and entertaining TV. His Jamie's Italian chain is, by all accounts, pretty decent and I'm fond of the Jme wooden chopping board in my kitchen.

Although it's now been announced that a second branch will open soon in Chiswick, his latest venture, Union Jacks, was supposed to be a one-off in a new development near London's Oxford Street, and the music, décor, drinks and tableware (the plates say "Stop looking at my bottom" on their base) are suitably witty and pretty. But the food is dire.

Actually, that's not fair. The starters and puddings are delicious, with the wit and flair of Jamie Oliver Inc at its best. But the central concept is a reinvention of the pizza. What's that? Pizza doesn't need reinventing, being one of the world's most loved, perfectly assembled dishes? That's where we're wrong, apparently.

Union Jacks is a celebration of British produce and flavours, showcased on "flats" (that's pizzas to you and me, not that you'll see the p-word on the menu). There's nothing wrong with showcasing the fantastic meat, cheeses, veggies and herbs of our nation. Just not on the same plate as a "flat" – not even one made by US chef Chris Bianco, whose pizzas are fabled and who's been brought over by Jamie to recreate his Arizona magic here.

It starts well with roasted beets with Westcombe curd and smoked seeds (£4), prawn and Morecambe Bay shrimp cocktail (£6), potted British seafood (£5.50) and catch-of-the-day fish fingers with tartare sauce (£5). All on the modest side, but that's about right for the price and as a curtain-raiser for something stodgy like pizza, sorry, flats.

Read more at http://www.independent.co.uk

Restaurant review A Little of What you Fancy, 464 Kingsland Road, London.

Finding new Dalston restaurant A Little of What You Fancy is a bit of a challenge.

It hides in plain sight on the Kingsland Road, blending in beside 'Angel's beauty and slimming clinic', a unisex hair salon and an off-licence cum mini-market. It's difficult to find because it doesn't have a sign.  A chalkboard near the street is the only indication that this is the right place, which with a smeared scrawl, announces the restaurant's name. This is either a stroke of marketing genius or a mis-judged attempt at projecting an underground image.

Inside it's stripped down, yet homely, with crates of eggs and lemons sitting around, a drafty toilet and reclaimed school chairs. It's packed with loud and chatty people, uniformed with undercuts and boat shoes for the boys, artfully dishevelled hair and baggy jumpers for the girls - a typical Dalston crowd.

But the prices are not Dalston prices. You could feed a whole family at Huong-Viet, just a few blocks down the road, for the price of three-course meal here. I suspect that A Little of What You Fancy is aiming to pull in the second wave of Dalston dwellers. The ones who came because they liked the edgy, vibrant area, and could afford the inflated rents. The ones who work in the City by day, but want to feel quite bohemian of an evening.

The ones who would love, in other words, to go to a dishevelled, word-of-mouth restaurant on the Kingsland Road and be served with potted shrimp and confit duck. Maybe that lack of a sign really is a cunning idea. Then again - it wasn't the only absent aspect of the evening.

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Restaurant review Soif, 27 Battersea Rise, London.

EM Forster once wrote an essay called "Battersea Rise". It was the name of the house where his great-aunt, Marianne Thornton, lived, a very grand place somewhere among the huge Edwardian mansions around Clapham Common. The Rise itself never had many pretensions, however. It's a strip of London's South Circular up which, in the 1960s, enormous car-transporter lorries used to run through the night and make the houses shake.

How do I know? Because, dear reader, Battersea Rise was where I grew up between the ages of 10 and 18. I know every inch of it. I remember when, across the road from our house at No 8, you'd find Midwinters the grocers, Kalsi the chemist, Edwardes the furniture store, plus a butcher and a baker.

I remember when Battersea began to change from grotty up-the-Junction rat hole to a rather fashionable suburb; it was when Acquired Taste appeared, the first wine shop-cum-delicatessen with its array of posh clarets and French cheeses and the salutation in the window that asked passers-by, rather snootily, "Why cross the river?". (On the other side of the Rise, the newspaper shop put a jar of peaches in the window, with a cheeky sign that read: "We got peaches in brandy and we sell fags. Why cross the road?".)

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Restaurant review Copita, 26-27 D'Arblay Street, London.

