The north Kent coast, known for its oysters, art scene and beaches, is a joy in summer, but where to eat well on a budget? Here are 10 restaurants and cafes in Whitstable, Herne Bay, Margate and Ramsgate that do the job for under £10 a head

Wheelers Oyster Bar, Whitstable & JoJo's Coffee House, Tankerton

If you know these two at all, it will be as very good and fairly upmarket restaurants. However, both Wheelers, which dates to 1856, and the much more modern JoJo's – a mile or two away in neighbouring Tankerton – have affordable arms that the budget traveller can enjoy. Don't be put off if the four stools at Wheelers cramped shop counter are already taken. You can pick up crab sandwiches, fantastic quiches (the crab and Béarnaise tartlets are seriously addictive), or make up your own portable fish platter, including your pick of rock oysters (half dozen, open to takeaway, £4.50), prawns, smoked eel, roll mops, hot smoked salmon etc. Nip across the road to the Offy (5 High Street) to grab a couple of cold beers from its wide selection of Kentish ales (from £1.79) and you have a meal fit for a king. If you're looking for a late sunset supper, both Wheelers and the Offy are open until 9pm.

Meanwhile, on the headland at Tankerton, the coffee shop at Nikki Billington's JoJo's (where, famously, you're charged double corkage if you BYO from Tesco) serves brilliant cakes, simple but good quality breakfast sandwiches, salads and seasonal specials. Some of the posh sandwiches (£6.95) – including a mean fish finger butty – probably don't offer as much bang for your buck as the stews. These might range, as the year progresses, from a sticky, wintry beef cheek number, to a more summery chicken, chorizo and red pepper one-pot. On a warm day, the patio area is a real sun trap.
• Wheelers: lunch from around £4, £10 a head would net you a handsome picnic; 8 High Street, Whitstable, 01227 273311, wheelersoysterbar.com. JoJo's: breakfast £1.25-£3.50, sandwiches and mains £3.50-£7.95; 2 Herne Bay Road, Tankerton, Whitstable, 01227 274591, jojosrestaurant.co.uk

Windy Corner Stores, Whitstable

This is a little off the main tourist drag but word is clearly out. On a sweltering day, Windy – part quirky corner shop, part serious foodie cafe – was packed. Little wonder, given the quality of my Moroccan lamb served with an assortment of jazzy, gourmet salads. The north African spicing was a little meek, but it barely mattered. The slices of explosively juicy, remarkably flavoursome lamb were cooked perfectly and ridged with caramelised fat. Elsewhere, the menu takes in interesting soups, sandwiches and salads, as well as other daily specials, such as orange-roasted pork or butternut squash and roasted vegetable frittata. Everything is available to takeaway, to the nearby beach, including beer (from £1.60, Red Stripe). It's a little cheaper if you do that, too. On a busy day, the service was stretched, but friendly.
• Breakfast £1.20-£7, lunch from £3.50. 110 Nelson Road, Whitstable, 01227 771707, Facebook page

David Brown Delicatessen, Whitstable

Eager to get off the gastro trail and try somewhere with a local, rather than DFL (down from London) following, I wanted to run the rule over Howard's Kitchen (mains £5.45-£8.75). However, it was shutting early, so, rather than "hearty, no-frills, home-cooked food", I had to settle for the affordable excellence of the delicatessen and bar, David Brown.

It's a tiny place, with the bar as close as you will come in the UK to the look and feel of a Spanish neighbourhood joint. There is a menu of small and sharing plates served into the evening (sandwiches, cured meats and cheeses, pork terrine, £2-£6), but the real bargain here is the lunch menu served from midday until 3pm. It's short: three nominal starters, one dessert, one hot main dish, but, drinking tap water, you could eat two courses for under £10. My plate of beautifully charred, perfectly pink feather steak –with a mess of soft, sharp lentils, seasoned with balsamic, basil, a little red pepper and onion – was fantastic. It wasn't the biggest plate of food I've ever eaten, but for £6.50 and rounded-off with a rather good pastel de nata (£1.25) from the deli next door, it felt like a treat.
• Lunch dishes £3-£6.50. 28a Harbour Street, Whitstable, 01227 274507

The Wallflower Cafe, Herne Bay

Hidden in an unpromising arcade on the High Street, the Wallflower is a laidback, faintly hippyish hang out. There is soothing folk music, you order at a brightly painted wooden counter, and, for 40p, you can add a shot of wheatgrass to your smoothie. Yum. The menu runs from sandwiches to specials, such as pan-fried rainbow trout, with around 50% of the options vegetarian. The falafel with pitta and hummus (the latter cleverly lifted with a little sun-dried tomato) comes as a huge plateful, which includes a mint-spiked tabbouleh and two generous and elaborate portions of salad. The falafel could have been more robustly seasoned and herbed, but they were ineffably light. All in all, the Wallflower is a cafe going that vital extra yard.
• Sandwiches £2.50-£3.50, meals £5-£8. 116 High Street, Herne Bay, 01227 740392, Facebook page

Great British Pizza Co, Margate

If Margate can be said to have a trendy, boho quarter, it's in and around the old town, the Market Place and the Parade, where you'll find vintage shops, art galleries, newer independent cafes and, just around the corner, on the front, this pizzeria – which is doing very good things indeed with Kent ingredients and a wood-fired oven. The restaurant itself is very now, in that it looks half-finished and features, as a centrepiece, a large, colourful portrait of a dog. Its menu is equally on point, with combinations such as parma ham and nectarine, and pear and cambozola blue cheese reflecting a new readiness among Britain's artisan pizzeria to innovate. I chose from the menu's more sedate core, but my sample ham and mushroom nonetheless sang with flavour. The base was surprisingly thin – ultra-slim, almost flatbread – but so fresh and easily digested that it banished any reservations. The tomato sauce, meanwhile, was supremely vibrant, one of most intense I have ever tasted. Flavourful ham and sweet pools of mozzarella (the toppings may look a bit sparse, but it's actually well-judged) sealed the deal. If you can stretch to it, you can round off your meal with tubs (£3.50) of ice-cream from, arguably, the country's best gelato maker, Gelupo of Soho, London.

Talking of wood-fired pizza, if you're in neighbouring Broadstairs, check-out Posillipo (£5.95-£11.95). The Canterbury branch was reviewed in a previous feature in this series, and its pizzas are a significant cut-above the high street norm.
• Pizzas £6-£9. 14a Marine Drive, Margate, 01843 297700, greatbritishpizzacompany.wordpress.com

The Lifeboat, Margate

This former wine bar is a pretty convincing recreation of a late-Victorian beer house (sawdust on the floor; four real ales gravity-dispensed from a rack of barrels), down to the refreshingly no-nonsense food menu. Weirdly, all the seafood was off on this visit, but elsewhere the Kentish-sourced menu includes savoury tarts, cheeses, sausages and a selection of puddings and pies. Served with a huge hillock of buttery mash and a dab of mustard and no veg, my pie meal (£5.50) was a very beige plate of food. But the soft shortcrust pastry yielded easily, and it was packed with chunks of moist, fibrous, falling-apart steak in a rich and well-rounded ale gravy. Washed down with a pint of Goachers' hoppy, refreshing Fine Light (£3), it hit the spot. The Lifeboat also has a sister venue in Broadstairs, the Chapel (44-46 Albion Street), which also offers good beer and simple, affordable food.
• Snacks £2.50-£3, meals £4.50-£8. 1 Market Street, Margate, 07837 024259, thelifeboat-margate.com

Fort's Cafe, Margate

Located on a shabby stretch of Margate seafront, this artsy, creative hang-out (The Cure playing at breakfast; vintage, mismatched Formica tables; a lone glitter ball for decoration) feels like a little slice of east London by the sea. If you're the sort of person who throws the word "hipster" around as an accusation, you're not going to like it. Which will leave the rest of us to appreciate a venue that – with top regional ingredients, sharp cooking, very keen prices – is a real find. From the breakfast menu, a large, doorstep of rarebit (£3.50, two for £4.50) was exemplary. The toasted sourdough had a real lactic twang, while the rarebit topping was a proper smooth, stout-loosened paste, with a powerfully spicy (extra mature) tang to it. Top that with an egg for a £1, and it's as good a breakfast as you'll eat. A flat white (£2) was a little thin, the milk hadn't been thoroughly textured, but at least it had been dosed correctly so that it actually tasted of coffee, not just hot milk. At lunch the menu expands to include burgers, smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, macaroni cheese and specials such as a warm scotch egg with an allotment salad or cider braised pigs' cheek on toast. Fort's is licensed and open into the evening on Friday and Saturday.
• Breakfast £2-£6.95, lunch £3.50-£7. 8 Cliff Terrace, Margate, 01843 449786, fortscafe.co.uk

Caffe Alma, Margate

The space that Caffe Alma occupies - part of the groundfloor of Westcoast live music venue - may look a bit tired in the cold light of day, but there is plenty of va-va-voom to chef-owner Shanda Fernandes's cooking. The focus is on Iberian and South American dishes, ranging from typical Brazilian nibbles (the coxinha– bread-crumbed, deep-fried "thighs" of shredded chicken – are beautiful, £1.60), to paella, piri-piri gambas, bacalhau pie and irregular specials, such as pork belly and bean stew, or mukeka, a rich, Brazilian seafood stew. I was there in the run up to the Margate Soul Weekend, when Caffe Alma was serving its specials at £5 a pop, which made my chicken salad an absolute bargain. It didn't necessarily look much, just grilled, shredded thigh and leg meat over leaves and tomato, but it tasted sensational. Clever marinating and dressing had given the juicy meat a wonderful salty, sharply fruity zing. Every mouthful was a double helix of flavour. I couldn't stop eating it. Which, when reviewing 12 or more places in 24 hours, is dangerous.
• Snacks, tapas and soups £1.50-£5.90, meals £7.90. 3-5 King Street, Margate, 01843 447522; caffealma.com

The Greedy Cow, Margate

This compact takeaway and cafe, which has outdoor seating on Market Place, is Margate's go-to kitchen for "dirty" burgers and salt beef sandwiches. My hefty mound of pulled pork on a locally baked bun was a creditable version, moist with plenty of gelatinous fat in the mix. The BBQ sauce was sweet and zippy but not overpowering, and the homemade coleslaw on the side – good onion flavour, but really lifted by a little shaved fennel – was fantastic. Had I been staying in Margate for a few days, I would have definitely been back for the borderline sexist, but hugely appetising gents' burger (topped with bacon, black pudding, salt beef), hopefully followed by a Greedy Cow special, such as its salted caramel brownie or baked custard cream cheesecake.
• Breakfast £2.50-£5.50, sandwiches, burgers, etc £4-£7.50. 3 Market Place, Margate, 01843 447557, Facebook page

Caboose, Ramsgate

Cafe, bar, late-night music and comedy venue, Caboose is a local cultural hub, which also serves locally-sourced food at competitive prices, from breakfast eggs benedict through to afternoon salads and sandwiches. The menu then changes on Wednesday to Saturday evenings into a rather more expensive Mexican mix of quesadillas, burritos and fajitas. A homemade burger looked a bit underwhelming – a small-ish beef patty on half a ciabatta roll – but worked surprisingly well, bulked out into a big plate of food with fries and coleslaw . Properly seared, so that it had developed a good caramelised crust, the patty had been well-seasoned, not least with onion and possibly garlic, to give it depth, yet – and this is rarer than you'd think – its beefy flavour still shone through. All told, for £5.95, it was good value. If visiting you would be wise to check-out Caboose's regular offers (Wednesday's £7 burger-and-pint deal, for example), although you may be tempted off-piste by its compact selection of local ales (Wantsum Dynamo, Gadds' No.3) and international craft beers (from £3.20).

