Sex, drugs, ridiculous hours and appalling bullying … thanks to lurid revelations, we think we know what goes on in top kitchens. But a new generation of chefs is keen to change the old culture

Some 13 years have passed since the New York chef Anthony Bourdain laid bare his sweaty, savage, drug-addled life in the brilliant memoir, Kitchen Confidential. All manner of unsettling practices were divulged, from serving nasty old fish on Mondays, to staff ritually spraying blood from their war wounds all over each other. In one brigade, they marked the start of evening service by pouring brandy on the stove to recreate the napalm blast from the film Apocalypse Now. Bourdain wrote about cooking as though he were reporting from the front line.

A new book by Imogen Edwards-Jones, called Restaurant Babylon, sets out to reveal a similarly seedy underbelly of London's current fine dining scene. For this, the eighth of her Babylon series (Hotel and Fashion were both adapted for television), she has interviewed a number of anonymous industry insiders. The high point, she tells me, was when six chefs chewed the fat around her kitchen table one evening. As the wine flowed, the chefs grew increasingly competitive and their anecdotes got juicier and juicier. The many lurid stories in her book are true, says Edwards-Jones, but they are shoe-horned into 24 hours in the life of one fictional restaurateur, giving a "hyperbolic view of everything".

The gist of the book is that, other than improved working hours, little has changed since the Kitchen Confidential days. Bad-boy chefs: tick. Bullying: tick. Sex in cupboards: tick. Drink and drugs: tick and tick. Our narrator awakes, still dressed after passing out the night before, with a strange blonde in his bed. The coke-head chef of his one-Michelin-starred restaurant is grotesque in every way, from his appalling personal hygiene to his penchant for brief, hassle-free extramarital flings with drunken women. A young commis chef arrives at work off his face. In the telling, Edwards-Jones reveals such unsavoury kitchen practices such as "lick and stick", where chefs use saliva to adhere delicate ingredients to the plate.

But doesn't this all sound like the stuff of reminiscence rather than current reality? Surely the lives of the earnest, post-Gordon Ramsay generation would make far less salacious copy; heads down, focusing on upping their games, building their brands and getting some beauty sleep before their appearance on Saturday Kitchen? Even the book's narrator says the "metro chefs" coming through now are softer and gentler.

Take Jackson Boxer, the director of Brunswick House and Rita's Bar and Dining, a twentysomething hipster with a English Lit degree from Cambridge and cooking written into his DNA (his grandmother is the acclaimed food writer Arabella Boxer). "Restaurant work at all levels is hard," he says. "However, everywhere I've worked, there's always been a strong sense that the proprietors take seriously their duty of care towards their employees." He reckons the mythology of restaurant excess is an external perception, although one, it would appear from Restaurant Babylon, that some chefs are happy to perpetuate.

Chef-to-watch Isaac McHale, 33, whose new eatery the Clove Club in Shoreditch Town Hall was one of London's most anticipated openings this year, takes a similar tone. It's his day off and he sounds knackered. "In restaurants I've worked," he yawns, "like the Ledbury and Tom Aikens, people would just finish their shift and go home, because they were back in six hours. Everyone has a professional attitude." Wait: wasn't Aikens alleged to have once "branded" a teenage junior chef with a hot palette knife? "There's high tension," allows McHale.

He and his partners threw an after-after party for the World's 50 Best Restaurant awards this year. The international gastronomic creme de la creme in one room? In high spirits? Surely there was gossip? "People drank, danced, ate some buns and wood-pigeon sausages," he sighs. "There were no stories of intrigue or drug taking that I'm not telling you." Either McHale is the soul of discretion or this truly was an innocuous gaggle of hard-workers letting their hair down.

The cooking arena has in recent years been elevated from a service job to a revered (fetishised, even) vocation – so while there is greater competition and pressure, kitchens also tend to be more serious workplaces. One restaurant publicist tells me that when she was doing service shifts in the early 90s, "everybody was on drugs". Many legendary tales of candle burning hail from that era: chefs curling up on piles of bin bags at work after a heavy night, and sex all over the shop. Allegra McEvedy, whose wild early cheffing years saw her fired from the Groucho Club and the River Cafe, says that when she originally told her school friends that she wanted to train as a cook, "in their eyes I may as well have been taking up plumbing". It was just the dawn of the UK's culinary awakening, with Marco Pierre White as its precocious poster boy, and the stakes have been continuously upped ever since.

But despite today's more studious culture, the fact remains that it is easy to pick up a drink problem working in a restaurant. Temptation is everywhere and there is little chance of drifting straight off to sleep after a frenetic evening's performance. With so many young, outgoing, transient staff around, too, that unwinding beverage can easily escalate. One maître d' told me that when he worked at one of those extremely swanky West End establishments that ooze old money and timeless sophistication, the staff partied like crazy, and were frequently caught on the restaurant's CCTV getting up to no good.

A decade since Ramsay's head chef David Dempsey fell to his death after taking alcohol and cocaine, the benevolent charity Hospitality Action still sees a healthy take up of workers seeking advice on dealing with alcoholism, drugs, bullying, stress and debt. The charity sends recovering alcoholics, such as Michael Quinn, who went from head chef at the Ritz to a Salvation Army hostel, to colleges to warn 11,000 students a year of the risks. "It's a society issue, not just this industry," chief executive Penny Moore points out, "but the message from us is positive. The issues are being addressed and things have changed dramatically."

When Thomas Blythe, who was general manager at St John for 12 years and will shortly launch the Merchant's Tavern in Shoreditch with Angela Hartnett, arrived in London as a 17-year-old chef, 80-hour weeks were the norm. Today, he says, 48-hour contracts prevail, with a clause that managers can ask staff to work longer when required, but that staff can, in theory, refuse. He also says that the industry is now much more enlightened regarding sexism and bullying. The fact that most restaurants have to fight to retain good staff these days helps. However, horror stories still surface.

One manager told me about her time at what is known as the worst London fine-dining restaurant to work in. The famous chef patron there believes that the only way to get the staff to perform is to put the fear of God into them. He exhausts his front-of-house staff by drinking late with customers, and then charges in the next morning, hungover with duvet folds imprinted on his face, and insults them for minor matters such as leaving water in an ice bucket overnight. If front-of-house staff request the lunch menu before 11.45am, he'll tell them to "fuck off" out of his kitchen. They see nothing of the service charge.

Thankfully, reigns of terror such as this are now considered rather old school, and are less common than in the past, when sometimes not even the customers were safe. In the 1980s, Nico Ladenis famously decreed that no customer was allowed to ask for salt, different lighting or a second gin and tonic in his restaurants. And in 1998, Ramsay made headlines ejecting the critic AA Gill and his dining companion, Joan Collins, from his restaurant after Gill had belittled him in print. But what chance of level-headedness did Ramsay stand when one of his early bollockings from mentor Marco Pierre White reduced him to tears? (When I dined with Ramsay and White in the late 90s, shortly after the Gill incident, Ramsay was a pussycat in his former mentor's presence.)