Some joints are so obviously designed for couples in the early stages of courtship that, should you go along with the intention of securing a table for four, you can immediately feel the soft stigma of social exclusion. This is us in Copita. It's a buzzy little tapas station in the middle of Soho, but we're not here to advance any amorous schemes, so we feel a little out of place.

If you need confirmation of its suitability for a date – second or third, I'd suggest (not snazzy enough for a first outing, but saucy enough for one soon after) – just look at the clientele. Barely two months after opening, it is heaving with thirsty, smart young folk, the sort who spend all day asking clients what their social-media strategy is or advising on brand optimisation.

Plus, just about every other feature of the eating experience here seems date-friendly. For one, the music is loud, though not as ear-crunching as the raucous din of the diners, which means I find it hard to hear the person opposite speak. Then there are the staff, who swarm about the place with constant smiles but only a passing interest in the food: three questions about the contents of arriving dishes are met with incredulity, suggesting their priority is a quick turnover. In fact their fleeting presence gives the whole meal a sense of transit, so that even on sitting down it feels as though we're moving.

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Restaurant review Mishkin’s, 25 Catherine Street, London.

The cable channel Dave famously got its name because the marketeers believed everyone had a friend called Dave. Mishkin's, a new Jewish(ish) diner in Covent Garden, has a similarly ersatz provenance – named for its owner, Ezra Mishkin, who sounds like the kind of mensch who'd feed you good chicken soup and bad jokes, but who doesn't actually exist.

The real owners of Mishkin's are those men with the Midas touch, Russell Norman and Richard Beatty, whose fun and funky openings in Soho have brought such a buzz to central London's restaurant scene.

Two years ago, Norman and Beatty opened Polpo, an updated Venetian bacaro whose menu of cicheti and small plates proved such a hit that the concept is now appearing at a Zizzi near you.

Having launched two further school-of-Polpo restaurants, and the dirty diner Spuntino, Norman has professed himself "over" that whole small-Italian-plates thing. He describes his latest opening, Mishkin's, as "a sort of sexy, fun version of a Jewish deli". Which, if you've ever eaten in one, you'll know is a bit like saying a sexy, fun version of Arthur Mullard.

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Restaurant review, Granger & Co, 175 Westbourne Grove, London.

To throw yourself into the melee of the restaurant scene in London must be terrifying, even if you're already a bit of a superstar. I feel for our own food writer Bill Granger, whose eponymous restaurant has finally arrived in west London after a few false starts.

A big name is no guarantee of success, as many will attest. On two early visits to Granger & Co, I'd say success is on the cards, but the white heat of a new place can cool quickly, especially in the swanky environs of Westbourne Grove, where families think nothing of dropping £80 on breakfast with the kids (as two dads with three toddlers did when I was there).

Early reviews have questioned the somewhat lackadaisical service and Bill clearly has been quick to act; things have tightened up. On both of my visits the female managers corralled staff and customers with searing efficiency. This is what's needed in an all-day establishment that doesn't take bookings. Which is my only quibble, really. I have to arrive for dinner at 7pm to make sure of a table for six, and 8am for Sunday breakfast for four.

At dinner, the manager quips to me – as I survey the quiet, elegant room with its leather drapes at the door, blonde-wood tables and chairs, and lovely panelled wood ceiling – that things would very soon be bordering on mayhem. She is right: it's that white-heat moment. Glossy couples and groups of creative-industry types look a bit disgruntled as they push back those curtains and see they're going to have to stand and wait.

From my snug, smug corner table for six, I feel glad I'm settled in. This is no Wagamama – once in, you want to relax and take time over the menu. Aussie and Pacific influences abound, which is to be expected from the man whose Bills restaurants are one of Australia and Asia's biggest hits.

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Restaurant review Newman Street Tavern, 48 Newman Street, London.

When does a "gastropub" become a "tavern"? When the owner wants to boost sales. That was my initial, cynical feeling when preparing for this visit to Newman Street Tavern, and the discovery that it lives on a site once occupied by a Ping Pong dim-sum factory only fortified that opinion.

People who say tavern instead of gastropub belong in the same class as those who use "quotidian" when they mean "everyday", "fuchsia" when they mean "pink" and "pulchritudinous" when they mean "beautiful" – frauds, the lot of them.