Just around the corner from Caboose, you will find what is commonly regarded as Ramsgate's best restaurant, Age & Sons. Outside of Thursday's steak night (burger £6.50; rump cap £8.50), it is generally a shade too expensive for this series' £10-a-head price limit. However, it does serve a two-course vegetarian lunch for £9.95. This commemorates the founding of the Vegetarian Society in Ramsgate in 1847. Who knew?
• Breakfast £2.50-£6, lunch £2.75-£6, evening mains £6.50-£9.95. 18 Queen's Street, Ramsgate, 01843 570984, caboosecafe.co.uk

Travel between Manchester and London was provided by Virgin Trains (virgintrains.co.uk). Accommodation in Margate was provided by the Walpole Bay Hotel (walpolebayhotel.co.uk, doubles from £85 B&B), an Edwardian property with many period features and a whole floor-cum-"living museum" packed with antiques, artefacts and ephemera. For more information, go to visitkent.co.uk

I have never made over $15,000 annually. I have worked as a cook, cashier and every position but management for three years

Claudette Wilson is 20 and works two jobs in the fast food industry, one at Burger King and one at a pizza place. She is on her feet, sometimes for 12 hours a day, and makes $7.40 an hour. She agreed to share her experience for the Guardian's A Day's Work series because she wants people to understand why fast food workers have been striking for better wages.

Wilson participated in a protest in Detroit, Michigan last week. Due to her demanding work schedule, Claudette might not be able to answer all questions, but she will be available later today to try to get through as many Guardian reader comments and queries as she can.

1. What is your typical day like?

Everyday for me is different. I can tell you how a typical Saturday is like: first I wake up around 8am to go to work at Burger King from 10am to 6pm. After I get off of work from Burger King, I go to my second job at Jet's Pizza from 6pm to midnight. After I get done with working, sometimes I hang with friends, sometimes I just go to sleep.

2. There's been a lot of talk lately about people wanting work/life balance. Does your job provide that?

My work/life balance is pretty rough at times. There's not even much time for me, let alone anyone else. In a weird way though, having both jobs does provide balance to me and a change of scene, but I'm not sure about others.

3. What's the craziest/most unexpected thing that's ever happened to you while on the job?

The most unexpected thing that happened to me when I was at work is when I witnessed a robbery at the Burger King I work at. The guy tried to get away in a cab. One of the cashiers and my manager at the time ran outside after the cab and chased it down to get the cab driver's attention. The driver stopped and got out of the car while the cashier and the robber tussled in the backseat for awhile. In the end, the robber got out of the car and ran across the street and got away.

4. What makes for a really good day on the job?

A good day on the job to me is when I arrive on time, and everyone is in their position and ready to work. There aren't many bad attitudes and the customers aren't being rude. The best kind of day is when everyone is doing their job and the day goes by swiftly.

5. What's your annual salary? Do you get benefits?

I get paid $7.40 an hour. My annual salary varies depending upon how many hours I work, but I have not made over $15,000 ever annually. I do not receive benefits. I have worked as a cook, cashier and in just about every position short of management off and on for the last three years. I still live at home with my mother and try to go to school on the side. I do dream of something more, but it's really hard to get jobs right now.

I participated in the strike on 31 July 2013 for District 15 (Detroit, Michigan area). I did it because I desire to accomplish a few things: I want to be able to form a fast food workers union and earn a higher wage. Also I would like to see fast food workers taken more seriously and actually respected for the hard work that we do.

• This article was amended on 6 August 2013 to correct Claudette Wilson's age. She is 20.

After a day on the beach, what could be better than a hot mackerel sandwich or a crab wrap? Here are the best seafood takeaways round the country

When the weather is good, nothing quite beats fish-shack cuisine and the offerings around the coastline are better than ever.

The Crab Shack on the tiny island of Bryher, in the Scillies, has just opened for the summer – serving crabs, scallops and mussels from a converted shed with marquee extension, in the grounds of Hell Bay Hotel. New England-style decor completes the Hemingway fantasy and food is served in in Portuguese cataplanas, with hammers and aprons provided (clearly the messier the more authentic).

Keeping West, Observer restaurant critic, Jay Rayner recommends the Crab House Cafe, on Chesil Beach, Dorset as his favourite place to eat on holiday. "Not much to look at: a shack, a yard, a few wooden tables and a view of the sea. But the Portland crab and huge prawns in tarragon butter are what you come for".

Bob Granleese, food editor for the Guardian's Weekend Magazine urges anyone in the area to try Seafood House, Teignmouth which he describes as "bonkers but brilliant, like being served fabulous crab sarnies out of someone's front room. Actually, it's not like, it is being served acers crab sarnies out of someone's front room."

On the opposite side of the country, at Riley's Fish Shack, Adam Riley pedals (literally, as he transports fish from the local market on the back of a Heath Robinson-style bike) mackerel wraps, squid on a stick and chargrilled lobster from the beach in Tynemouth, near Newcastle. Born out of frustration that the local catch rarely ended in local mouths, Riley, who runs the shack with his wife, Lucy says there was a real shortage of healthy seafood. "We have lived here for the best part of a decade and the only seafood I'd seen came in a coating of batter."

Another of Rayner's favourites is the Company Shed in West Mersea, Essex "essentially a wet-fish shop, with a few tables, serving oysters, crab and prawns (but you bring your own bread, wine and condiments)." Keep heading round the East Anglian coast and you'll end up in Brancaster (north Norfolk), where critics rave about the Crab Hut.

Back on the South Coast, the Dungeness Fish Hut in Kent is a popular choice and in Sussex, there is the Brighton Smokehouse, alongside the city's seafront Fishing Museum, which previously won the best takeaway at Radio 4's Food and Farming Awards. Run by former trawler man, Jack Mills and his wife Linda, they pride themselves on their chemical-free oak and applewood smoking and cooking the fish within an hour of purchase from local fisherman. The result is sublime - though you need to watch hungry seagulls as you tuck into hot mackerel or crab sandwiches.

Crossing over to the Welsh coast, Cafe Môr was the overall winner of the British Street Food Awards 2011 with their hand-made, seafood-stuffed flatbreads, and they took home the best sandwich award this year for their crab wrap. Not a million miles away is the Cockle Rotunda in Swansea market - where Carol Watts (subject of Rolf Harris's painting The Cockle Woman) sells cockles and mussels from the Gower peninsula. Across the water in Ireland, Rick Stein favourites, Linnane's Lobster Bar, sits on the quay in Burren, Co Clare

Back in mainland UK, the Seafood Hut on Calmac Pier in Oban offers hot smoked salmon and mussels and also gets puntersqueueing for its oysters, crab sandwiches and razor clams.

The ambience isn't quite the same but, even in city centres, freshly-caught fish, cooked on site and served from makeshift premises serves as a reminder that the shore is never far away, says Robin Dunlop, whose Oyster Boys, a pop-up street food operation is about to embark on a month long run at the Edinburgh festival. "Obviously we're not right on the sea but there is still something about the preparations and cooking of fish which takes you there."

"You don't have to be by the sea to sample locally caught fresh produce," says Great British Menu Chef, Mark Greenway, whose own Edinburgh restaurant serves fish caught daily "but you can't beat the romance." Greenaway's favourite place to get messy with seafood is The Lobster Shack in North Berwick's tiny harbour. "Watch fish being landed and cooked as you sit overlooking the sea. On a beautiful day, you really can't beat that."

'I'm tickled by the idea that it's a large Frenchman who's delivering this fresh, almost feminine food'

I visit Grain Store the same week I road test what seems like several thousand burgers, winding up suffused with guilt, shame and grease. A short while earlier, a report told us what we already know: our global consumption of meat is "unsustainable". It wasn't all my fault, guv, honest.

So the menu at Grain Store reads to me like aloe vera feels to the sunburnt: balmy and refreshing. Chef Bruno Loubet, its co-owner (with moneymen Michael Benyan and Mark Sainsbury), insists it isn't vegetarian, more "veg-centric", but every dish stars leaves, pulses or grains, with any meat or fish element – if there is one – relegated almost to the status of garnish. Hey, limelight-hogging flesh, how do you like them apples?

Loubet is a stellar chef: he's had the Michelins and worked with the big hitters. His excellent Bistrot Bruno Loubet is a typically meat-focused modern French restaurant, all snails and meatballs and wild boar ragout. This is quite the departure.

It's huge, for a start, a sprawling space in the magnificent former wheat warehouse that also houses Central Saint Martins and the estimable Caravan. Hard to believe this is once-scuzzy old King's Cross. When we arrive, young, happy-looking people are chilling on the astroturfed steps to the canal; when we leave, Granary Square's dancing fountains are staining the night violet and turquoise. On a hot night, it feels like a different country.

As does the restaurant itself. One pal whispers, "Ikea", and although it probably cost several gazillion pounds, you can see where she's coming from: the white-painted wood, the blond animal skins hanging from the whitewashed brick walls, the quirky lampshades, the "sweetpea" neon in the ladies. It all looks very set-designed. Down one long wall is the kitchen. Not open, goodness no. It's "exploded": all the units are on castors, as if they might wheel over to your table at the drop of a napkin. Towering above his team, Loubet orchestrates with brooding grace. If only I weren't facing the far less enthralling dessert station, where a solitary chap dollops horseradish ice-cream on to strawberries of varying degrees of jamminess (a terrific dish, the sweetness of the lightly balsamic-vinegared fruit chilled and thrilled by the sting of the acerbic root).

