Restaurant review The Peach Tree, 18-21 Abbey Foregate, Shrewsbury, Shropshire.

Volkswagening our way down the middle lane of the M40, your correspondent and his accomplices were torn about the restaurant in Shrewsbury that most warranted your – and by extension their – attention. Several candidates presented themselves, but ultimately all roads – Google, expert local opinion, the A458 – led to The Peach Tree, a kind of forbidding elder uncle among the eateries of this not-quite-Welsh dwelling.

The early signs are not promising. A vermillion exterior adjacent to the Abbey of this sleepy country market town gives no indication, it's true, of the experience within; but by the time we are settled at the table, Charlotte notices it looks like the victim of a particularly schizophrenic Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen makeover. Everything is jumbled. I think we are in a Tudor barn with low-hanging roof beams; but then the giant speakers, craning their necks over us and working in satanic tandem with vertical heating coils, convince me that, for all the elderly dears here – is Shropshire the oldest of the shires, people-wise? – we have been teleported to Ayia Napa.

So far, then: a sub-medieval dance festival attended by dystopian technology. No wonder the website boasts: "Some interesting historic features and some cosmopolitan twists."

But wait! What's this? Frances emerges from the loo to be confronted by a mid-forties creature covered in curlers. A cosmopolitan twist too far? This mesmerising Medusa begs the question of whether there is a hair salon upstairs. Above the restaurant. The one with the old people and the Tudor roof beams and the raving equipment.

I must say all of this has rather discombobulated the four of us, and when presented with a menu it is a blessed relief. But the incoherence of the interior is reflected in the food.

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Restaurant review Medlar, 438 King’s Road, London.

Since it opened its doors in April, the new Chelsea eating-house Medlar has picked up reviews that are the gastronomic equivalent of high fives and punches on the arm. It's a welcome addition to that dog-leg section of the King's Road where World's End twists into Bibendum-land; its neighbours are a shop with a clock that goes backwards and a fine example of that dying species, the second-hand bookshop.

Its cooking pedigree is impeccable: the chef-patron is Joe Mercer Haines, an Old Etonian who until recently ran the kitchen at Chez Bruce, the Savoy of Wandsworth Common; he seems to have brought a few staffers with him from there and from Bruce's sister restaurants, Ledbury and The Square.

I'm not sure about the name, though. I first came across the word medlar in a novel by Candia McWilliam, who likes to use old-fashioned, Victorian constructions: "bletted medlars," in her book, turned out to mean "rotting apples." My spies in the fruit world tell me it's a kind of apple that's best when slightly decayed. And, had the owners consulted Wikipedia, they'd have found that, in literary circles, the medlar has been employed as a metaphor for premature age, and also, I regret, as a bawdy medieval term meaning "open-arsed."

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Restaurant review The Cobbles Inn, 7 Bowmont Street, Kelso, Scotland.

Sir Walter Scott, a man whose judgement on these matters can usually be trusted, described Kelso as "the most beautiful if not the most romantic village in Scotland". This is pleasantly ironic given the only reasonable way to describe its central square is French. Aside from the large, ugly hotel, there are enchanting tea rooms, under-the-arches tables, and hunched tenements redolent of nothing so much as little Condom or Montreal in Agen, halfway between Toulouse and Bordeaux, rather than halfway between Edinburgh and Newcastle, as this is. Then there are the cobbles.

This vast sea of stones, each one a painful protrusion from the earth but, collectively, a joyful massage to the feet, gives the small town a rustic civility. When we arrive it is lashing with rain, gloomy above (despite the long evenings at this latitude), and precisely the kind of inclement weather to make the always-cheery Celeste, our eight-month-old companion, rise from her slumber and threaten violence upon the ears of her parents, our fellow diners tonight. Fortunately, just off the main square, The Cobbles Inn – which began life as a Victorian coaching inn – offers salvation.

There is a main bar on the right as we enter, offering casked local ales and single-malt whiskies devoured by locals, who clearly took refuge from the rain several hours ago, so crimson are their faces. To the left, a carpeted eating area unfolds, revealing a bevy of elderly Scots whose uproarious laughter stops us from feeling as though we have entered a retirement home. Celeste, the only under-25 around tonight, is an instant hit with both the locals and the attentive waiting staff, which leaves us with an immediately overwhelming feeling of being cared for.

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Restaurant review Daylesford Farmshop and Café, Daylesford nr Kingham, Gloucestershire.

Daylesford is probably the most famous farm shop in Britain. A retail heaven of organic gorgeousness on the edge of the Cotswolds, it has grown over the past 10 years into something between a mall and a Japanese temple, selling not just food and produce, but clothing, gardening equipment, homeware, yoga classes and spa treatments. Alex James, who lives nearby, once described it in The Independent as "absolutely ridiculous, fantastic and sexy", and gratefully recorded how Daylesford's gentrifying effect had sent the value of his house rocketing.

Daylesford is much less of a curiosity now than when it first opened and was dismissed as a rich woman's plaything – its founder is eco-chatelaine Lady Bamford, whose husband is the "B" in digger manufacturers JCB. Early visitors would return with incredulous reports of the rural farm shop's exquisite produce and even more exquisite customers, who famously included Liz Hurley and Kate Moss. But it's harder to dismiss Daylesford as an organic folie de grandeur now that it has survived, diversified and expanded – there are two Daylesford cafes in London, as well as various spin-off ranges.