Well, so much for cynicism. Taverns are inns that travellers stay in; pubs are houses open to the public. Obviously there is a huge amount of crossover, but because of the overnight element, the former put a greater premium on comfort and domesticity. I should think that nobody but the very drunk or the very mischievous will ever stay overnight at Newman Street Tavern, but many more visitors will wish they could, because a more comforting place than upstairs here would be hard to find in London.

Much like GrEAT British in Mayfair, the venue I wrote about earlier this month, the emphasis here is on seasonal produce, patriotically sourced. First built in the late Victorian period, the walls sport portraits of scenes from coastal life. Images of trawler boats, fishing nets and swollen waves make the sea seem close, as does a board listing the seafood platter and extensive range of oysters and crustacea on offer.

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Restaurant review, Neighbourhood, North Avenue, Spinningfields, Manchester.

In Manhattan, restaurateurs and chefs maddened by the blitzkrieg of bloggers' flashbulbs are starting to ban diners from taking photographs of their meals. In Manchester, where new Manhattan-inspired mega-restaurant Neighbourhood has just opened, photography seems to be positively encouraged. Dressed-up gal-pals are merrily snapping away at each other, and even the staff are at it; you've got to love a chef who proudly captures a hamburger on his BlackBerry before letting it leave the pass.

There's an appealing swagger to this city-centre newcomer. A feeling that they're doing something a little bit different, and doing it well. Pimped-up American comfort food may already be all the rage in London – sliders, mac and cheese, Southern-fried chicken and the like. Now, with the opening of Neighbourhood in the shiny new Spinningfields development, the craze has spread north.

Here are wagyu sliders, lobster tacos, fried oysters, buttermilk-coated chicken wings, grilled stone bass and pot-roast chicken thighs. Here are broiled steaks, pasta and pizzette. Here is a 'raw bar'. Only the cocktail list, which offers a range of Wag-pleasing curiosities, including the Belle Epoque Blazer (it involves a bottle of vintage Champagne, Martell XO cognac and flambéed summer fruits, and costs £325 for four people) gives a clue that we're not in east London or on the Lower East Side.

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Restaurant review, The Pipe & Glass Inn, West End, South Dalton, Beverley, East Yorkshire.

The flotilla of nightlights on the tables outside the Pipe & Glass – a welcome sight after much peering at the map and several U-turns on dark, narrow lanes – formed an infinitesimal reflection of the glittering constellations arching over rural East Yorkshire. Coincidentally, many of the customers, who pretty much filled the car park on a wintry Tuesday night, were lured by a single star of a distinctly non-celestial nature, being bestowed by a tyre company based in Clermont-Ferrand. Less than four years after taking over a "tired and unloved" pub in the village of South Dalton, local boy James Mackenzie was awarded his county's first and only Michelin star in 2010. This glory was further burnished when the Pipe & Glass was named Michelin's Pub of the Year for 2012.

Mackenzie's ambition is indicated by the menus from stellar figures of the culinary world – Paul Bocuse, Thomas Keller, Fergus Henderson – that line the walls of his comfortable bar. The proceeds of his stardom have been ploughed back in the form of a large, gleaming kitchen, a conservatory, two bedrooms and a sexy salon privé. The main dining rooms are spacious and retain an idiosyncratic décor. Our table was flanked by a dressmaker's dummy and a Gerald Scarfe poster of local bard Alan Ayckbourn.

While mulling over a wine list that oddly classified wine under "Poultry & Game" and "Cow, Pig & Sheep" rather than price or provenance (our Beaune at £26.95 was fine), we were joined at the next table by an Anglo-Dutch party of six poultry entrepreneurs. It did not require Holmesian powers to deduce their occupation since for the next two hours they talked about battery farming without deviation or hesitation but with much repetition. Going by their choice of eatery, mass-volume eggmen prefer not to eat their own output.

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Restaurant review, Hereford Road, 3 Hereford Road, London.

I saw Fergus Henderson walking in my direction in Farringdon the other day. The champion of British nose-to-tail eating, dressed in trademark navy pin-stripe, was ambling in his usual wonderful way, true to Orwell's description of "that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knee". He doesn't know me from Adam, of course, but what with so many of my heroes having died in the festive period (Vaclav Havel, Christopher Hitchens, Kim Jong Il) I wanted to introduce myself, thank him for his remarkable service to our cuisine and stoicism in facing Parkinson's disease, and pay him as high a compliment as I could muster. Of course, being an idiot, I did none of these things, and bobbed my own bent knees into the horizon.