Some dishes are successful assemblies: baked beetroots with creamy goat's milk labneh with a sharp, medicinal note from dill oil. (Loubet enjoys the brightness of goat's milk; it turns up again in a dessert of pannacotta with candied cherry tomatoes.) Or a harmonious salad of endive, peas, runner beans and roquefort, with the crunch of hazelnut or little flavour bomb of smoked pepper jelly here and there. Some are more complex: a daily special of gratin dauphinois topped with little almost-fritters of rabbit bathed in salsa verde. Or a tamale filled with a nutty mush of quinoa and sweetcorn, the charred corn-husk wrapper wreathing it in subtle smoke. There's a cube of wobbly, sticky pork belly on the side, and a little jug of gazpacho-ish salsa. Clever, and fun.

Some dishes are less successful: lobster "bloody mary" features mushy "heritage" tomatoes, chilly lobster and a none-too-limpid and underpowered tomato water poured from a cocktail shaker. It has "vodka essence", too. Eh? And the potatoes in the dauphinois have an unwelcome, raw crunch. But a wonderfully light, puffy cherry pancake, like an ebullient baby clafoutis, finishes on the sweetest of notes.

This is sunny food, California dreamin' dishes. Loubet relocated to Brisbane for several years after "burning out" in London, and Oz's relaxed attitude to culinary rules and celebration of the ingredient must also be an influence. I'm tickled by the idea that it's a large Frenchman who's delivering this fresh, almost feminine food. (There's a heavy emphasis on imaginative cocktails, too – truffle martini, tuberose Collins – from cocktail boffin Tony Conigliaro.) It all feels very forward-thinking, rather than rooted in the past. For Loubet, it's a big, brave move. And it's a big, brave restaurant.

• Grain Store, Granary Square, 1-3 Stable Street, London N1, 020-7324 4466. Open all week, lunch noon-2.30pm (11am-3pm Sat; 11am-4pm Sun); dinner 6-10.30pm Mon-Sat. Three courses about £35 to £40 a head, plus drinks and service.

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

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From limp chicken to vile banana ketchup, the Blue Boar Smokehouse takes the "dirty food" trend to a new low

45 Tothill Street, London SW1 (020 3301 1400). Meal for two, including wine and service: £120

Not far from the Blue Boar Smokehouse, which is a smokehouse much as I am a prima ballerina, is New Scotland Yard. And so it was that I spent much of lunch – less eating, more pushing platefuls to one side – wondering whether there were any statutes under which it would be possible to prosecute the place. Sadly, I concluded that shameless bandwagon jumping, grievous bodily harm to an entire culinary tradition and atrocious cooking are not yet criminal offences. Oh, that they were. This country would be so much the better for it. Make me prime minister. I'll sort it.

The Blue Boar Smokehouse is a grotesque marketing conceit, realised in acres of dark wood veneer, hefty linen and glassware. It occupies the back room of a corporate hotel for businessmen, dreaming only of an in-house movie and a handful of tissues, and feels like two hours of death by PowerPoint, presented by a lifestyle trends consultant who once went to Hoxton. You can imagine the pitch: "dirty food" is cool; people like pulling their pork, whatever that means; fried chicken isn't just for sink estates in Peckham; making this kind of crap is easy and cheap. Fill yer boots.

Or don't. Their ribs arrive dangling out of a mini bucket. Ah yes. I've seen things like this before; it's like experiencing a vicious flashback before you've taken the drugs. The sauce is at first as sharp and acidic as a cheap packet of salt and vinegar crisps and then as sweet as a six-year-old's confection stash. If the meat has spent any time in a smoker, I'm afraid it will take a more acute palate than mine to detect it. My mouth had been brutalised by the sauce. On issues of smoke it had nothing to say.

The least offensive of the main courses is the crab, baked in the shell under a Cajun mayonnaise gunk. It looks like a hefty sneeze into a shell, after a long swim in the sea to clear a cold. To be fair, the first forkful is just about OK. After that it goes from cloying to "please stop" in easy steps. The accompanying chips would have proved a moment of nostalgia for anybody who has ever worked in a fast food joint emptying the freezer bag into the deep fat fryer.

From the list of pulled meats we order the suckling kid: a heap of something tired and drained, violated and one-note sweet arrives on a wooden board next to glazed onion rolls made from a dough so overworked that tearing them open offers the chance to burn all the calories involved in eating them. The dish is completed by a motorway service station coleslaw.

Worse than this is the "southern fried chicken", which must never be granted freedom from within those quotation marks: a tube of breast and a reformed leg, clumsily coated in bright orange crumbs the colour of the cast of TOWIE, fried off so limply that those on the bottom come off on the plate. Underneath lies a banana ketchup which has the honour of being the worst thing I have put in my mouth since the incident with the washing-up liquid when I was seven. It tastes like those sweetshop bananas, blitzed with the remains of someone's forgotten 1970s spice cabinet. It looks like something you would treat with antibiotics.

The dessert menu includes an Eton Tidy for £7, which is not merely a violation of ingredients but also of the English language: splodges of strawberry purée, hard, dusty meringue, flaps of crumbly gel, artfully draped. It's the sort of thing that would get a Professional Masterchef contestant sent home in the quarter finals.

As to wines, a waiter had to be called back to deliver a full measure of the glass I had ordered. Shortly, I expect to receive a press release announcing the relaunch of the restaurant at the Intercontinental Hotel, Westminster. I'll regard that as a very good day for London.

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

Glasgow is now Britain's best city for vegans, according to Peta. Jane Hughes picks the city's top vegan hangouts, plus other great meat- and dairy-free restaurants around Britain

The campaigning activities of Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) are designed to shock, with bucketloads of fake blood, semi-nudity and sexy vegetables. But have they gone too far this time? Quite a few cages were rattled when Peta announced last week that the best city for vegans in the UK is … Glasgow. Has Brighton really lost its crown?

Glasgow certainly has more vegan eateries than most cities, and its city-centre cafe bars give Brighton a run for its money. In the Merchant City area, Mono is an enormous airy performance space. The menu is light and modern, with vegan takes on popular international dishes – bean burritos, nasi goreng, Vietnamese salad and porcini risotto. Mono's sister, Stereo, a popular bar in the Mackintosh-designed building that was once home to the Daily Record, is always packed and also offers live music along with an all-vegan tapas-style menu.

The 78 cafe bar in the West End has a cosier vibe, with a coal fire, comfy sofas and a proper old HMV 78rpm record player. For a slightly less bohemian experience, head to Saramago café bar at the Centre for Contemporary Arts for freshly baked organic bread and some vegan haggis fritters.

Glasgow, with its history of radical politics, innovative live music and bar-based socialising, is a good fit with veganism. More generally, towns with large student populations and influential communities of academics are good places to look for vegan and vegetarian food. Old trading ports, too, have a history of diversity. Scouseveg, Liverpool's campaigning veggie social group, meets at The Egg Café on the roomy top floor of a Victorian warehouse. The menu is not particularly adventurous (quiches, soup and garlic bread), but the boho vibe is alive and kicking.

Bristol is home to the campaigning group Viva! and was the first venue for VegFest, originally an annual festival of veggie food and music. The city's Beatroot Café is a not-for-profit "community space" where all kinds of ethical campaign groups choose to meet over laptops and Fairtrade coffee. In Bath, an elegant vegetarian dining experience can be had at Demuths. Built around local produce, the menu might include truffled broccoli and cauliflower pannacotta.

Manchester's self-consciously "alternative" Northern Quarter is a good place to find a comforting plate of veggie sausage and mash, but for an exclusively vegan lunch, locals head to V-Revolution, a vegan shop/vinyl seller/zine outlet where you can grab a burger or a hefty wedge of cake. Manchester is proud of its vegetarian credentials. The Vegetarian Society started there in 1847, and the city now has two classy vegetarian bistros named 1847 in recognition of that fact. For a cheap and cheerful cafe lunch, head towards the university to find The Eighth Day, which has been serving up cheesy pasta bakes and salad since 1970, or try Earth, a busy vegan cafe beneath the Buddhist Centre, for wholesome, spicy stews.

Any city with a wide selection of ethnic eateries is likely to be a good bet for meat-free pickings – although Indian food is often laced with yoghurt and ghee, so vegans may favour the flavours of east Asia.

Manchester has the "Curry Mile" in Rusholme, with around 70 Asian restaurants. In London, Drummond Street is a safe bet. It is home to Chutneys, the Diwana Bhel Poori House and the Ravi Shankar, all longstanding vegetarian favourites.

Inevitably, London has more vegetarian and vegan establishments than anywhere else in the UK, with around 130 completely vegetarian restaurants. Relatively new developments include the Coach and Horses on Greek Street, Soho, which now serves exclusively vegetarian pub grub, and a new alcohol-free raw food experience called Redemption.

Brighton has been the most veggie-friendly town in Britain for decades, offering quirky little cafes such as Iydea and Wai Kika Moo Kau; civilised family-friendly dining at Food for Friends; funky vegan burgers at Heather Mills's VBites; and the town's most exciting restaurant, Terre a Terre, described by the food critic AA Gill as "probably the best vegetarian restaurant in Britain … singularly and eccentrically marvellous."

Other vegetarian destination restaurants include David Bann in Edinburgh (smoked tofu fritters with fresh banana chutney), and Denis Cotter's Café Paradiso in Cork– it is well worth a special trip to experience what he can do with local cheeses and Gortnanain honey.

Veganism and fine dining have yet to see eye to eye. A tiny minority of top-class chefs are grasping the nettle (and pureeing it), but most modern vegan food doesn't have fancy aspirations. It is more likely to be a burger or a hot dog, something you can grab on the go, not something that requires napkins and sitting up straight. Many tiny vegan eateries survive only through happy partnerships with other enterprises such as bars, performance spaces, art galleries and tattoo parlours.

And it's not all sweetness and light between vegans and vegetarians either – many vegetarian chefs don't exactly go out of their way to attract vegan customers. One (now defunct) restaurant in Cheshire told me that if vegans came to the door, they were advised to go elsewhere. Apparently, they were "bound to cause trouble". Another top vegetarian restaurateur says he doesn't like cooking for vegans: "They're people who don't like food. 'Can you make it without the cream?' I can, but I'm not going to!"