A working farm, Daylesford is easy to distinguish from its Cotswold neighbours. The hedges are more kempt, the golden stone buildings more immaculate, even the grass looks greener. A fleet of black SUVs stands in the car park, surrounded by chatting groups of honey-maned women, holding babies and takeaway cappuccinos. Desirable benches are scattered around, bearing discreet price tags.

The farm shop, with its colour-coded fruit and veg, walk-in cheese room and wet fish counter, is Selfridges food hall in miniature; if this was my local food store, I'd be slobberingly grateful, and a lot less solvent. The original farm shop café was extended last year, and is not just bigger, but apparently much slicker, according to my lunch companion, a designer friend who is a Daylesford regular.

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Travel to Pebble Beach, Marine Drive, Barton-on-Sea, Hampshire.

"Pebble Beach, far away in time," you find yourself adapting Martha and the Muffins as you park the car on the clifftop drive. "Pebble Beach, far away in time, Pebble Beach..." And as you push the door, you feel you've stepped back 20 years in time, to a kinder, simpler age when all restaurant menus came in floppy leather (with photos of the shellfish platter), all dining-rooms were on a split level, with fleshy-orangey chairs, tables and curtains, and a wrought-iron fence as a "feature".

The owners have tried to modernise this old-fashioned seaside eating house – there's a small bar area and an 'oyster bar' where you can perch on a stool to watch the chefs in action – but they're both empty at 8.30 on a Wednesday night. All the action is in the restaurant, which is packed out with chattering trippers.

Then you venture outside, and all your ignorant metropolitan carping evaporates. The view from the terrace is wonderful: you're looking at the western tip of the Isle of Wight, and the trio of chalk rocks called The Needles that poke out of the sea and used to be a menace to shipping until they stuck a lighthouse in front of them in 1859. It's a beautifully tranquil scene, with Barton beach on your left, Poole to your right and the millpond of Christchurch Bay in front of you. Gulls fly overhead, barking discreetly, as though reluctant to disturb the calm. We ordered cocktails from one of the pretty waitresses, sat on the black chairs beside the patio heater and thought, ooh yes, we could stay here for hours...

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Restaurant review Gidleigh Park, Chagford, Devon.

There is among the English aristocracy a common species of buffoon that combines surface beauty with intellectual docility and gracelessness. You know the type I mean. Think of Zara Phillips, who on winning BBC Sports Personality of the Year five years back accepted her award with an utterly absurd speech, in which she seemed to abandon the rudiments of her expensive education and said the word "amazing" nine times in succession. It would have seemed a brilliant bit of oratory if the volume were switched to mute.

Ms Phillips would feel very at home in the garlanded Gidleigh Park, a hotel of immense beauty with brilliant food, massively let down only by its prices. Perched on a throne atop a wooded valley in Dartmoor, and set among 54 acres of gloriously kept gardens, it is a three-storey, long Tudor building, which gains charm from being at the end of a one-and-a-half mile driveway. It was built in the 1920s by an Australian shipping magnate, and has won so many awards that it is now one of Devon's more celebrated tourist destinations.

But I am here for lunch with my girlfriend Charlie and her family, and not long after arriving, we are made to feel very queasy. Our red Audi is the only non-4x4 in the parking lot, save for two Porsches and an Aston Martin, and on entering the restaurant, and being guided to a waiting-room, we notice that those cars probably belong to one of two groups of corporate weekenders. That, predictably and unfortunately, is the clientele here: herds of touring suits.

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Restaurant review Roganic, 19 Blandford Street, London

One of the questions I'm most often asked, when I tell people I review restaurants, is, 'Where have you been lately that's really special?'. And it's a difficult one to answer. The truth is, there aren't many places out there that really are that special. For every Fat Duck, there's a lot of ugly ducklings.

But now I have an answer to the question: Roganic. It's original, ambitious, artistic and rather bonkers. And it's certainly special.

It's the first London opening from Simon Rogan, the wildly inventive chef/proprietor of L'Enclume in the Lake District. If Heston Blumenthal is the king of avant-garde cooking in this country, Rogan is the prince in exile, with a fabled domain in Cartmel encompassing two restaurants, a hotel and an organic farm.

TV audiences got a glimpse of Rogan's style in The Trip, in which L'Enclume was the setting for Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's exchange about foam. The good news about this new restaurant is that not only are there no foams in evidence, but it's geographically more central than L'Enclume, occupying a short-lease site in Marylebone.

They're calling it a pop-up, though with a potential life span of two years, it's more of a stay-up. The slender, storefront dining room has been tastefully refurbed on a shoestring, with Deco-ish pendant lights, turbulent black abstracts, and moss-green wainscoting which chimes with the foraged, herbivorous theme of the menu.

Never in the field of human dining have so many obscure herbs and sea vegetables laid down their lives in the service of a tasting menu. Chenopodiums and buckthorn, blite and Sweet Cicely – the menu should come with a copy of The Observer's Book of British Plants (not that Roganic offers anything as workaday as a printed menu).

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