In something like an homage to the man, ruefulness at this missed opportunity, and bold defiance of New Year's resolutions to generally make a greater enemy of all calories, I have come with a group of friends to Hereford Road in west London.

Imitation probably is the sincerest form of flattery, and this place is nothing if not a compliment to Henderson's influence. It was set up four years ago by Tom Pemberton, who had been head chef at Henderson's St John Bread and Wine, and still boasts a menu that, from nose to tail, carries the stamp of Hendersonism. Or, as I like to think of it, an offal lot of offal.

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Restaurant review The Delaunay, 55 Aldwych, London.

Simply walking into the Delaunay makes you feel you've found the perfect restaurant. Sited on the corner of Aldwych and Drury Lane, it hums with elegance. The rubicund doorman tips his top hat, a startlingly pretty Roedean-head-girl takes your coat and you enter a wide, welcoming, marble-floored space. To your right, a vast bar is lit up like a cathedral high altar; to your left is a line of tables for posers, chatterers, couples nursing cocktails. Riding on castors is a glass-topped trolley full of teatime cakes – millefeuille, Black Forest gâteau, sachertorte – in case someone fancies a sugar rush at 9pm. Beyond the grey pillars, you make out the dark, indefinably sexy interior where the serious eating goes on. Mein Gott, you think, das ist wunderbar.

Because you're looking here at a dream of Mitteleuropa sometime in the 1930s before it all went to rubble. A little bit Cabaret, a touch Habsburg dining-room, a soupçon Paris boulevard (check out the French antique clock, its face a distressed orange like a 1940s duchess) and a lot Viennese café.

The Delaunay's owners, Jeremy King and Chris Corbin, the nation's most polished and enterprising restaurateurs, have looked for inspiration to the grand cafés of Old Europe, as they did when launching The Wolseley in 2003. They were, effectively, turning their back on chef-led cuisine and returning to the cooking relished by our grandparents: English-French dishes with added Danube flavours: coq au vin and kedgeree, but with added choucroute a l'Alsacienne.

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Restaurant review, The Modern Pantry, 47-48 St John’s Square, London.

I know myself well enough not even to attempt a New Year regimen; but after all the festive indulgences, I'm craving crisp, fresh produce and zingy flavours to blow away the cobwebs. Hence The Modern Pantry. The London restaurant/café run by Anna Hansen has, over the past couple of years, established itself as A Good Thing, spawning an excellent cookbook. In fact, Hansen has been awarded an MBE in the New Year Honours list for her services to the restaurant industry.

Her style of global inspiration and clever ingredients (signature dish: sugar-cured prawn omelette with green chilli, spring onion, coriander and smoked-chilli sambal) is what I crave.

When I worked in Clerkenwell many moons ago, there was just a scruffy warehouse on the square where The Modern Pantry now sits. It thrums with folk either entering Hansen's place, the Zetter Townhouse or Bistrot Bruno Loubet (both of which are ace). The quiet, elegant façade has a wide glass door on to the square. On this blustery January evening, though, the door is locked and we're sent to a little side door, to enter the ground-floor café through the back.

Fair enough – a constantly swinging door probably makes it too cold for those sitting near the front. But the maître'd approaches us with a rather grumpy manner, before marching us to the front desk to check our reservation, then marching us back to our first position. He then loftily gestures towards a table. Not exactly the most effusive of welcomes...

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Restaurant review, 34, 34 Grosvenor Square, London.

I'm trying to cast my mind back to the tail end of 2011, when 34 was my lunch destination, rather than my waist measurement, and I'm struggling. My memories of this new Mayfair smoothie, the latest launch from Richard Caring's fast-expanding Caprice Holdings group, have soft-focused into a vague impression of luxury, of deep carpets and heavy silverware, all sepia-tinted by the glow from a host of flickering table lamps.