These days, of course, ugly displays of temper are most likely to become public on the internet. Take the shocking spat that erupted late last year after a food blogger gave Hibiscus three out of five in an online review. Claude Bosi, the two-starred restaurant's chef, bizarrely tracked him down on Twitter to call him "a cunt". Then two more top chefs – Tom Kerridge and Sat Bains – rounded on the blogger, encouraging Bosi to "smash him in" and calling him a c#nt and c**t respectively, along with so many other vile things that the blogger closed his Twitter account. Critics may still have the power to make or break, but web reviews can't half stir up a chef's bile.

Running a great restaurant will always be stressful, but these unpleasant tales call to mind an amusing quote from one of Edwards-Jones's sources, which appears in her book: "It's ridiculous. All the shouting and screaming and slapping and hauling around great sides of beef and all we are really doing is making people's tea. It's just a bit of tea."

Restaurant Babylon by Imogen Edwards-Jones and Anonymous is published by Bantam Press at £14.99

Michelin-starred restaurant in Barcelona, famous for traditional cuisine, to close doors after owners declare it no longer viable

El Racó de Can Fabes, one of the first Spanish restaurants to be awarded a Michelin star, is to close at the end of next month after 32 years. The owners said the business was no longer viable.

Can Fabes, which is located in Sant Celoni in the Montseny hills north of Barcelona, opened as a modest establishment in 1981 in what had been the family home of its chef, Santi Santamaria, for 200 years. It acquired its first Michelin star in 1988, the second in 1991 and maintained the coveted three stars from 1994 until shortly after Santamaria died of a heart attack in Singapore in 2011. It currently holds two stars.

In common with his fellow three-star Catalan chefs Ferran Adrià, Carme Ruscalleda and the Roca brothers, Santamaria's cuisine was rooted in local tradition. However, he spurned and at times ridiculed Adrià's experiments with foam, nitrogen and deconstructed omelettes. He dismissed Adrià as "a media spectacle" with his "laboratory dishes full of gelling agents and emulsifiers". He described the so-called Spanish vanguard chefs as "a gang of frauds". However, many of them, Adrià included, attended his funeral.

Since his death the kitchen has been run by his daughter Regina and the chef Xavier Pellicer. In an open letter, the owners said Can Fabes was closing "after 32 years of a marvellous culinary and gastronomic adventure … in which we have sought the best products and perfect cooking and a commitment to our culinary roots". The message added that the restaurant "lacked the economic viability necessary to continue as a project based on excellence".

The demise of Can Fabes comes two years after Adrià closed El Bulli, but Catalans still have two other three-star establishments to choose from: Ruscalleda's Restaurant Sant Pau and the Roca brothers' El Celler de Can Roca, recently voted the best restaurant in the world.

Complaints prompt questions about restaurant that has displayed swastikas and Hitler's photo for two years

Authorities in central Indonesia plan to ask a restaurant owner to explain his reasons for opening a Nazi-themed cafe that has sparked controversy among residents and tourists.

Soldatenkaffee includes a red wall of Nazi-related memorabilia, including a large flag with the swastika and a giant picture of Adolf Hitler. Its staff dress in SS uniforms, and can be seen posing in front of the cafe on its Facebook page.

The cafe, in the West Java provincial capital of Bandung, one of Indonesia's main tourist cities, has been open since April 2011. But a recent article in a local English-language newspaper has prompted angry responses from some foreigners and Indonesians on social networking sites.

The deputy mayor of Bandung, Ayi Vivananda, said a letter was sent on Thursday summoning the cafe owner, Henry Mulyana, to meet officials to discuss his motives for opening the cafe and whether his objective was to incite racial hatred.

"Those symbols are internationally recognised to represent violence and racism," Vivananda said.

Mulyana said his objective was not to breed hatred. Instead, he said he wanted to decorate his restaurant with Nazi symbols to attract customers, both local and foreigners.

He denied being pro-Nazi or supporting Hitler.

"I'm just a businessman, not a politician," Mulyana said. "I have a right to design my restaurant with anything that attracts people to come. I'm sure that I'm not violating any laws."

He said the controversy had forced him to temporarily close the restaurant. He declined to say whether he would consider changing the Nazi theme if authorities requested him to do so.

"Let's wait and see," he said. "I don't want the workers here to lose their jobs."

Fred Sirieix, unflappable general manager of London's Galvin at Windows, reveals the secrets of how to make a fuss without being booted off the premises

A survey showed that 38% of British people would never complain in a restaurant– however bad the food or service. Who can blame us for our reticence? Chefs are sometimes unhinged. Marco Pierre White ejected diners who asked for salt and pepper. His protege Gordon Ramsay created equally priceless PR for dispatching an American customer who had, he said, the temerity to ask for tomato ketchup with a dish of red mullet and summer minestrone.

Waiters seem less threatening, but can be sneaky. In Waiter Rant: Thanks For the Tip– billed as a front-of-house Kitchen Confidential– Steve Dublanica tells of restaurant staff putting laxatives in soup or using a returned burger as an ice-hockey puck before taking it back out and serving it again to the customer.

These are, we hope, extreme and rare reactions, but to guide a path through the minefield, we enlisted the help of the legendary Fred Sirieix, unflappable general manager of London's Galvin at Windows.

Be clear. Be concise. Be calm

OK, you have a legitimate, non-subjective complaint: the dish is not the one you ordered; the food is cold when it shouldn't be. Alert your waiter immediately and, this is important, explain the problem without bluster, exaggeration or threat. There should be no reason to raise your voice at this stage. Mistakes happen; allow the restaurant to correct it.

"There's a difference between a complaint and a comment," says Sirieix. "Somebody can make a comment and say: 'I thought the service was a bit fast.' Or 'I did not get the table I wanted.' People are in business like we are and they feel a responsibility to tell you, because they would want to be told themselves. That I am very happy to know."

Know your onions

Before you kick off in a restaurant, take a moment to check that you are not going to embarrass yourself. Sweetbreads are not what they sound like, and neither is head cheese. Hot-smoked salmon has an all-important hyphen and can often be served cold. "Some people order ceviche and say, 'the scallops are raw,'" notes Sirieix. "And I will say, 'Yes sir, it's the ceviche.' What can I say?"

Speak now, or forever hold …

Do not complain about a dish when you have eaten most of it – say something straightaway. Equally, if you have not enjoyed an aspect of your meal, it is good manners, and karma, to alert someone while you are at the restaurant, rather than venting your fury on Twitter, TripAdvisor or elsewhere.