But the reputation vegans have for not enjoying food is all wrong. The best vegetarian food is about celebrating nature and trying to convince a sceptical world that a fresh, colourful platter of local fruit and veg is an ideal to which we should all aspire. For the most part, the world of veganism punctures that pomposity. These days it's largely about pop-ups, guerrilla caterers and street food entrepreneurs using the web to summon followers. It's OK if it comes out of a can, or even (for vegan freegans) out of a skip. It's OK to decorate a cake with Jammie Dodgers. Lighten up and dig in!

Australians are eating out more but spending less. I blame jus

What's the difference between tea and dinner? About $150.

What kind of diner are you? A la carte or a blackboard on the side of a van? Valet parking or drive through? Silver service or self serve? Degustation or one with the lot and maximum chips with sauce thanks?

Chances are you're the latter. It appears Australians are noshing up more than ever, but we're also becoming tight-arses when it comes to coughing up in restaurants. According to recent figures, while we're eating out more, spend per head has dropped from $61 to $54. We could dissect that further – but stuff that, let me tell you an anecdote.

An old boyfriend and I used to treat each other to the fanciest restaurant in town for our birthdays. We'd scan the papers and be ear to the ground in order to get the heads up and the jump on the pack. We'd book a table months early at the next big culinary triumph so we had plenty of time to marinate in our smugness.

"What are you doing for your birthday?" "Dinner at the Frozen Walrus Scrotum." "Whoah! I heard it's impossible to get a booking." "It is, that's why we're going." I remember one place we went had the word Workshop in the name.

We went to some posh place called Est Est Est. It was one of those moments when you look at the menu and ask for the one in English and then they tell you the one you're holding is in English. A foam of this, a confit of that on jus served in a deconstructed stack of a dialogue of vegetables, followed by a tepid veloute palate spritz….

I was knackered that night and really had to drag myself out. I yawned the whole way through the procession of tossery. "The mussels are Tasmanian, the spatchcock corn-fed, the truffle smear with the lemon air is served on a bed of handpicked baby mesclun infused with dandelion that's been wafted by a mini trio…."

I did yoga moves in the bathroom to wake myself up. Which was unnecessary: if I wanted to feel a bolt of lightning through me I could have just picked up the bill.

The bill was $300 (this was 1997) and as we wandered back to the car in the crisp autumn air, he said, apropos nothing, "restaurant is from the word restore". I didn't feel restored. I felt ripped off – and I hadn't even paid. And I was starving.

So when it comes to Australians eating out more and paying less, I blame jus. It's sauce, juice or gravy. What's with this jus bullshit, apart from justifying exorbitant prices?

Jus and its ilk started to creep in 20 years ago and sure, we went on the ride for a while but now it seems we're over it. Give us one meat, two veg, some special fried rice and a decent pie and don't you dare call it "gourmet".

Our collective consciousness has suddenly reminded us that eating is what we do so we don't die. And something that gives us pleasure. Not some Olympics of pretension. (Or should that be Jeux Olympiques de Prétention?)

We're onto you lot now. A tasting plate is just code for "stuff we are about to throw out". Smashed avocado, crushed potato, and bruised garlic. Why don't you just admit the green grocer dropped the box on the way in?

Oven baked, pan fried, garden fresh, hand picked? As opposed to what? Guitar baked, filing cabinet fried, pants fresh and arse picked? Twice cooked? Doesn't that just mean reheated in the microwave? So it's a deconstructed apple crumble. Looks like you just couldn't be stuffed putting it together and are veiling apathy with "an intimate interaction with the produce".

We know rustic just means put in an old pot on a chopping board. And what's with the chopping boards? WE GET IT. They arrived just after the giant pepper grinders left.

We're not playing any more and you've only got yourself to blame. Stuff kale. Stuff aioli. Stuff coulis. And particularly, stuff activated almonds.

We're not coming to your restaurant and paying reassuringly expensive prices to convince ourselves we've had a good time. We want stew in the bistro for tea. And a beer. For $20. And make it snappy.

From student years in Pizza Express to romance at the Quality Chop House, milestones can be measured in passing food trends, says Rachel Cooke

• Read more of the best food writing in Observer Food Monthly, this Sunday

A press release informs me that Browns is 40 years old. Forty? It gave me quite a jolt. It's horrible now – last time I had the misfortune to visit one of its 27 branches, the chicken was rubbery and the chips were cold – but when I was a student in Oxford it was quite the thing. Good-looking waiters in white aprons, generous jugs of Pimm's, crisp side salads in wooden bowls with a choice of dressing including – the wondrousness – blue cheese. In 1988, these delights we had not much seen before.

Nostalgia washed over me, warm and plangent. Being able to measure out my life in restaurants (as opposed to coffee spoons) makes me feel old. Oh, the trends that were there: the fads, the failures and, before that, the paucity. It's almost touching to think of it, the way we used to eat, though there's not a person alive who'd go back. And so, in the manner of one of those really annoying high-concept novels – only shorter – I thought I'd get this strange timeline down for your delectation. My life in restaurants. Do you remember? I bet you do.

1 The first restaurant I went to was not really a restaurant at all, but a Dining Room. It was in the Wasdale Head Hotel, Wastwater, to which my father used to take me as a girl. I had to put on my best lilac kilt for dinner. The starter was always the same: a tiny glass of fruit juice or – push the boat out! – celery soup. The main course was meat, roasted. Pudding was fruit salad or trifle, though either way, what you mostly ended up with was a lot of tinned mandarin oranges.

2 When I was eight, I was allowed, for my birthday, to take some friends to the Berni Inn at the Norton roundabout in Sheffield. Every Berni Inns dish came with three button mushrooms, and every adult always had an Irish coffee at the end of their meal. I couldn't understand their delight in this delicacy, which seems, looking back, to have been almost sexual. But now I'm 44, I really get it: the pleasure of all that boozy warm froth on one's upper lip. Nice.

3 Abroad. I went to the Loire first, in my newly married mother's Datsun. This was the first time I tasted proper cheese, butter, yoghurt and fizzy water. Later, we went to Gascony, where I ate at what I then considered to be the world's best restaurant: La Rapière, in Mauvezin. Confit de canard and prune and Armagnac ice cream. Nothing like that at home.

4 University. See above. Plus, Pizza Express. Hard to believe now, but in 1988, I thought doughballs as exotic as David Sylvian (which is to say: very exotic indeed).

5 To London. I arrived in 1991. It was the era of 192, the insufferable Notting Hill media watering hole, and of Terence Conran; Quaglino's, which we might call his restaurant zenith, opened in 1991. I went to the former once and what I remember is many, many puy lentils. I did go to Quaglino's, too. But, embarrassingly, not until 1998.

6 To Glasgow. I lived close to the Ubiquitous Chip. Langoustine and haggis: what was not to like? Scotland seemed to be ahead of London in several foodie ways, and I longed to visit the Altnaharrie Inn, which had Michelin stars, a stern, no-choice menu featuring foraged foods – the prescience! – and could only be accessed by boat. Sadly, the closest I got was Ullapool, where I reported on a drugs cheat at the Highland Games and ate nothing but a Cornetto all day.

7 Back to London. All was now very earthy: St John, Moro; chops and chickpeas. But I was working such long hours that I spent most of my time first in a Wapping sandwich bar – its owner cleaved to sun-dried tomatoes like a soap star to a bubble perm – and then in a branch of Cranks in Canary Wharf. Sort of like The Good Life, but minus the anaesthetising nettle wine.

8 2013. Just now, my favourite restaurant is the Quality Chop House in Clerkenwell. I'm spoony about it because I was wooed there by T, but the food is the tops, too – grown-up and delicious. Not a bad marker for the mid-point of my restaurant eating life. And I'm clearly not having a midlife crisis, else I'd be somewhere more modish: queuing on a sticky pavement outside Meat Liquor, probably, while worrying quietly about my trainers.

A San Diego restaurateur has abolished customer gratuities at his restaurant, in favour of a flat-rate 18% service charge, so that waiting staff can focus on their jobs, rather than soliciting tips. Is it a good idea?

From Monday to Sunday, Nashville has the best venues for listening to country music, and now has a blossoming restaurant scene that's threatening to rival the pull of its songwriters

Late afternoon is the perfect time to arrive in Nashville, giving just enough time to settle into your hotel, grab a drink, and head out to hear live music. And Nashville's all about live music.

If it's a Monday, try 3rd and Lindsley (818 3rd Avenue South). The doors open at 5.30pm, the music starts at 9pm, and if the Time Jumpers are playing, as they do most Mondays, you're in for a world-class treat: western swing played by virtuoso pickers with country legends sitting in. Don't be put off by the strip-mall setting.

If it's a Tuesday, make for The Basement (1604 8th Avenue South) and catch the free New Faces show. The entrance is on a hard-to-find, dicey-looking alley. Find it. And if there's a concert at Grimey's, the vintage record store upstairs, do not miss it. Grimey's shows are life-changing events, for artists and audience alike.

On Wednesday or Thursday, get to the Bluebird Cafe (4104 Hillsboro Pike). It's become very popular since the TV show Nashville, and not what it was when owner Amy Kurland personally shushed anyone who dared speak while songwriters performed, but a lot of great songwriters grew up in the Bluebird and come back to it as if it were home.

If it's Friday or Saturday, head to the honky tonks on Lower Broad. My favourite is Robert's Western World (416 Broadway), where you can dance for free, buy cowboy boots, and listen to a stone country classic served up righteous.

When you tumble out of Robert's, go to Pub5 (104 5th Avenue South) for a nightcap, late dinner, or snack. Don't stop at the ground-floor dining room. This is all about the view. Climb three flights to the roof of one of Nashville's oldest buildings to take it in.

Next day, to put the music you've heard into context, head to the Country Music Hall of Fame (222 5th Avenue South); Studio B (1611 Roy Acuff Place) – where Elvis recorded; and Hatch Show Print (316 Broadway), an amazing letterpress shop that has reprinted posters for blues, country and rock icons (excellent souvenirs). Or go to the Ryman Auditorium (116 5th Avenue North), former home of the Grand Ole Opry, for a tour.

Have lunch at Burger Up (2901 12th Avenue South), where your server is likely to be a rising star, then stroll up the same street to Corner Music. This is a true pro-musician's neighbourhood music store, but they're nice to every customer, not just Bob Dylan. Once you've bought your harmonica, guitar strings or pick, walk up the road again to Imogene and Willie (2601 12th Avenue South) and try on artisan blue jeans. Or just find out they, and Nashville's burgeoning fashion design scene, do really exist.