Rather like a first-class plane flight, my lunch at 34 seems to have passed without leaving much of an impression. This place is all about expensive comfort rather than excitement. Nothing about it will startle the well-heeled diners who flock to existing Caprice favourites, The Ivy and Scott's, and who have already taken 34 to their hearts, judging by how hard it is to get a blimmin table.

From the moment you check in (turn left for the most desirable seats, as on a plane), there's a sensation of being in safe hands. A team of fluffers descends, one to arrange your napkin, a second to tweezer lime into your water, while another circles, waiting to proffer bread. Buckling up for the smooth ride ahead, I could have asked for a magazine, a massage, possibly even a dressing gown and fold-down bed.

The dining room is masculine and clubbish, with such low lighting that even on a bright day, it feels like the in-flight movie is about to start. It's tasteful enough, but bland; the muted retro-styling falling short of the see-and-be-seen glamour of Scott's, but not quite evoking the buzzy intimacy designer Martin Brudnizki achieved with the Dean Street Townhouse.

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Restaurant review Angela's, 38 New Bridge Street, Exeter.

To qualify for the endearing label "local", it's not enough these days for a restaurant to be within walking distance of the front door. It has to have other, easily identified but hard to realise qualities. These include: a small, familiar main room, with an ambience that tends towards the intimate; ultra-friendly and few waiting staff; and, above all, garrulous owners on hand to take orders, talk about the perils of nearby parking, and ask after your father-in-law's cat. Most of all, the establishment should be named after said owners. By something approaching this alchemy, Angela's in Exeter is a wonderful local restaurant.

It sits on the steep slope linking the river to the town centre. There is a single, small eating area facing the street with cut flowers on each table, quiet soul music and wooden floors. Local artists, depicting local scenes in pastel colours, are exhibited on the walls. Paddy and Richard, with whom we are here, have identified three sights of the south-west captured in paint: Exeter's quay, the coast at Dawlish, and St Michael's Mount, the family seat of the St Aubyns.

The name of the restaurant comes from the female half of owners Richard and Angela Valder. She is charming, polite, joyful and tonight, a winter Thursday, the sole front-of-house staff member, serving 14 customers. Much of her service is, hilariously, devoted to getting out a procession of cocktails. Available are a Moscow Mule, elderflower with gin (both £4.75), as well as that bizarre, bright-yellow concoction called a Snowball (£4.50). This contains a double measure of Advocaat with lime cordial and lemonade, tastes terrifyingly of Nesquik (which I thought I'd left behind years ago) and might be best saved for the shape-shifters at Timepiece, the five-floor club 10 minutes up the hill.

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Restaurant review, The Crooked Well, 16 Grove Lane, London.

There's been a lot of nonsense talked already about The Crooked Well. The spectacle of a middle-class restaurant opening in apparently hard-as-nails Camberwell – a gastropub (gasp!) run by a chap called Hector (shriek!) whose website brazenly mentions that he worked in a French nightclub during his gap-year (snigger!) and whose partner is a double-barrelled posho called Matt whose career began in Tunbridge Wells (stop! Stop!) – is being greeted as if Heston Blumenthal had opened a restaurant in Wormwood Scrubs.

For heaven's sake. Camberwell has always leaned towards, if not gentility, then class-neutrality. It occupies a no-man's-land between Brixton and Dulwich, constantly pulled between the edgy and the bourgeois, somehow maintaining equilibrium. When I lived there, my neighbours were journalists and advertising types. Florence Welch, of the Machine, grew up in my road. Ten years earlier, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett and Terry Jones of the Monty Pythons all lived in Camberwell Grove (though, sadly, not together). It was hardly an upscale neighbourhood, but it wasn't conspicuously grotty. And before The Crooked Well was on this site, a bar called The Parisien managed to hold its own against the, you know, marauding street hooligans, and served perfectly acceptable steaks.

Angie and I arrived at 8.30pm on a freezing Tuesday evening, looking for comfort and, more to the point, comfort food. From outside, The Well is a rather cheerless-looking place with uncurtained windows. Inside, stage left, there's a drinking-and-chatting section, then a bar, then, stage right, a more formal dining area. You wouldn't call it a warm place. Beneath a wall of exposed brickwork was a fireplace, with five candles (rather than logs and coal) burning in it. The radiator beside our table was set to Tepid. The lights were set to Dim/Gloomy. Unclothed Formica tables and wooden chairs creaked on wooden floorboards. More uncurtained windows disclosed the spectacle of frozen Camberwellians struggling home to their two-bar electric fires. I was afraid my frozen fiancée would start to weep.