A salutary tale: last December, a food blogger called James Isherwood didn't particularly enjoy his starter at Mayfair's Hibiscus and wrote an unfavourable criticism of it when he got home. He woke up to a stream of abuse from the chef concerned, Claude Bosi, with fellow two-Michelin-starred cooks Simon Rogan, Tom Kerridge and Sat Bains jumping to Bosi's defence under the hashtag chefsunite. Bosi's justification was that Isherwood was asked about his meal at the time and said nothing.

As the Times restaurant critic Giles Coren wrote in his book, How to Eat Out: "Once you walk out of the door, it's over."

That said…

If you feel your complaint has not been taken seriously, or you remain disappointed with your experience, hit them online. Internet reviews – good or bad – are increasingly powerful for all restaurants; no one in the trade ignores them. "I look at everything all the time," admits Sirieix.

Don't go fishing for freebies

Maybe it's the recession, perhaps we are over-excited after years of suffering in silence, but it is still the prerogative of the restaurant to suggest how to make amends for a complaint, not you. You may be pleasantly surprised. Any decent restaurant will know that if they can turn your criticism into a positive experience, they may retain your loyalty for ever.

"A customer has to complain with honesty and integrity and have high values attached to it," says Sirieix. "If you're just saying something to get a free drink or a free meal, we can see what you are trying to do, you are not going to get it. It won't happen."

Don't believe the horror stories

Tales of restaurant staff tampering with your food once you have sent it back are mostly apocryphal. We live in litigious times and the Food Standards Agency is just a phone call away.

"I'm sure there are sick people who do things, but I've never worked with them," says Siriex. "If I did, it wouldn't be for long."

'There are the inevitable "jokes": pickled mussels whose shells are edible and twigs made of seaweed. I hazard these are more fun to dream up than they are to eat'

There's an Irving Berlin song that goes by the name They Were All Out Of Step But Jim. I've been humming it like a mantra because of The French, goggling at column after column of praise for the place: normally caustic critics wiping away tears of gratification and the blogosphere in even more of a freebie-fuelled froth than usual. Because I just don't get it.

The standout dish for many is "ox in coal oil". Of all the things I don't get about The French, I don't get this the most. Coal oil – oil in which hot charcoal has been steeped – is something of a recurring theme for the chef behind this landmark new Manchester restaurant, Simon Rogan of Great British Menu and two-Michelin-starred L'Enclume fame. He's drenched mackerel in it previously, and scallops. (Me, curious about taste profiles: "What is the difference between ox and cow?" Server: "Ox is bigger and has horns.")

So we have raw beef in an almost Korean yukhoe style, chopped, fat-free, with tiny spheres of kohlrabi, toasted pumpkin seeds and sunflower shoots. But everything is reduced to texture, because all I can taste is that oil. It's all I can taste next morning, too. Unlike barbecuing, where smoke enhances, this meat has given up the ghost and let the oil dance a demented caper all over it. It's clammy and cold. Everyone, but everyone, loves this dish.

We have the full 10 courses, at £79. Well, you feel you must. We have spongey boiled sole on to which is poured an onion broth so powerful and jammy, it gums the lips together. Sole is a delicate fish; it doesn't stand a snowball's. There are the inevitable "jokes": pickled mussels whose shells are edible – pastry stained with squid ink – and twigs made of seaweed. I hazard these are more fun to dream up than they are to eat. Goat's cheese with a beetroot mousse is served at a disturbing blood temperature, and a claggy chore to wade through. Although I do love its apple marigold; they've apparently imported L'Enclume's plot-to-table philosophy by installing polytunnels on the grand Edwardian hotel's roof. A dish called "late spring offerings" is a gorgeous, supremely fresh riot of living flavours – petals, shoots, roots, alliums – and beautiful to look at. There's more. A lot more. But apart from those prepubescent veg and magnificent bread, much of it has a pre-plated quality. I don't love any of it.

I'm so distressed at not falling for this handsome room – an uneasy cocktail of grand hotel, modern Scandi and Vegas bling – that I resort to checking Tripadvisor, that chat room for shills, for validation. But the only people complaining there are the fossils, the kind who chunter things like, "The lady wife and I like it when we return from powder room to find our serviettes folded into the shape of a swan."

Worn out after almost four hours of foofery, of dish expositions as foams congeal and collapse on our plates, we beg for the bill. This causes consternation: I've never before been pursued out of a restaurant by a panicked server wailing, "You haven't had your sarsparilla!"

So voilà: everyone loves The French but me. Maybe it's because there's an unwritten restaurant critic rule to be nicer to places outside London, or the pitchforks come out. Or, for punters, that weird psychological aberration that kicks in after you spend scary loot: "I've just dropped nearly 300 quid. Itmust be good!"

I haven't been to L'Enclume (apart from via Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's glorious The Trip: "The consistency is a bit like snot." "Like Ray Winston's coughed it up"), so I must take everyone's word for its marvellousness. And, despite its mean little room, I was wowed by Rogan's recently closed "two-year pop-up" in London, Roganic, but a lot of that was down to the vaguely loony talent of then chef Ben Spalding. Messrs Michelin are probably hurtling towards The French as we speak. Everyone's out of step but me.

• The French Midland Hotel, Peter Street, Manchester, 0161-236 3333. Open lunch Weds-Sat noon-1.30pm (last orders), dinner Tues-Sat 6.30-9.30pm (last orders). Three-course set meal £29, six-course £55, 10-course £79, all plus drinks and service.

Food 5/10
Atmosphere 4/10
Value for money 5/10

Follow Marina on Twitter.

Should you risk the house red? Can you trust the sommelier? What about vintage? David Williams explains all

Avoid the second cheapest

Restaurateurs have long since cottoned on to the practice, and on many lists the slot will be taken by the wine that was cheapest for them to buy, with the price then pumped up. If you're looking for value, you're often better off with the house (aka cheapest) wine: an ambassadorial bottle that most restaurant wine buyers I know take pride in getting right.

Try this at home
Waitrose Rich and Intense Italian Red (£4.99)

This juicy, plummy red is the supermarket equivalent of a good-quality house red at a local pizza place.

If you can't stand the mark-up, BYO

An increasing number of restaurants will let you bring your own for a respectable corkage fee. Wine writer Tom Cannavan has an up-to-date list of restaurants that are amenable to this at wine-pages.com. If you live in London and eat out a lot, you might be able to justify the £99 membership to join byowineclub.com, which gives you BYO access to some restaurants that wouldn't otherwise allow it .

Try this at home (or BYO)
Ostler Blue House Pinot Gris Waitaki, New Zealand 2010 (£18.99, Berry Bros & Rudd)

The perfect BYO wine: it comes from New Zealand, too often under-represented on restaurant lists; its luscious quince flavours and texture make it a versatile food match.

If there's no producer, have a beer

The producer's name is the most important information on a wine (or any drink) bottle: it's the most reliable guide to quality. There are many UK restaurants, and not just those at the cheaper end, that, when it comes to wine, may give the country or region, but leave out the producer's name. This is usually a good sign the establishment doesn't care about wine, and I've learnt to retreat to the safer ground of bottled lager, juice or tea.