But first you've got to settle into that hotel. If you want a hip vibe and cool star sightings, try the Huttonon West End (1808 West End Avenue. Doubles from $191) in a repurposed office building. If you want history and old-school luxury, and want to be able to walk to the honky tonks, stay at the Hermitage Hotel (231 Sixth Avenue North. Doubles from $279) and ask for a room with a view of the state capitol. Train buffs will enjoy the Union Station Hotel (+1 615 726 1001, doubles from $259).

Food is beginning to challenge music as the magnet that draws visitors to Nashville, so don't leave town without trying Prince's Hot Chicken Shack (123 Ewing Drive) – even if you like spicy food, order the mild – or one of the chef-owned establishments that mix southern staples into something contemporary. Tandy Wilson's City House (1222 4th Avenue North) is my favourite. This is austere southern food at its best. I love the Carolina trout, with peanuts, raisins, lemon and parsley ($22). Others adore his house-cured pork and the chicken roasted in an open fire while you wait. His side dishes are a revelation: I'd lived half a century in the south before I was served a corn salad with raw perfectly herbed corn.

For great food crafted by local artisans, go to Rolf and Daughters (700 Taylor Street). The sourdough, radish and seaweed butter starter ($5, perfect for sharing), accompanied by the mescal and tequila cocktail, followed by a bowl of chef-owner Phillip Krajec's gargenelli verdi with heritage pork ragout ($15) is a perfect quick-ish meal before a night out. On Sunday morning, join locals at Margot's (1017 Woodland Street) for a funky-elegant brunch. Her menus are short, perfect, and ever-changing, but if you see a savory crepe, get it. Margot's the queen of keeping the renovated classic relevant.

Don't leave town without going to the Fisk University and its Jubilee Hall. This 19th-century building houses a portrait commissioned by Queen Victoria of the original Jubilee Singers, an a cappella group of newly freed slaves who sang to raise funds for their university. It's because of them that Nashville earned the name Music City.

Alice Randall is an award-winning songwriter who married into a family who have been in Nashville for nine generations. She teaches at Vanderbilt University and is also the Jamie Oliver food ambassador for Nashville

• For more information on holidays in the USA, visit DiscoverUSA.com

'This is a weird old crustacean altogether, but it almost works'

Mayfair genuinely now is a foreign country. A country populated by gals trussed up in truncated bandage dresses like so many glossy sausages. And by men whose expressions, despite their decks of mobile phones and jewelled watches the size of satellite dishes, register only "broodingly miserable" and "deeply cross". The Russians, Indians and south-east Asians who pop by to pick up Mayfair's multimillion-pound properties rarely live in them full-time, creating a kind of glittering ghost town, all underground pools, panic rooms and occasional staff. A Smith Group report says that Londoners can't afford to live here. Like, duh: most Londoners can't even afford to visit for their tea.

But here's Rock Lobsta, the new restaurant in the nightclub Mahiki. Oh, come on, don't tell me you haven't heard of it, seen the pics of baby royals and Made-In-Chelseas staggering out into Dover Street, spangled every which way. (And if you haven't, you clearly adhere to far loftier reading material than I do.) This knowingly trashy gaff scoffs at the Mayfair template, the muslined-lemon establishments where million-pound deals take place and moguls indulge in "playful tiffs" with their wives. It teeters towards affordable, and anyone with the foresight to book is in, even me in my non-skyscraper heels and stoutly un-bandagey frock.

It's billed as "East End punk lobster bar meets West End Polynesian Paradise", a line bound to bring one out in hives. Certainly, the wealthy punters seem perplexed by the scallop-shell lampshades and frenzy of South Pacific toot, bemusedly slurping cocktails from tiki beakers and nibbling on lobster "corn dogs", a torpedo-shaped item as bouncy and unfathomable as Geri Halliwell.

It's the work of "itinerant chef" Carl Clarke, responsible for a number of food-based happenings in the capital: Disco Bistro, the English Launderette, a clambake called God Save The Clam (subhead Never Mind The Scallops). This, with its punk and ska soundtrack, is intended to be his first permanent restaurant. I'm not overburdened with high hopes.

But in among the short menu of corn dogs and the inevitable burger (with pineapple and bacon jam, obviously) are some lovely, cheffier things: wild seabass with passion fruit and pickled ginger; salad from Keveral Farm. The quality is a little startling: Clarke is obsessive about sourcing, utilising a network of indie suppliers. The aged Dexter ribeye I order is so ripe in flavour and buttery in texture, it's hard not to eat it open-mouthed. It doesn't need its vulgarian peppery, creamy "house sauce", but there's that swanky-junk thing going on here that precludes simplicity and clean flavours.

We have "beer cheese": several cheeses mashed up with truffle oil, crumbed and fried in beef dripping. No idea if that's right, but that's what it tastes like. A line of gooseberry ketchup is piped on top. Satan's bar snacks. There are scallops with apple and, yes, the dreaded charcoal oil, but used as a fleeting base note, not a truncheon. The hero dish, with its steamed brioche bun and mayo-bathed, tender crustacean, is as good a lobster roll as you'll get outside Maine. And the staff, in their tropical halter dresses or mini carhop outfits, are posh and pretty and friendly.

This is a weird old crustacean altogether, but it almost works. I teeter off into the night with a Mahiki stamp on the back of my hand like a battle scar, wondering who Rock Lobsta is aimed at. Not Clarke's usual hipster constituency, surely, unless reverse slumming. Perhaps the young Asian guys in the club downstairs who order a £150 Treasure Chest cocktail for eight – delivered with a fanfare of indoor fireworks – but don't drink it because… well, they don't drink? Perhaps not. The brooding blokes and bandaged gals are more at home in the likes of Nobu and Novikov. This is shonky fun with food that defies its rattan bar environment, but feels more Dalston than Dover Street. Chalk it down to an anthropological experience.

• Rock Lobsta at Mahiki 1 Dover Street, London W1S 4LD, 020-7493 9529. Open dinner only, Mon-Sat, 5-10pm (11pm Fri and Sat). About £35 a head for three courses, plus drinks and service.

Food 6/10
Atmosphere 6/10 (if you have a taste for Tiki)
Value for money 7/10

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Opening a restaurant is hard enough without complications. But when you are in a couple, and one of you nearly dies … Angela Hartnett and Neil Borthwick talk about love, life, good food and broken bones

Angela Hartnett and Neil Borthwick first met in the kitchens at the Connaught hotel in London in 2002 where she was head chef and he was there as a willing junior. He was only meant to be there for a couple of weeks. In the end, he stayed for the best part of four years.

"She fancied me," Borthwick says by way of explanation.

Hartnett rolls her eyes. "I'm saying nothing," she replies. "I was professional to the end."

Hartnett, 44, went on to open the Michelin-starred Murano in Mayfair and start a mini-empire in the mould of her one-time mentor, Gordon Ramsay. More recently, she launched the restaurant at the Lime Wood hotel in Hampshire, and is planning a new restaurant on the site of the old Petrus in St James Street, but on 1 October will open the Merchant's Tavern in a former Victorian warehouse in Shoreditch. The head chef? None other than her 32-year-old boyfriend.

"Essentially, it's Neil's restaurant," Hartnett explains when we meet in Murano. The interior is exquisitely decorated in shades of muted grey and green. Today, they are seated on the sort of padded leather banquette one imagines was made from the skin of ostriches bathed in champagne. Both are wearing chef's whites – but only Hartnett's are embroidered with her name in blue cursive.

"It's the same as what Gordon did with me and Jason [Atherton] and Marcus [Wareing]," she continues. "They will write the menus and I will influence them because my name's attached to it … but it's Neil's name above the door."

Borthwick has his own impressive pedigree. He was born and raised in Falkirk and started working in the bar of a local hotel at the age of 14. He went to catering college in Glasgow, got his first job in Gordon Ramsay's Amaryllis and, after his stint at the Connaught, took off to France for three years to work for Michel Bras in Laguiole where he was taught the precise, inventive cuisine that has made Restaurant Bras into one of the top gastronomic destinations in the world.

Borthwick worked his way up to sous chef. He says he loved the work-life balance in France and became fluent in the language: Hartnett used to visit him as a friend for long weekends to sample the local restaurants, taking advantage of his French to order the best things off the menu.

Bras wanted him to move to Japan to be head chef at his restaurant there but Borthwick felt "it would just be doing his food again and I thought it would be a long way away." By this stage, he and Hartnett were a couple. He returned to the UK and got a job at the Square, under Philip Howard, just down the road from Murano. Soon, the two of them were living together in Hartnett's house in Spitalfields.

Despite the hours and brutal pace of life as a top chef, they make an affectionate couple who seem to like nothing more than teasing each other. When I ask Borthwick to say something romantic, he looks mildly taken aback.

"Angela makes a lovely bowl of pasta," he says. "Is that romantic?"

Their interests are complementary – she's an Arsenal fan, he supports Spurs – and they have the same taste in food.

The modern European menu at the Merchant's Tavern will reflect this unfussy approach. "As much as I've worked in three-Michelin starred places where things have to be exact, I'm not going to shout about something if it doesn't look perfect," says Borthwick, "because it doesn't taste any better."

But what if he does something wrong? Isn't it going to be hard for Hartnett to tell off her boyfriend?

"The chances of that are minimal," jokes Borthwick. "Very minimal, obviously," Hartnett says drily. "You have to have ways of doing things ... [but] I'd pull Neil aside and say, 'By the way, this isn't quite right.'"

She cracks her fingers menacingly. Borthwick doesn't seem remotely perturbed. "It's like Alan Sugar on The Apprentice," he says. "The entrepreneurs would be mad not to take the constructive advice."

They both laugh.

The most extraordinary thing about their story is that it almost had a very different ending. One night last November, Hartnett was woken by two policemen knocking on her door at 1.30am. They told her Borthwick had been in a cycling accident and was now at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. The police had his phone and her number was the last one called.

The police were able to tell Hartnett that her boyfriend was alive but, other than that, they had no further details. In the grip of shock, she remembers making small talk about the policemen's shoes, "because you do, don't you?"

When Hartnett got to the hospital, she found Borthwick in an induced coma and a team of neurosurgeons trying to ascertain what damage had been done to his brain. "They couldn't answer any questions," she says now. Those first few days of uncertainty were, she admits, "horrible".

"The first feeling is shock," she says. "I've never experienced anything like this. My father died when I was young [Hartnett was eight], my grandmother died but I've never had someone physically ill like that in front of you."

"My brother said: 'You're very calm,' and I said: 'This is the easy bit. The hard bit will be when he comes out and can't move his legs or taste anything.'"