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Restaurant review Quo Vadis, 26-29 Dean Street, London.

There's a certain scene when a new restaurant opens, or when a lauded chef finds a new berth. The foodie cognoscenti descend and the place is abuzz with bloggers and critics, chefs and PRs, taking pictures, comparing notes and getting love bombs from the staff.

All of which could be rather irritating for the paying customers, I imagine. I've been at new openings when civilians were practically pushed aside in the rush to bestow free extra dishes and glasses of champagne on the favoured few.

The restaurant that's got the foodies in a froth this week is Quo Vadis, a beauteous Soho establishment that has passed through various stellar owners over the years. It's now in the care of Sam and Eddie Hart, whose Fino and Barrafina are brilliant and unfussy.

After three years they have handed over the kitchen to Jeremy Lee, a star in his own right from 16 years at The Blueprint Café at Tower Bridge – a paean to minimal deliciousness.

The buzz about Lee's move is almost deafening when I arrive. (I don't have any great desire to be one of the first through the door, but January has brought me two birthdays, one anniversary and a lot of parent/teacher action to attend to, so opportunities for dining out are scarce.)

Lee, Eddie Hart and maître'd Jon Spiteri (champion host, late of St John) are all working the series of rooms. Quo Vadis, with its stained-glass windows and airy feel, has simply been pared down further from its already quiet elegance, the art on the walls removed and the crisp white tablecloths brought back.

To one side of the table that Mr M and I occupy are a couple of foodie scenesters; on the other, two well-known bon viveurs. There are so many Campari, orange and pomegranate cocktails flying past that it takes a few minutes to flag down a waiter.

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Restaurant review Hotel Maiyango Restaurant, 13-21 St Nicholas Place, Leicester.

It's such a leap of faith, going to a completely unknown restaurant in an unfamiliar town. Rather like going on a blind date with someone you've met online (or so I would imagine, she adds hastily). Their profile photo looks appealing, they sound as though they'll be fun and they seem to like all the same things you do. Then you meet them, and you can tell at first glance it just isn't going to work out.

It was like that with me and my latest date, Hotel Maiyango, a mysterious stranger I encountered online, while vainly attempting to find somewhere interesting to eat in Leicester. Judging from its website, the Maiyango has got it going on. A boutique hotel in the historic city centre, with a restaurant that has won gold in the Taste of England regional tourism awards, serving an eclectic, seasonally changing menu, using local ingredients, sustainably sourced fish and veg from the community allotment? Mmmmm, this could be the start of a beautiful relationship.

And then I had lunch there. The boutique hotel turned out to be on an arterial road, sandwiched between a Subway and a minicab office, and the unique, intimate atmosphere of the restaurant was hampered by the fact that the sole waiter and I were the only people in it. A bit awkward, as the whole place has been exuberantly done up as a Moroccan pleasure palace, a sultry temple of hedonism and fun. Every surface, including the ceiling, is covered with some kind of billowing draped fabric, or planked with timber. Lamps twinkle in the gloom, and loud, Buddha Bar-style souk-hop pumps from the sound system. It probably rocks at night, when it's full. But at lunchtime, with only two people in it, it feels like a deserted nightclub.

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Restaurant review The Nobody Inn, Doddiscombsleigh, Exeter, Devon.

In case you were wondering, I can report with certainty that this is not just the first time I have eaten in Doddiscombsleigh, about five miles south-west of Exeter, between the Teign Valley and the Haldon Hills, but the first time I have eaten in a pun. It's the Nobody Inn, which takes its name from the unfortunate moment during a former landlord's wake when his coffin was brought back to an empty pub.

You half-expect, on turning up to eat in a pun, that the menu will be saturated with double entendres, or a court jester will pop out from under the table; but in fact this bar and restaurant with rooms is no more comic than other country inns in deepest Devon. It does, however, differ in three crucial respects: the service, food, and affordability are excellent, whereas generally round here you'd think it was your lucky day if you chanced upon just one of that holy trinity.