Try this at home
La Vieille Ferme Blanc, Côtes du Luberon 2012 (£7.95, Asda, Waitrose, ocado.com)

This trusted brand from the Rhône shows the value of knowing the producer. Offering good value, this perky, pear and peach-flavoured white is made by the Perrin family, a top producer of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

Mind the vintage

If you're tempted to splurge on an expensive bottle, particularly a red from one of the classic European regions such as Bordeaux, Burgundy, or northern Italy, look for older vintages. Too many restaurants list big name estates for prestige, but only offer bottles from recent vintages that aren't ready to drink. You'd be better off with the house red.

Try this at home
Cune Imperial Gran Reserva Rioja, Spain 2004 (£28 if you buy two bottles, Majestic)

The traditional top reds of Rioja are marked out from their counterparts in Bordeaux in that they are released only after a long period of ageing.

Give the sommelier a chance

A good sommelier, of which there are many more in the UK than there used to be, can add to your evening. They get genuine pleasure out of guiding you to their favourite bottles and food matches. You'll need to be firm on your budget (they can get carried away), but why not let them choose for you? At the very worst, it's sure to be better than the second cheapest wine on the list.

Try this at home
Quinta do Soalheiro Alvarinho, Vinho Verde, Portugal 2012 (from £14.95, Lay & Wheeler)

The sort of wine that sommeliers love: they can explain that alvarinho is Portuguese for the more familiar albariño from Spain, and that the brilliant Quinta do Soalheiro take 70s favourite vinho verde to a whole new level of white peachy refinement.

With its plethora of restaurants, the city is firmly geared up for the visiting gourmand. But just how good are they?

Coppi, St Anne's Square, Belfast (028 9031 1959). Meal for two: £60

Mourne Seafood Bar, 34-36 Bank Street, Belfast (028 9024 8544). Meal for two: £70

Ox Restaurant, 1 Oxford Street, Belfast (028 9031 4121). Meal for two: £110

The exterior of Ox in Belfast is much like my soul: black and featureless. There is a large plate-glass window which looks into a sparsely furnished dining room. It appears to have taken its design cues from a hyper-efficient car workshop in Dusseldorf. It is all hard lines and hard surfaces; if the food game doesn't work out the space would make for a jolly nice torture garden. Nowhere on the restaurant frontage is its name. Perhaps letters were judged to be messy. Then again they hardly need to advertise. During my three days in Belfast almost everybody I met talked to me about Ox: had I been there? Was I going there? And what did I think? A cab driver took a detour just to show me where it is. I hadn't asked him to do so.

Ox is a collaboration between the former head chef of James Street South and the manager of Deanes, two of the city's better-thought-of places. Local boy Stephen Toman and Brittany-born Alain Kerloc'h have done their time, served their apprenticeships at fancy joints in France like L'Arpège and Taillevent, where heels are clicked and cloches lifted.

What was striking in Belfast was the palpable sense that everyone wants it to be good. In London an opening like this would be a cue for bloodletting and Olympic-quality bitching, rumour, innuendo and sneering, and that's only from the chef's mother. Not, apparently, in Belfast. As the admirable Belfast food blog forked.ie put it recently: "At times here in the North we're still like one big dysfunctional family… happy to knock seven shades of shit out of each other but stop midway through the fight to join together against the outsider who happened to make eye contact at poor wee cousin Janie."

I know this to be true. I have been that outsider. I have said the bad things, and felt the ire. There is local pride, and not unreasonably. There are many cities in the UK where the dining options would be exhausted by lunchtime. On the first day. I knew early on that I wouldn't have enough Belfast mealtimes in which to visit all the places I wanted to try. The newish faux-Georgian Saint Anne's Square development, for example, is wall to wall new restaurants. On one side is an Italian called Coppi, launched by a veteran Belfast chef and restaurateur called Tony O'Neill. It looks like a Jamie's Italian on steroids, all heavy wood tables and white tiling. The intention is similar. It is meant to be a casual place, lighting sparklers rather than fireworks.

Most of the small plates – some pork and fennel sausages, strips of breaded chicken with an underwhelming romesco sauce – are a little a bit ho and a little bit hum. But there is a wood-fired oven for terrific charred breads, and a selection of steaks supplied by the extraordinary local meat producer Peter Hannan, who ages beef from shorthorns fed on clover, in a chiller room walled in Himalayan salt. Yes, really. Apparently the salt acts as an antibiotic.

I've tried the beef, and it is something special. It has a depth of flavour and dense texture without that "something just died in the corner" flavour you get with less-cared-for muscle. Best of all at Coppi was a stonking duck pasta dish, for a very reasonable £12.50, of fat ravioli stuffed with a fine ducky ragu, overlaid with more of the same, the whole spun through with fat flakes of crisped duck skin. It was deep and outrageous and completely unfinishable. Naturally I finished it.

Less happily, next door, is the House of Zen. It's the sort of fancy Chinese restaurant where they keep trying to give you a knife and fork, and all the money appears to have gone on faux Oriental screens and downlighters. The menu reads overwrought and sugary so I played safe by ordering dry, skinless crispy duck, and a beef in black bean sauce that left me clicking my tongue against the roof of my mouth just to kill the sensation. Service is of the distracted kind that results in you getting up to pay your bill at the front desk just to speed your exit.

It makes more sense when in Belfast to eat seafood, which I did at Mourne Seafood Bar, a much-loved local landmark situated in what feels like an old boozer near King Street (there is another outside the city at Dundrum). I ate pristine rock oysters, some plain, others with a julienne of cucumber and pickled ginger. There was a rustling bowlful of salt and pepper squid, and the kind of hefty seafood chowder that makes you wish it was colder outside. Each of these was a few quid, and while there are more pricey main dishes from a changing blackboard menu, no one could ever accuse it of being expensive.

And so, on the last night, to Ox. However austere it may look from the outside – and however obvious the ambition of the kitchen – it isn't up itself. Nobody bows. There are no stupid formalities performed because someone was so taught by a scary maître d' who could not be disobeyed. They want you to eat well with the minimum of fuss. Much of that applies to the food, too. Starters can read on the complex side – quail, white asparagus, fresh almonds, cherries, for example; or scallop, egg, curry, hazelnut, cauliflower – but they eat very simply. It's about top-quality ingredients to which the best things have been done.

The quail has been boned and glazed and roasted, the asparagus parboiled. There are fresh white, crunchy almonds and stoned cherries. It is all very balanced. Ditto gloriously sweet scallops seared until the protein is just set, with the crunch of cauliflower and nut. Even a plate of crisped Iberico ham, with dollops of a truffled custard, does not feel like good ham wasted. It is salt and soft and sweet and earthy.