Borthwick can't remember the specifics of what happened. He recalls the day leading up to it – he had been out for a lunch with friends, then went home to pick up his bike to meet another mate in the evening. He was only going a short distance and for some reason he didn't wear his helmet or his cycling kit. It was on City Road, a few minutes from their house, that the accident happened. Witnesses said they saw the bike "wobble". Borthwick thinks his feet might have slipped on the pedals. He fell awkwardly.

Borthwick suffered what the doctors described as "a severe knock to the head" which doesn't quite seem to do justice to the seriousness of the injury. Hartnett talks about it like an internal bruise: "When you bruise yourself, the bruise expands. But if it's in your head, the bruise has nowhere to go."

At one point, a female surgeon described Borthwick's brain to her as "like a crème brûlée". It was only later that her colleagues pointed out she'd been talking to a Michelin-starred chef.

"People slag off the NHS but you can't imagine how faultless they were," Hartnett says. "If a restaurant could run like a high impact unit it would be staggering. Neil had 24-hour care."

Borthwick was kept in a coma for five days, "basically," he explains, "on the same drugs that Michael Jackson had paid his doctor to give him."

He had weird dreams, involving a bet he'd failed to place on the outcome of the Ryder Cup, but even when he was unconscious, he retained his fine-dining palate. Borthwick kept trying to remove his intravenous drip so the nurses ended up covering his hands in what looked like a giant pair of oven gloves.

During that time, Hartnett set up a blog to keep friends and family updated on his progress. It was easier, she says, than answering the hundreds of texts individually and it meant that Borthwick's friends could post things, too – among them Michel Bras.

When Borthwick finally came round, doctors were astonished at his rapid recovery. From the neck down, he had sustained no other injuries. He immediately recognised people. Within 15 days, he was speaking fluent French and craving grilled cauliflower and turbot. The hospital food was supplemented by deliveries from London's finest restaurants: a chef friend sent him a plate of roast goose; his boss Phil Howard came with a plate of broccoli and vegetables.

"Neil was lucky," says Hartnett. "He was young and fit and had no other injuries, which was incredible."

Also, because he landed on the left side of his head, he found he could still perform tasks with his right hand without too much bother. He was home by Christmas.

But it wasn't all plain sailing. Borthwick had an operation to drill a hole in his skull in order to release the pressure. Six weeks ago, he had a second procedure: major cranioplastic surgery to put a plate in his skull. The plate was constructed of methacrylic resin moulded to the shape of his head and was fitted with titanium screws.

"It was made in Italy," Borthwick says with pride. "It's actually quite a nice shape. I'm going to make the spare one into a bowl for Twiglets in Charlotte Road." He's joking. I think.

In the aftermath of the accident, he was relieved to find that his palate wasn't affected but the motor skills in his left hand were still weak. For a while, Borthwick was worried he wouldn't be able to cook with his customary precision and delicacy. When he returned to work at the Square in the new year, he was "nervous" and found himself "in tears in Phil Howard's office about it… He's been a great friend."

In retrospect, Borthwick admits that he went back to work too early because he so desperately wanted things to be normal again. He started to suffer seizures and was forced to rest. "You slowly have to build up your stamina," he says. "That will come in time."

To look at Borthwick, you would struggle to know what he has been through. But he still hasn't been able to face getting back on his bicycle. Understandably, then, the prospect of opening a restaurant in under a month is enough to make him feel anxious.

And yet, when he makes me lunch, it's clear that he has lost none of his touch. The plates of food that come to the table are unfussy and delicious – tangy artichokes with a zesty pesto; glistening cod; the best lamb I've ever tasted and a honey tart with roasted apricots that takes me straight back to childhood (in a good way). When I tell him how much I enjoyed the food, Borthwick seems genuinely pleased. "My confidence is coming back but it's not quite where it was," he admits.

The Merchant's Tavern deserves to be a raging success, not just for its food but for the extraordinary achievement it represents in terms of Borthwick's recovery. He's come a long way – and he's got the Twiglets served in a skull-shaped bowl to prove it.

Hutong's position in the Shard matches its elevated prices, but the experience is more than just wallet-lightening

The Shard, 31 St Thomas Street, London SE1 (020 7478 0540). Meal for two, including wine and service £200

It was while I was having a wee at Hutong that I finally understood the point of it all. The restaurant occupies the 33rd floor of the Shard, by London Bridge, which I'm meant to hate but don't. I love cities. I love their audacity and shamelessness. I love the way the Shard stands as an enormous raised middle digit to the rest of town. It's a pulsing lump of architectural Viagra. The only problem with eating inside the Shard is you can't see the Shard.

Which brings me back to the business of weeing there. The floor-to-ceiling windows continue into the loos. As nobody can see you up here they've put the urinals up against the glass. It truly is a loo with a view. I don't think I've ever urinated to a better vista. They have enhanced even the most basic element of eating there.

And that is the point of it. Hutong is the London outpost of a revered restaurant of the same name in Hong Kong. It is a high-end take on the fiery food of northern China, with a few other less-ballsy dishes because rich people like them. The space is all intricate lattice work and carved doors dropped inside the hard box of the building. It's less restaurant than production design: part stage set for the next Bond, part Cadbury's Flake advert.

The prices are unconscionable. They are ludicrous, a poke in the eye from a chopstick dipped in salty Korean chilli sauce. The restaurant is only affordable if you wear knickers lined in baby panda fur on a daily basis, rather than just for pulling. A whole Peking duck for £58? Why, of course. £10 for dry-fried green beans with minced pork, and £11 for fried rice with the hit of salted fish? It's all yours.

I can suggest other places where you could get versions of these dishes at less than half the price. Ba Shan in Soho or Red Chilli in Manchester for the serious-chilli stuff from Hunan and Sichuan provinces; Four Seasons on Gerrard Street in Soho if you hanker after roast duck, yours for £20 in the kind of sweet-savoury sauce you would want to lick off a friend. Even the dry-fried green beans/minced pork combo is now on the menu at the most banal Cantonese places.

All that is to miss the point of Hutong. First, apart from the "comfortably numb" cocktail, full of Sichuan peppercorns – it looked like norovirus in a glass and tasted like it was made by someone who hates me – the food is generally very good. Ignore the prices, the fact you can see the locations of 50 food banks from up here, and there's lots to enjoy. There are thin slices of crisp cucumber interleaved with cold pork belly, to be dipped in a deep, toasty, fermented bean sauce with a hit of minced ginger and garlic; translucent discs of raw scallop with the invigorating bash of bitter citrus; de-boned marinated, braised and deep-fried lamb ribs, with fragile skin like baked nori seaweed; fat prawns with a seriously ill-mannered whack of chilli and peppercorns.

And then there is the duck, which comes complete with the theatre of table-side carving, shards of caramel-crisp skin fluttering on to the plate inside the Shard. Pancakes are gossamer thin. I complained when they tried to remove the carcass without giving me the parson's nose. The waiter laughed and said, "That's what my mother would do." And that's the other point. Service here is lovely: engaged and relaxed where in other Chinese places it rarely reaches beyond the functional.But the view is not a mere add on to this. As with my pee break it provides meaning. It is integral to being here. Put this food at ground level and, at these prices, a baying mob would quickly gather. But up here with the crystal gash of London spread out beneath you, instant memories are made; a Tuscan sun dunks itself in the river and for a moment, even as your wallet lightens, all is right with the world.

Marseille's modern food scene is one of the most exciting in France, with restaurants and bistros serving a diverse range of cuisines from around the Mediterranean

Marseille, where a good meal once meant pizza, bouillabaisse or fish, is suddenly coming on strong as one of the more interesting food cities in France. It is a trend mirrored in the new MuCEM (Musée des civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée), designed by architect Rudy Ricciotti at the entrance to Le Vieux Port. The museum opened to coincide with Marseille's reign as one of this year's European capitals of culture, and its mission is described in its name: to highlight the city's real identity. Of course Marseille is French, but it's also a simmering cauldron of peoples and cuisines from all around the Mediterranean.

Le Bistrot d'Edouard

"Today, Marseille is embracing its Mediterranean identity," says Edouard Giribone, whose convivial tapas and pinxo restaurant in an old provencale cottage in the Prado district has been packed from the day it opened. "A new generation is proud of the city's diversity, and we all love eating each other's foods." Grab a table in the tiny garden for a light supper of Spanish ham, poutargue (cured fish roe), grilled aubergine with chopped mint, raw artichoke salad and tortilla.
• rue Jean Mermoz,+33 4 9171 1652, no website. Open Tues-Sat noon-2pm, 8pm-10pm. Average a la carte €35

Le Café des Épices

Until chef Arnaud Carton de Grammont opened this small, charming restaurant on the edge of the Le Panier district in 2004, Marseille was one of the only French cities with no bistro culture of its own. After working in Lyon, Uruguay and the USA, Aix en Provence native de Grammont pioneered the Marseille bistro with a changes-daily chalkboard menu of dishes from around the Mediterranean. Grilled turbot with a puree of escalivada (a Catalan dish of aubergines, peppers, garlic, onions, and olive oil) and slow-roasted free-range pork with girolles and butternut squash puree show off a cooking style that's consistently precise, generous and inventive.
• 4 rue du Lacydon, +33 4 91 91 22 69, cafedesepices.com. Open Tues-Fri 9am-3pm, 6pm-midnight, Sat 9.30am-4pm. Lunch menus €24-€27, prix-fixe dinner menu €45

Café Populaire

Located on the increasingly-chic rue de Paradis, this popular brasserie is where well-heeled locals take a break from shopping over beautifully prepared Mediterranean comfort food. The great looking setting comprises an open kitchen and dining room with a found-in-the-attic decor of factory lamps and flea-market chairs and tables overlooking a courtyard garden. The menu changes often but runs to dishes such as panisses (fried bars of chickpea-flour), caponata (a Sicilian compote of aubergines, onions and peppers garnished with capers and pine nuts), and grilled rougets with tapenade.
• 110 rue Paradis, +33 4 91 02 53 96, no website. Open Mon-Sat noon-2.30pm, 8pm-11pm, Sun 11am-3pm. Average a la carte €40

Chez Michel

This dressy brasserie with a clubby clientele of local power-brokers, bourgeois families out for a special occasion, and slightly furtive couples coming in for a good feed, is the place to come for bouillabaisse in Marseille. Yes, it's expensive, but there are not many fish left in the Mediterranean and a real bouillabaisse requires a huge amount of local rockfish. Service can be a little shirty with unknowns as well, but ignore that and focus on the seriously good cooking.
• 6 rue des Catalans, +33 4 91 52 30 63, restaurant-michel-13.fr. Open daily noon-2pm, 7.30pm-11pm. Average a la carte €70