The original building goes back to the 17th century. It has a beautiful thatched roof, low – and at times very low – black roof beams, a blazing fireplace, rickety, beer-stained tables, and dim electric bulbs, which convert the shafts of sunlight piercing the windows into an ethereal glow. They take orders only at the bar, and leave you well alone to eat your food. A bevy of local ales at around £3 make it the sort of place that aged locals attend religiously. They, too, feel part of the centuries-old furniture.

There are five starters, 13 mains (two vegetarian), four desserts and a selection of cheeses, all crammed on to a single A4 sheet of paper. It's all very minimal fuss and unsurprising – but that doesn't stop the dishes coming out of the kitchen from attaining an impressive standard.

The duck-liver pâté (£6.95), for instance, is extremely smooth and moist, and comes with perfectly toasted wholemeal bread. So, too, does the duck terrine, which is the same price but has an excellent orange marmalade – not too sweet, and full of tiny chunks of orange rind that add intense flavour and a contrasting texture. The soup of today – butternut squash – is rich and creamy and worth £4.75. Best of all among the starters, and again £6.95, are crisp, pungent crab cakes with a memorable red-pepper mayonnaise. The short strips of pepper are cooked until soft and visibly bleeding flavour into their greasy companion.

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Review, The Pass, South Lodge Country, House Hotel, Brighton Road, West Sussex.

On a brass-monkey night in January, the South Lodge Hotel looks good: grey-beige stone, triangular pediments, lots of ivy and lots of windows through which firelight and lamplight gleam appealingly. The lobby is wide enough to accommodate a Victorian coach-and-four passing through and sparsely furnished with plush sofas. Though the place dates from 1883, it has an ersatz feel to it, a sprayed-on faux-luxury. As a manager comes to greet you, your eye falls on a doorway through which you glimpse a horribly overlit green space – a gym? A swimming pool? – and you try to ignore it. On the way to the bar, you pass a cosy-looking restaurant, all wood panels and floral wallpaper and you think, ah yes, just the job. The bar is a mocked-up gentlemen's club with more panelling and chandeliers made of twisted shards of leather-coloured glass. You greet your friends, floor a dry martini and head for dinner...

And there, dear reader, I encountered one of the great disappointments of my reviewing career. The cosy restaurant is called Camellia and isn't the one we're reviewing tonight. We're reviewing The Pass, which is in the kitchen. Yes, it's the brightly-lit, green-glowing place about which I shuddered earlier. It's awful: 22 seats mostly ranged along the wall, where pictures of chefs-in-action are interrupted by CCTV screens showing areas of the kitchen where something may happen. "I feel like a security guard," said Chris. "Am I supposed to be watching that all evening?"

The dominant shade here is green: green leather stools and banquettes, green glasses, green napkin-rings, green textured wall-fabric – even our waitress's tie is green satin. It puts you in mind of ice and phlegm. Above our heads, the kitchen air-con blew a steady gale. It was like dining in a glacier. At the next table a woman with bare, goose-pimply arms drew her fur closer around her.

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Restaurant review Mele e Pere, 46 Brewer Street, London.

So here we are, standing in a queue outside Pitt Cue Co, the red-hot new barbecue specialists in Soho, on the coldest night of the year. (I'm surely not the first to rechristen it Pitt Queue Co.) A woman walks past and pauses. "What the hell are you doing, waiting out here in the cold?" she gasps. "It's not like there isn't anywhere else to eat around here..." And that's how we end up in Mele e Pere.

Perhaps the cold has iced up my brain, as it takes me a while to realise the brightly lit corner building with a window full of glass apples and pears, and just the tip of a staircase showing, is the restaurant, a spanking-new Italian (mele e pere, duh).

Mr M and I trot down the tiled steps to see a long, copper-topped bar and a low-ceilinged room, with rather attractive mismatched wooden tables and chairs.

The walls have Anglepoise lamps of differing vintages attached to illuminate the tables. A neat trick, but the effect is somewhat spoilt on the back wall by four ghastly abstract paintings which frankly would be better off in the shadows, if not in a skip outside. (Apologies to owner Peter Hughes and co-owner/chef Andrea Mantovani, both late of the ace Wild Honey, who clearly have otherwise excellent taste, but really...)

Read more at http://www.independent.co.uk