If anything the mains, priced in the mid- to high teens, are simpler. The most showy thing in a plate of local Mourne lamb – some loin, a chop, a kidney, all of them served pink in the right way – is an ultra-smoky aubergine purée. A piece of beef fillet seasoned with a little lardo, the famed Italian cured piggy back fat, is a great piece of meat cooked by a kitchen that knows what it's doing. Rabbit comes with the sweetness of apricot and unctuousness of long-braised pig cheek; pollan, a local herring-like fish, is accompanied by cockles, artichokes and violet potatoes.

The great technique is disguised by superb ingredients. It is therefore unsurprising that desserts – a white-chocolate parfait with summer fruits; marinated strawberries with a sharp limoncello jelly – are overshadowed by a plate of well-kept local cheeses. There is also a thoughtful wine list with lots of choice by the glass and 50cl carafe, at prices which encourage experimentation.

It is easy to get carried away, to overstate what is going on here. Is Ox on a par with the very best in Britain? Absolutely not. But, for all the adoring local chatter, it doesn't feel like it's trying to be that. Ox simply wants to be best in class and then some. It wants to celebrate the best ingredients on its doorstep, and do it with unstudied professionalism. On those terms it has more than achieved its goals. It does not need to show off. Ox knows it's the most interesting thing to happen to Belfast in a long while. And the city seems grateful for it.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1

• This article was amended on 23 July 2013 to remove a reference, in the sub-heading, to Belfast as the "Irish" city.

Olli Dabbous tells how to make the sinfully rich mashed potato that wows diners at Dabbous. Warning: contains three packs of butter

Two weeks after Dabbous opened in January 2012, it received a rare five-star review from Fay Maschler in the Evening Standard. More rave reviews followed, and suddenly the restaurant had the longest waiting list in London.

One thing Ollie Dabbous didn't want to do was let the hype affect his food, which is clever without being tricksy, and often quite restrained. It's all very well impressing people with exotic combinations, he says, "but it's even more powerful if you can deliver something they've had 100 times before and they think, wow, I didn't know it could taste that good."

Enter the Dabbous mashed potato, which appears as a standalone dish. In general, he says, the food at the restaurant is "very light, very clean, probably quite feminine". This dish is the opposite of all those things: sinfully rich, full of butter, served with unctuous roasting juices on top. "A lot of dishes here are pretty," he says. "The mash is deliberately quite ugly. It's not attention-seeking. It's no frills."

SERVES 8

new potatoes 1kg (Ratte, Desiree or Maris Piper)
water 2 litres
salt 49g
milk 200g
unsalted butter 750g

Choose your spud

We use a French new potato called Ratte, which has a buttery texture, but you could also use Desiree or Maris Piper. Wash the potatoes but don't peel them yet. Place them in a pan with cold water and 40g salt and bring to boil then simmer gently for 1 hour until completely cooked but not falling apart. Drain the potatoes and then peel them with a paring knife as quickly as possible.

Push, but not too hard

Bring half the milk and half the butter to the boil in a wide pan, then remove from the heat. Sit a mouli or a potato ricer on top of the pan and pass the potatoes through into the hot liquid. The key is not to push them too hard – you don't want to stretch the gluten. Adding little cubes of butter to the potatoes will help them go through much more easily.

Mix well. Melt the remaining butter in a small pan and whisk it into the potatoes with the remaining 9g salt and finally the remaining milk.

Sieve, but keep it quick

Pass the mash through a sieve, twice. At the restaurant we use a fine drum sieve, which allows you to put all your body weight behind it, but you could use a normal sieve at home. You want to do this as quickly as possible so you can serve the mash while it's still hot.

Dabbous, 39 Whitfield Street, London WIT 2SF

Matt Hayes is head chef at the Wolseley where they make 200 portions of cucumber sandwiches a day. So if anyone knows, he does …

The British have long associated elegance with understatement. Take cucumber sandwiches – basic and affordable but still a sign of luxury. They're an essential component of afternoon tea, something in which Matt Hayes, head pastry chef at the Wolseley on London's Piccadilly, specialises. They make 200 portions of cucumber sandwiches a day.

"People love the combination of soft bread, crunchy cucumber and lightly salted butter. Our guests would definitely be horrified if they weren't there," says Hayes.

Thin, uniform slices of bread are key so ask a baker to slice the bread. Source British cucumber and use good-quality, lightly salted butter.

Cucumber sandwich

SERVES 4

thin sliced white bread 8 slices
cucumber 1
salted butter at room temperature
salt and pepper to taste

Lightly and evenly butter the slices of bread right to the edges.

Peel the cucumber and cut to the length of the bread. Using a peeler, thinly slice the cucumber until you get down to the seeds, turn the cucumber and repeat the process until all the flesh has been removed. Discard the seeds – they will make the bread soggy. Place the strips of cucumber evenly on the bread and lightly season. Top with a slice of bread.

Leave the sandwiches for around 10 minutes – this stops the cucumber slices sliding around when you cut them up. To retain moisture and avoid the bread drying out, leave a slightly damp cloth on top.

Carefully remove the crusts and cut into fingers or triangles. For a twist, you can also add chopped mint and a little creme fraiche. thewolseley.com

Where do chefs go to eat? Cyrus Todiwala, head chef at Café Spice Namasté in Whitechapel, east London recommends a Vietnamese restaurant in Hackney

Brigid Delaney: It started with shared student $5 pizzas. But now a couple of drinks and a half-decent dinner empties your wallet

Every UK restaurant, takeaway joint and supermarket is rated by the Food Standards Agency. We've mapped their inspection data so you can look up your local and spot regional trends

• Use our interactive map to search for your postcode
• Get the data

Food safety officers up and down the country inspect the premises of just about anywhere that you can get food: schools, sandwich shops, pubs, hotels and bakeries.

In fact, the list of exceptions probably gives an even better indication of just how much they cover – only childminders, newsagents, chemist shops or "visitor centres selling tins of biscuits" don't need to be inspected for their hygiene standards.

So whether you're eating out or eating in, this is important information to know. Most places are fine to buy food from – the Food Standards Agency (FSA) passes 91% of food outlets – but what about the other 9%?

Anything less than a score of three out of five constitutes a fail. Businesses given ratings of 0 or 1 are those that need to make urgent or major improvements – but they're not closed down. That only happens if the food is so unsafe for the public to eat that there's an imminent risk to health.

So where are the chip shops, delicatessens and care homes that have failed their food inspections? They're all the red dots on the map below, which you can click on to see further detail. If you want to search for the postcode that you live in, try our interactive map here.

Though the FSA is responsible for food safety across the UK, there's a slightly different rating system in Scotland, which is why outlets there don't appear on our map.

Top of the (kitchen) table

Craigavon in Northern Ireland is the only local authority where 100% of food inspections resulted in a pass.

By contrast, Sutton and Bexley fall well short of the national average 91% pass rate – scoring just 68% and 66% respectively. You can also use our interactive map to spot regional trends. It shows that the biggest concentration of unhygienic food outlets is to be found in London.