Pizzeria Chez Etienne

After the Suez Canal opened in 1869, the port of Marseille boomed and draw migrants from around the Mediterranean: especially Italy. In Le Panier, the city's oldest neighbourhood, the Cassaro family's simple but much-loved restaurant offers a delicious time capsule of how southern Italian cooking evolved in Marseille, with excellent wood-oven-baked pizzas, cuttlefish cooked with garlic and parsley, good steaks, and rosé de Provence to wash it all down. Service can be gruff, but don't take it personally they treat everyone that way.
• 43 rue de Lorette,no phone or website, no credit cards. Closed Sunday. Average a la carte €35

L'Epuisette

Built on a craggy stone point jutting out into the Mediterranean, this casually elegant sea shack of a restaurant offers views over the sea as well as some of the finest seafood cooking in the south of France. Chef Guillaume Sourrieu, who trained with Bernard Loiseau, among others, works exclusively with the local small-boat catch of the day to create signature dishes such as his shrimp terrine and slow-cooked sea bass, along with local seafood stews/soups like bouillabaisse and the lesser-known bourride.
• Vallon des Auffes, +33 4 91 52 17 82, l-epuisette.com. Open Tues-Sat noon-1.30pm, 7.30pm-9.30pm. Menu: €70-€125

Le Goût des Choses

After running restaurants in Antibes, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Sylvie and Olivier Rathery returned home and opened this popular value-for-money bistro in Marseille's rapidly gentrifying sixth arrondissement. The menu varies between provençal classics such as half-salted cod with bouillabaisse sauce and black rice or veal kidneys sautéed in white port, and worldly dishes such as crab cakes with tartare sauce or prawns sauteed with ginger and served sesame-seasoned basmati rice.
• 4 place Notre Dame du Mont, +33 4 9148 7062, legoutdeschoses.com. Open Tues-Sat noon-1.45pm, 7.30pm-10.30pm. Lunch menus €15, €25; dinner menus €25, €33; average a la carte €45

Le Grain de Sel

After working in Barcelona for a several years, talented young chef Pierre Giannetti, a native of Martigues, 40km north-west of Marseille, came home and opened a "Mediterranean-inspired" bistro in a cement-floored atelier on a side street near the port. His impeccably-sourced local produce and savvy cross-cultural references – tiny Sardinian gnocchi are served in a light tomato sauce with small clams from the Rhone delta, and salt-cod tartare with rocket comes with chickpea puree laced with sesame oil – has made this one of the most successful restaurants to open in Marseille for many years.
• 39 rue de la Paix Marcel Paul, +33 4 91 54 47 30, no website. Open Tues-Sat noon-1.30pm, 8pm-9.30pm. Lunch menu €18.50, average a la carte €40

Le Malthazar

After many years of cooking in Bordeaux, Marseille-born chef Michel Portos returned home last year and opened a good-looking restaurant with a sepia-tone atmosphere created by the collection of antique black-and-white photographs on one of the cocoa-coloured walls. Like most of Marseille's best chefs, Portos's appealing menu travels the Med and includes classics such as salade nicoise and Tropézienne à l'Orange, the orange-cream filled cake from Saint Tropez, but also off-beat choices like the whiting with Moroccan spices.
• 19 rue Fortia, +33 4 91 33 42 46, malthazar.fr. Open daily noon-2pm, 8pm-11pm. Average a la carte €40

La Table

This sleek restaurant run by chef Philippe Moreno, who executes the menu designed by three-star Michelin chef Gérald Passédat, Marseille's most-famous chef, is located on the top floor of the MuCEM. Passédat's short menu is a delicious and intriguingly harmonious presentation of Mediterranean cooking. Start with octopus carpaccio or dressed crab with harissa and quinoa, and then try the grilled catch of the day with a sauce Antiboise (capers, black olives, olive oil, tomatoes) and Niçoise socca (chickpea-flour crepes) or chicken cooked en paupiette with Sicilian-style caponata (a cooked aubergine salad).
• +33 4 91 59 25 92, mucem.org. Online reservations only at passedat.fr. Open Tues-Sat, call for hours. Average €50

Bye-bye pineapple and hotdog crusts. Indie restaurants and mini chains now serve the authentic Neapolitan deal with sourdough bases, Italian tomatoes and fresh authentic ingredients
• Below, our testers try eight of the best pizzerias

There's a pizza revolution going on– and it doesn't involve pineapple or hotdog-stuffed crusts. Authentic, Neapolitan-style pizzas are winning over an army of British fans thanks to mini-chains such as Franco Manca and Rossopomodoro in London and Birmingham, independents PizzaFace in Brighton and La Favorita in Edinburgh, and street food crews Homeslice and Pizza Pilgrims, both of which have recently opened restaurants. (Pizza Pilgrims has also published a cookbook.)

Why does it matter? Because Naples is the spiritual home of the pizza. While Rome has its pizza al taglio (by the slice), Chicago its deep-dish, and every high street in Britain its Sloppy Giuseppe and American Hot, Naples gave the world what the Oxford Companion to Food terms "the archetype of modern pizzas".

The Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana produces a mind-bendingly long and precise booklet about what constitutes an authentic Napoletana pizza, with edicts on acceptable toppings (sorry, no pineapple). But for British producers of Neapolitan-style pizzas, what matters are the quality ingredients and techniques: 00 flour, Italian tinned tomatoes (preferably San Marzano), fresh basil and firm fior di latte (mozzarella made from cow's milk) in the case of a classic margherita. The dough is left to rise slowly, then cooked for 60 to 90 seconds in a blisteringly hot wood-fired oven. The bases should be thin and softer in the middle of the circle, with a puffy cornicione (crust).

To many, all this marks a sea change from the chains. "When Francos [the forerunner of Franco Manca] opened in 1987, there was no one else doing authentic Neapolitan pizzas," says Sami Wasif, co-founder with Giuseppe Mascoli of Franco Manca and owner of Eco pizza. "It was all Pizza Hut and Pizzaland." Franco Manca developed a cult following for its delicious cornicione and sourdough bases, which Wasif says are "easily digestible" thanks to the dough's slow fermentation. "The big chains do things cheaper. They use big quantities of dry yeast plus other agents to accelerate the dough fermentation, and tend to buy cheap cheese," he says. Not that chain pizza is without its merits. "Cheese, dough, tomatoes and meat together is never bad," says Thom Elliot of Pizza Pilgrims, who says he has a "great place in my heart for Pizza Express".

But Pizza Pilgrims and Franco Manca hope to elevate what can be an average dish into a truly memorable one. Franco Manca leaves its sourdough to rise for at least 20 hours before baking it at 500C in a custom-built oven made by "artisans from Naples". Thom and James Elliot of Pizza Pilgrims earned their merit badges by taking a six-week road trip around Italy, meeting pizzaioli and collecting traditional recipes. "Neapolitan gets used to mean an indicator of quality rather than referring to a specific style," says Thom Elliot. In other words, unless there is a wood-fired oven on full blast behind the bakery counter, it isn't a Neapolitan-style pizza.

Franco Manca, London
12in pizzas from £4.50

francomanca.co.uk

Those famous sourdough pizzas are still packing people in. Now a small chain, with five London branches, Franco Manca's original outlet in Brixton market is a shrine to pizza minimalism with its sparse decor and short menu. On our visit, the margherita was faultless – a rich and sweet tomato sauce, soft base, creamy mozzarella and that perfectly chewy crust. Katy Salter

Gusto, Manchester
12in pizzas from £7.25

gustorestaurants.uk.com

It may do a Peking duck pizza, but purists will be pleasantly surprised by this small chain. Thanks to its wood-fired ovens and a dough recipe inherited from a Tuscan monk (it's a long story), its pizzas are a palpable cut above. Their elegantly thin, airy bases have real character, reassuring char and, if arguably they are a little crisp, plenty of fresh chew, too. Gusto's loosely pulped tomato sauce is unusually vibrant. Quality toppings seal the deal. Tony Naylor

Santa Maria, Ealing
12in pizza from £5.45

santamariapizzeria.com

This is a rigorously authentic, Neapolitan-owned pizzeria. Its wood-fired oven was imported from Italy, where they are built using clay from around Vesuvius which, experts insist, reflects heat in a specific way. Paper-thin in the middle and patched with char, Santa Maria's easily digested, springy bases are topped with A1 imported ingredients. Once you fold your slice of its buffalo mozzarella bufalina, it's like eating a sandwich of the sweetest tomatoes and double cream. Best pizza in London? Quite possibly. TN

La Favorita, Edinburgh
10in pizzas from £8.50

lafavoritadelivered.com

There are now two outlets for the much-loved Leith Walk pizzeria, run by the Crollas, a Scots-Italian catering family who have been putting the Mediterranean into Edinburgh diets for nearly 100 years. Fresh dough is made daily instore from Italian flour, making proper Neapolitan-style thin-crust pizza. All the usual toppings, plus some novelties – radicchio, figs, baby spinach, parsley pesto, nduja sausage. Recommended: the seriously fiery Vesuvio, the voluptuous cinque formaggi (five cheeses), or the Ggiro d'Italia – a 14in "tour of Italy" with 10 hams and cheeses for £14.95. Alex Renton

La Fiamma, Tunbridge Wells
12in pizzas from £7.50

realpizza.co.uk

"It is on the same level as my home town," exclaimed the man from, no kidding, Naples, who was sitting with his family at the next table in this tiny outpost in Tunbridge Wells. Owned by TV chef Rosemary Schrager's nephew Simon, La Fiamma dishes up pizzas with blistered bottoms and beautifully charred cornicione from its wood-fired oven. The namesake pizza comes topped with firm-ish mozzarella, shreds of wood-fired ham and salty olives. Delicious. KS

Croma, Loughborough
10in pizzas from £5.25

cromapizza.co.uk

Croma is owned by a group of ex-Pizza Express employees. It started in Manchester and now has six branches, including a couple at Odeon cinemas. While the menu veers alarmingly into novelty territory (tandoori chicken pizza, anyone?), the simpler options are more than acceptable. The Cotto is covered in gooey mozzarella and firm, salty chunks of pancetta, on top of a sweet tomato sauce. While the base is pale and tastes a little doughy in places, there are good patches of char on the crust. KS

Pizza Pilgrims, London
12in pizzas from £7

pizzapilgrims.co.uk

Pizza Pilgrims feels like a neighbourhood joint somewhere in southern Italy – from the green-checked tablecloths to the all-important Neapolitan pizzas that made its name. So, do said pizzas live up to the hype? Resoundingly so. The Bufala is dotted with Buffalo mozzarella – creamy and slightly golden from the oven. The sauce, made simply from crushed San Marzanos, tastes like purest essence of tomato, and the chewy, charred crust contrasts nicely with the soft middle. KS

Great British Pizza Co, Margate
12in pizza from £6

greatbritishpizzacompany.wordpress.com

A serious slice on the seafront. GBP majors on local ingredients across a menu that, beyond the staples, features modish, creative toppings such as chorizo and chilli, and specials such as parma ham and nectarine. A simple margherita sings with flavour. The base is super-thin, wood-fired, crisply edged. The tomato sauce (a painstaking amalgam of cherry tomatoes, honey, lemon juice and slow-roasted garlic) is remarkably clean and strident. Ice-cream comes from Soho's God-like Gelupo. TN

For a seaside resort, Brighton has a surprising number of good places to eat. Ahead of next month's Brighton & Hove Food Festival - and updating our previous guide - here are 10 restaurants where you can eat well for under £10 a head

The New Club & Seven Bees

Such is Brighton's fascination with burgers that the New Club even has one on its breakfast menu: a sausage patty with egg and melted cheese on a glazed brioche bun. Its finely shredded Boston "boxty" hash browns, served with bacon and fried eggs is, likewise, typical of this sharp US-influenced bar-diner. Later its menu runs through a tick-list of hip "dirty" diner classics, from pastrami sandwiches, fish tacos and fried chicken to burgers.