Scores on the doors

Businesses aren't obliged to put their food ratings in their windows – although many that score well choose to do so with familiar stickers. A recent audit by the FSA found that more businesses are choosing to share their results.

Catriona Stewart, head of the food hygiene ratings team, said: "Many of us make spontaneous decisions about where to eat, so being able to see the rating on the door or in the window is important."

What do they inspect?

In its information pack for businesses, the FSA explains that it can inspect:
> premises
> the kinds of food made/prepared
> how staff work
> a business's food safety management system

And, if they feel it's necessary, they can:
> inspect records
> take samples and photographs of food
> write to the business informally, asking them to put right any problems
> detain or seize suspect foods

How often do they inspect?

The frequency of visits by the people in white coats depends partly on its hygiene record. Normally, food premises can expect a routine visit every six months or so but a complaint can bring an inspector at any time.

Note: Food inspections take place each and every day. We downloaded, checked, tabled and mapped these results a fortnight ago so they may have changed slightly since then. To double-check the results where you live, visit the FSA's website.

Data

• Download the full spreadsheet

Can you do more with this data?

• Email us at data@guardian.co.uk
• Follow us on Twitter
• Like us on Facebook
• Post a comment below

If you are big mates with the food we get from pigs, you'll find a very warm welcome at Friends of Ham in Leeds

4 New Station Street, Leeds (0113 242 0275). Meal for two: £30-50

A late night in Leeds and I am in a basement room with a slice of Prosciutto di Parma ham dangling off the ball of my hand, held in a fist. A fellow food writer has explained that he was told to do this by Ferran Adrià, the überchef famed for the modernist food he once served at El Bulli. "You wait until you can no longer feel the temperature difference between the ham and your hand," he says. "Then you know it's at the perfect temperature." I wait. Quickly the ham is warmed by my soft, soft skin, a dividend from never having done a proper day's work in my life. I lick the slippery fold of cured pig off. Gosh. Adrià's right. It has a deep, ripe sweet flavour that just goes on and on. I slap another bit of ham on my now pig-fat-slicked hand, dead flesh on live skin.

You might assume from this that I was less than sober. You would be right. I was deep down in the bottom of a glass and floating right back to the top again. This does not invalidate the experiment. And anyway, it came with the territory. I was in a fabulous bar called Friends of Ham and having been one for a long time – I think calling me and ham mere friends is to understate the depth and maturity of our relationship – it seemed only right to show the product a bit of serious love.

Is it valid to review this sort of place in a restaurant column? After all, they don't actually cook anything. All they do is buy stuff and sell it on. Ah yes, but they buy really good stuff and they sell it on very well indeed. I would choose Friends of Ham over any number of bona fide Leeds restaurants. What's more, I did. It occupies one of the units in the dark, narrow approach to the city's station, a road usually only used when you are either trying to leave town or locate someone to mug. At ground level is a self-consciously narrow bar. Chatter rises and falls. Downstairs is a larger, floorboarded room with central communal tables and smaller seating spaces around the outside. The ceiling is low. The wallpaper is of filled bookshelves, spine out, which saves on buying the real thing.

To eat, there are hefty wooden boards of charcuterie, cheese and bread with crunchy pickles on the side. Both the food and drink choices run from the obvious to the less so, and come with tasting notes. So there is a full platter of premium jamón Ibérico at £17.50 – with "an unmatched depth of flavour" – as well as cheaper options like the Parma I licked off my hand, or a serrano, for £6 a serving. There is salami flecked with fennel seed, a coarse cut, oily chorizo, and some glorious lardo – "a savoury buttery taste" – the salty cured back fat of the fattest pigs.

Some of these come from mainstream suppliers such as Brindisa, others from the kitchen of a nearby restaurant called the Reliance, which cures its own meats. What matters is that it is both stored and sliced well. The cheese list runs through a bit of Brie de Meaux and Keen's Cheddar to Harrogate Blue and Yellison's Goat from nearby Skipton. There is olive oil-dribbled bread or crackers with which to eat this and little pots of fiery sweet jelly to smear across it. Cutlery is optional.

The ever-rotating beer list is of the serious sort that more manly men than me would frown and nod over, with choices from Oregon and the Sierra Nevada in the US, through Belgium and Sweden to the glorious exotica of Stockport. I taste chocolate stouts, and wheat beers with a salty edge and softer lighter ales that feel as if they were brewed with me in mind.

Some of the staff have beards but, like me, they wear them lightly. They are eager to give tasters wherever possible. There is a short, well-priced wine list, but even I would acknowledge it's not the point of coming here. You come to wear paper-thin slices of ham like a glove and behave like it's a reasonable thing to do. Because it is.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1

From fake venues to spats over the accuracy of reviews, disputes between TripAdvisor and restaurants keep on coming. But how do you use the site's reviews? And do you trust them?

Barely a week goes by without the restaurant industry and TripAdvisor [TA] falling out. Last week, it was reported that mischievous web-users had propelled a fictitious venue to a top ranking in Brixham, reports followed this week about how it was all a ruse to prove you can game the system, while, despite vociferous objections from its owner, a Yorkshire restaurant had numerous positive reviews removed, after TA's filters judged them suspicious. Claims and counter claims swirl around such stories, most generating more heat than light.

Clearly any review site on which a Glasgow homeless shelter can emerge as one of the city's top hotels isn't fail-safe, but did anyone think TA was? Doesn't everybody approach it with caution? Not because of headline-grabbing, malicious fake reviews, but for a far more mundane reason: a significant minority of its users don't know what they're talking about. Blimey, there are people on TA who I wouldn't trust to pass me a pair of scissors, never mind recommend a restaurant I should eat in. But you knew that, right?

To use TripeAdvisor – as it's hilariously and somewhat unfairly known in our house – properly, you need to read it. You can't just look at the scores. And to read it in a way that is rewarding, you need to develop a set of personal idiot filters, far more powerful than anything TA could develop to police the site. For instance, if I'm looking for a hotel, I am wary of fellow travellers (usually, wealthy Americans) who are used to such obliging levels of service, that they've given perfectly good hotels 1/5 because the front desk refused to send someone up from reception to wipe their bum for them.

Likewise, there are a remarkable number of people reviewing restaurants on TripAdvisor, who don't care about food. Like me, you've no doubt read posts (or clusters of posts, appearing almost simultaneously, from different members of the same irate party) that fulminate with invective – header: "I will NEVER go back" – because the waiter's welcome wasn't warm enough; the chairs were a bit uncomfortable; the lighting was dim; someone had to wait 17 seconds for their main course; there was a mistake with the bill; the kitchen refused to rustle-up chicken nuggets and chips for a child; they were out of soap in the ladies' toilet; the staff forget to put the balloons out for Uncle Peter's birthday. Yet, many of these posts still conclude with: "We all agreed that this was some of the best food we had ever eaten, and it's incredible value, too."

Do you take any notice of such reviews? Well, it depends what you care about, doesn't it? Eating well or the fact that the service was a bit slack. Even then you've got to allow for the exaggeration and OTT self-justification that is the hallmark of any critical review. Put simply: you cannot use TripAdvisor without sifting its reviews according to how rational, intelligent, experienced and fair-minded a reviewer seems … or not.

Should I even be talking about this? There is something of an omerta around TripAdvisor among paid food journalists. We all know it's there, we can't help but use it. But we remain sceptical about this rough'n'ready litmus test of local opinion. Ideally, we prefer to pretend that it doesn't exert any influence on us. Our own high priestess of the pass, Marina O'Loughlin, summed-up this ambivalence in a recent review, when she admitted to browsing that "chatroom for shills" to try to make sense of her opinion of The French restaurant in Manchester.

Me? I'm happy to go one better and admit that in researching my "budget eats" series for the Guardian, I find TA invaluable. As one of several research tools (local contacts, trawling guides, blogs and so on). it regularly points me towards excellent cafes and restaurants that I would otherwise have missed. TA is very quick, it's very democratic and so, particularly at that sub-£10 price-point, it's useful. Of course, places crop up in any town's top 20 that are there because said venue does an enormous carvery/it's Nando's/the chef spends more time drumming up online support than cooking, but to ignore TripAdvisor would be peculiarly arrogant, and self-defeating.

What do you think of TripAdvisor? Do you use it? Do you post reviews on it? And how reliable do you find its restaurant rankings?

'It has the hallmarks of something that could be rolled out to a town near you. Be afraid'

I'm asking my Brummie chum where he eats in the city and he says, "Manchester or London." This seems a bit harsh, especially since we're in what looks like a genuinely exciting addition to Birmingham's burgeoning dining scene, and it's neither balti nor Michelin-botherer.

Actually, I'm not entirely sure what it is meant to be. The website announces blithely: "We've taken inspiration from the grooviest country kitchens." Would those be ones sponsored by champagne salesmen? Staff wear Moët-embroidered tops, there are Veuve Clicquot cushions on the attractive, canal-side outdoor seating and flashy bottles of Bolly among the window display's Colman's mustard tins and couthy provisions.

But it looks fresh and appealing, plant-filled and bright; the staff are sparky and friendly; and we can see a huge grill thing in the open kitchen (it's a "barbacoa", a pure charcoal indoor grill and, according to the verbose menu, the UK's only one). Lovely, lovely, tra-la-la.

We settle in for a top meal. I'm even prepared to overlook the overdone Fleet Street theming, all newsprint and blackboards promising "Daily's" [sic]. It's Fleet Street, Birmingham, chaps, on the fringes of the Jewellery Quarter, not London's former heartland of journalistic excess. The menu talks its sweet talk: "Fantastic meat suppliers… happy animals… Hereford and Dexter beef… farm on the north Yorkshire moors." They mix a fine, spicy bloody mary and the Cloudy Bay is frosty. And then the food arrives. And my Birmingham native pal becomes… no, not outraged, downright incandescent.

There's pâté, grey and weirdly runny, with impenetrable sealant. ("Mattessons and candlewax," rages the pal.) It's bitter, as though the livers haven't been properly trimmed. Baby back ribs arrive slathered with something we're about to see a lot of: tooth-rottingly sweet, brown gloop. There are a number of sauces on the menu, and we endure several, but they're all riffs on that gloop. It's as if they have vats of the stuff in the back, in a darker, Nibelungen-run kitchen hidden behind the showcase open job, ready to customise into "FSK #1 meat sauce", "tonkatsu" or "Diane". The rib meat is fibrous and overcooked, not in a falling-off-the-bone way, but in a lodged-in-your-teeth-all-day way. Calamari have the air of items released from decades of cryogenic freezing. They loll off the fork, as flaccid and weary as a Playboy magnate. Their "aïoli" simply isn't: it's a lurid yellow dollop that's never met a clove of garlic in its miserable life.

It gets worse: a fine bit of steak, nicely charred and pink, has a new kind of torture inflicted on it: "coffee and chipotle bbq" sauce, aka brown gloop that tastes as though it's had Nescafé and Tabasco flung in. There's a side dish of cabbage and leeks. I can't really complain, because they're just that: ignorant great chunks of the veg boiled in water, no other cooking or seasoning. Chips are pallid and wan. Most heinous are "barbacoa-grilled lamb cutlets": unrendered fat, no crisp, caramelly bits. They sit on vegetables billed as roasted but virtually raw, including "crushed" potatoes. The only thing that's crushed here is the spuds' amour propre. They purport to be served with "redcurrant jus", but guess what? Yup, brown gloop, differentiated from its colleagues by being even sweeter. We don't have puddings. Our insulin levels couldn't stand it.

The depressing thing is that, underneath the cackhandedness, the lumpen crowd-pleasing, there's evidence of fine produce. But it simply doesn't stand a chance against the force of the concept. And the towering might of the gloop. Fleet Street Kitchen is the brainfart of a bunch of businessmen who are colonising Summer Row with their other outlets, Mechu and Après. It has the hallmarks of something that could be rolled out to a town near you. Be afraid. As the pal points out, "This monstrosity should be bundled into a sack and rolled out straight into the canal."

• Fleet Street KitchenFleet Street, Islington Gates, Summer Row, Birmingham, 0121-236 0100. Open daily, noon-midnight (7pm Sun). About £35 a head, plus drinks and service.

Food 3/10
Atmosphere 7/10
Value for money 2/10

Follow Marina on Twitter.

Classical cooking as a spectator sport has all but died out. At Otto's, though, it's all part of an epic dining experience

182 Gray's Inn Road, London WC1 (020 7713 0107). Meal for two (excluding duck), including wine and service: £120

One afternoon in the late 1960s the star French chef Michel Guérard received a breathless phone call from the equally revered Pierre Troisgros over in the Roanne gastro palace that carried his family's name. Troisgros told Guérard that he'd done something amazing: he'd plated a dish in the kitchen. It was a small gesture but a huge moment. Until then, convention demanded that cooked ingredients be taken out of the kitchen on silver platters and plated in the dining room. Troigros's change, quickly adopted by others, shifted the balance of power from the lofty faffing waiters back to the kitchen.

We gained an awful lot that day – most importantly a focus on the food over silly service. But we also lost something: the polish and gleam of true gastro theatre, of classical cooking as spectator sport. After that the best we could hope for was a festering roast on a carving trolley, or an outbreak of crêpes suzette.

Thank the gods of greed, then, for Otto's, an old-school French restaurant opened 18 months ago on the Gray's Inn Road by Otto Albert Tepasse, an equally old-school maître d'. It's handsome rather than pretty. The blue upholstered chairs do not quite go with the red banquettes. The Brigitte Bardot photos clash slightly with the Warhol cushion covers, which sit oddly next to classical Greek sculptures. And yet, for all that, it feels like a room in which very good things can happen.

Unless you're a duck. Otto's has mostly gained attention for its hulking silver duck press, originally fashioned for a luxe hotel in Provence in the 1920s, which takes pride of place in the dining room. For £120 for two – ordered in advance – Otto's will roast you a whole duck, sourced from the same farm that supplies La Tour d'Argent in Paris, the originator of this dish. It is served in two parts, legs first, followed by slices of rare breast, under a stupidly rich sauce made from the juices of the bird, extracted by crushing it in the press: those juices, the liver, cognac, other stuff, a side order of defibrillator. I will just have to find a friend and save up.

Instead I ordered the steak tartare. There is a lot to adore about this place, but I truly fell in love when the waiter appeared with a tray laden with at least nine bowls and bottles; it looked like mise en place for a whole service. He cracked the egg to separate out the yolk, to mix with the olive oil and Dijon which he spun up into a mayonnaise. There were chopped shallots and cornichons and capers and parsley. There was Tabasco – I had asked for it piquant – and Worcestershire sauce and a few other things besides, the whole lot worked in a wooden bowl.

The puck of artery-red raw meat was served with a hot rosti and was simply the best steak tartare I have ever tried. There was the kick of Dijon and Tabasco, the sweet-soft of beef fillet, the crunch and salt of cornichon and caper. I accept that some of this love is transference from the business of watching it made. So what? I like to watch.

The rest of the menu is a deftly modernised classicism: light, silken pasta encloses blushingly pert and fresh langoustine one side of the raviolo and fresh spinach the other, all under a killer seafood bisque; a spring pea soup for £5.95 is all the sweet lightly starchy things you want from a pea. A dish of rabbit brings boned loin and a little of the bunny's offal, shards of crisped pancetta, Jersey royals and a sprightly mustard sauce. There is a perfect crème brûlée to finish, because there must be, and a more complex plate of meringue and pistachio cream and fresh strawberries.

The wine list is of the kind written by a man who wants you to share his enthusiasms. It's full of big sexy names priced according to cost plus a fixed margin, so it's also full of big sexy bargains. Have I sold it to you? Do you want to go? No? Then clearly you have no soul.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1

Kout Food Group to buy 81 of ailing restaurant chain's 83 sites and is expected to retain the Little Chef name and mascot

Restaurant chain Little Chef will remain a feature on Britain's roadsides after a Kuwaiti firm snapped up the ailing business for £15m.

The firm's Fat Charlie mascot, which has been a familiar sight for UK motorists for more than 50 years, looks likely to remain as the restaurant's logo following the successful bid by Kout Food Group, which operates a number of restaurant franchises in the Middle East.

Put up for sale earlier this year by its private equity owner, RCapital, Kout Food is understood to have beaten several bidders including McDonald's, KFC and Costa.

It is buying 81 of its 83 sites and is expected to retain the Little Chef name.

However, RCapital's chief executive, Jamie Constable, said the new owners would "take the brand to the next stage". They will hope to capitalise on a breakfast and travel dining market estimated at £3bn in the UK.

RCapital had acquired Little Chef for a nominal fee in 2007 after it collapsed into administration before an overhaul including a menu revamp by celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal. It said it had brought the business back into profitability.

Little Chef employs 1,100 staff and serves more than 6 million customers a year. It had 234 outlets with 4,000 staff at the time of its 2007 collapse.

Famous for its large "Olympic" breakfasts, it began life as an 11-seat restaurant in Reading, Berkshire, in 1958.

SBS Feast magazine spreads accolades around the country as it announces winners of its food awards

Food can be one of the best things about a holiday – or one of the worst. Do you research restaurants before you go away, and if so, where do you get your recommendations?

For those who live their lives in perpetual anticipation of the next meal, eating out abroad presents a fleeting chance to explore once-in-a-lifetime peaks – and never-again-I-swear valleys – of gastro-geography.

In this respect, the world divides neatly into two types of people. The first type rock up, drop their bags and wander Pollyanna-like into the nearest eatery, where they're met with the finest examples of local cuisine and hospitality, and return home swearing that Alghero/Rio/Hanoi has the best food in the world and the friendliest people they've ever met.

Then there's the rest of us, who are resigned to the fact that, without restaurant research, we'll be left picking at our plates in a half-empty dining room, having been served the same facsimile meal that graces the menus of every establishment we've encountered, while the locals gorge on fresh seafood and small-batch artisanal tipple just round the corner, clinking glasses with the aforementioned first type of traveller.

So we knuckle down and do our holiday homework. But where to begin?

In the days when encyclopedias were hardbacked instead of crowdsourced, there was a wonderful holiday planning device known as the Tourist Guidebook. You'd consult the index, pinpoint your destination, and be presented with a list of, oh, at least three restaurants to choose from. When you turned up (assuming the place hadn't closed in the four years since the guide was published), you'd be greeted by the disappointed looks of other foreigners hoping to glimpse a more indigenous clientele, and the knowing smirk of the owner.

Add on the shoestring budget of your average travel writer (not exactly conducive to an in-depth assessment of every dish in town) and a certain suspicion regarding the dubious practices of some members of the profession, and you might conclude that you'd be better off stalking the concierge on their dinner break than paying attention to most guidebook restaurant listings.

Thankfully, the world wide web now gives us access to a previously untapped fount of knowledge: the Random Nameless Stranger. Even better, a whole bunch of random nameless strangers, brought together in a one-stop shop of holiday wisdom: TripAdvisor.

A self-perpetuating guide for the undiscerning, written by the one-time tourist for the next one-time tourist? Or a valuable source of local knowledge? If you haven't already noticed the various, er, weaknesses to the site's system, I'll leave you to look up the places you know in your own home town and draw your own conclusions. In other words, a healthy dose of cynicism is advised when using the guide.

Still, for those willing to put in the hours, the internet holds more than just an opinion free-for-all from those who think a hotdog-stuffed deep-crust pizza is the pinnacle of Neapolitan cuisine. If you're the kind of person who can still utter the word "foodie" without the need for air quotes and a painfully self-aware eye roll, you'll find a wealth of information on Chowhound, where food fanatics pen mini essays on the best bagels in New York and guides on avoiding the tourist traps in Brussels, and spill the beans on the latest, hottest eats in town and country. And for the big cities of the English-speaking world, have a glance at Urbanspoon, which arguably has its finger on the hip and happenin' pulse. (Again, have a go at the home town test and see if you agree.)

So where do you go for your restaurant recommendations abroad? What's your best ever "just stumbled upon it" meal? And what lengths will you go to in search of that perfect holiday meal?

Where do chefs eat out? Master patissier Claire Clark recommends William Curley, a patisserie in Belgravia, London