Fair as the prices are at the New Club – given its prime location on the front, just along from the Grand – its breakfast menu isn't the cheapest in town. So where should you dispatch your hangover if you're really watching the pennies? Plenty of Brighton cafes offer a full English for under £5, but few can match Seven Bees for quality. Found down a tight ginnel off Ship Street, it may look like a basic greasy spoon, but it's a greasy spoon that uses proper ingredients (bacon, sausages and black pudding from local outdoor-reared pigs; free-range eggs; bread baked by a mate in Hove), to produce breakfasts that are a cut above. A sausage sandwich (£3) was a thick fistful of liberally buttered, daisy-fresh bread stuffed with properly porky, if heavily seasoned, sausage.
• The New Club: breakfast £3.50-£8.50, sandwiches and salads from £6.50, mains from £7.50; 133-134 Kings Road, 01273 730320; thenewclubbrighton.com. Seven Bees: full breakfast £4.95-£8.50, other breakfasts from £2.50; 7 Ship Street Gardens, 01273 205477, facebook.com/SevenBeesCafe

Troll's Pantry

Acclaimed new-wave burger joint MEATliquor is opening a branch in Brighton next month, on York Place. But does Brighton need it? The town is already packed with burger perfectionists delivering juicy, loosely packed, next-level patties. Burger Brothers at 97 North Road is a tiny takeaway with late-night opening, dryly amusing staff and, on this taste test, Brighton's second-best burgers (from £5). Its dense buns had an almost doughnut-y, residual sweetness to them.

If you want a burger after a dip in the sea, Lucky Beach (burgers from £5.95), is the undoubted standout among the beachside cafes and bars that line the Kings Road arches. Luxury mayo, a serious brioche bun with a nice chew to its crust, and the novel addition of pickled red onions were notable, although the patties didn't quite boast the profoundly beefy flavour of what, for me, is Brighton's best burger experience, Troll's Pantry.

You'll find Troll's in the covered beer garden at the back of the Hobgoblin pub, a big, old, gussied-up Victorian boozer. It has six real ales on from local micros such as Dark Star and Hammerpot (pint from £2.99). Troll's owner, Paul Clark, is notoriously fastidious about everything from the classically squishy but durable buns to the rum BBQ sauce for his cult classic, the Smoky Mountain. I don't know whether it's the 35-day aged steak mince he uses, or the fact that the burgers are fried in beef dripping, but my sample Imperial, topped with Sussex St Giles cheese, was a pure beef bomb. Juice dripping off your wrists, a beatific grin on your face, you may well get carried away and proclaim this the best burger you will ever eat. Perhaps it is. The only problem, particularly if you're a bit strapped for a cash, is how to resist going straight back for another.
• Burgers from £6.50. The Hobgoblin, 31 York Place, 01273 682933, thetrollspantry.wordpress.com

Bardsley's

First the bad news. Brighton's best chippy isn't on the front; it's tucked away on a side street, heading out of town on London Road. Despite the unpromising location, however, its prices (and this is a theme at all the chip shops in Brighton) are steep enough to give visiting northerners vertigo: £7.20 for chips and a small haddock. And they leave the skin on.

But there is a reason why Bardsley's has been here since 1926. It delivers a damn fine portion of fish and chips. Said chips were as soft and buttery as can be, while the haddock, literally squeaky in its freshness, came in an airily light, but definitively crisp, well-seasoned batter. Sometimes good fish and chips requires a bit of effort and Bardsley's – its sit-in restaurant an incongruous mix of Veuve Clicquot champagne buckets and vintage Max Miller posters – is definitely worth the detour.
• Takeaways £3.70-£11.70. 22-23a Baker Street, 01273 681256, bardsleys-fishandchips.co.uk

La Choza

A riot of Mexican wrestling masks, death heads and gaudy floral upholstery, La Choza is Brighton's go-to venue for first-rate burritos, quesadillas and tacos. Passing on the deep-fried catch of the day (in a burrito!), not to mention the pit-smoked pulled pork and homemade chorizo, I opted for shredded beef, which had both surprising heat and a wonderful depth of complex, whole-spiced, slow-cooked flavour. Around it, everything – the mild, spritzy pico de gallo salsa, the green rice, even the burrito itself – tasted fresh and full of life. Which is key. It's not just about the meat.

If you're hell-bent on a burrito, but want to shave a pound or two off the bill, the takeaway Bang Bang Burrito (from £4.50, 6 Jubilee Street) does a credible job. But if you can stretch to £6.50, La Choza's burritos are in a different league. They're big, tightly packed batons, too. You won't go hungry.
• Mains £6.50-£7.50. 36 Gloucester Road, 01273 945926, lachoza.co.uk

The Coal Shed

Travelling on a tight budget needn't preclude you from actually sitting down and eating somewhere relatively grown-up, now and then. The Coal Shed majors on meats cooked in a whizzy charcoal-fired Josper (half grill, half oven). At lunch and in the early evening, its express menu offers a number of mains, including a good looking onglet steak and beef-dripping cooked chips, for under £10. There's also a short menu of hefty takeaway lunchtiime sandwiches. These include a shrimp po-boy, a hot-smoked American belly bacon number, and a generously filled BBQ pulled pork ciabatta, slathered with red cabbage slaw and underpinned by a fiery tomato sauce. Be warned, though, it's a sloppy business. You won't be able to walk and eat. Unless you want to end up wearing half your lunch.
• Takeaway sandwiches £5, express menu mains £8.50-£10. 8 Boyces Street, 01273 322998, coalshed-restaurant.co.uk

Iydea

The words "vegetarian canteen" are normally a warning sign, shorthand for worthy cooking of a 1970s vintage. But park that prejudice, because in right-on Brighton, such laziness wouldn't fly. Instead, Iydea serves some of the most vibrant food in the city. The deal is you choose from one of several hot mains (for example, veggie lasagne, Thai green tofu curry, daily roti and quiches), pair that with a couple of salady sides and add sauces or toppings. Everything on my plate, from a well-judged curried bean salad to a thick hummus with a garlicky, lemony lick to it, suggests that the kitchen is going about its work with exemplary commitment and honesty. A couple of pea and goat's cheese arancini – with their panko crumb, plump arborio rice filling and sophisticated flavour – would have passed muster in many good Italian restaurants. Iydea is cheap, so invest the money you've saved in a pint at the Evening Star, a few streets away. A plain, handsome hop-heads' pub owned by celebrated regional brewer Dark Star, it has 12 keg and cask pumps, plus beers from such trendy micros as Brodie's and Magic Rock (pint from £3.10, 55-56 Surrey Street).
• Takeaway meals £4.35-£5.80, eat-in £5.85-£7.30. 17 Kensington Gardens, North Laine and 105 Western Road, 01273 667992, iydea.co.uk

The Lion & Lobster

This lovely, unpretentious pub (a warren of dark rooms and levels, including two shaded "internal" roof terraces), serves good food in remarkable portions all day. Feeling the strain of a day's eating, I opted for a supposed starter of smoked mackerel fillet with streaky bacon and shaved beetroot (a good interplay of flavours), which arrived on a large doorstep of sourdough, with a decent leaf salad and creamed horseradish on the side. It cost £4.95, but most places would have passed this off as a main course. Elsewhere, the menu runs through the pub staples (most mains under £10), but in an engaging way. A black pudding and roast pork toastie, a superfoods salad and a shepherd's pie made with regional lamb all confirm that this is a pub kitchen going that extra mile. Not least in its veggie options. One of the day's specials was grilled polenta with grilled aubergine, ruby grapefruit, parmesan and rocket (£6.95). Which beats the usual goat's cheese salad.
• Sandwiches (until 5pm) from £3.95, pizzas from £6.95, mains £8.95-£11.95. 24 Sillwood Street, 01273 327299, thelionandlobster.co.uk

Pizzaface

This busy takeaway specialises in exotic toppings (lamb prosciutto, smoked tuna, shitake mushrooms), and proper bases, made with Sardinian 00 flour, blast-cooked in its gas-fired stone oven. Being picky, I had a couple of issues with it. I don't understand pizza places that add basil to their tomato sauce. It detracts from what should be a fantastically clean, fresh, sweet passata. Pizzaface also goes a bit OTT on dusting its bases with semolina, which mitigates against char – it was lacking – but does add a pleasing crunch.

But these are finicky points. Pick up a slice of Wild! (it comes with a heat warning: I opted to lose the ghost chilli, because I'm a wimp), fold it as the pizza gods intended, stop analysing each component, and in its mix of chipotle chilli, wild boar and pepperoni, it delivers a long smooth arc of smoky, cured, piggy flavours, borne aloft on a warm chilli heat. Choose carefully and two people could share a 12-inch pizza, a salad and a 500ml tub of ice-cream from Boho Gelato for under £20. You can also find Boho and their rather brilliant sea salt caramel and Ferrero Rocher-inspired Ambassador ice-cream at their own shop in town (6 Pool Valley).
• Pizzas £6-£11. 35 St Georges Road, Kemptown, 01273 699082, pizzafacepizza.co.uk

Flourtown

A former chef and the one-time editor of food magazine Delicious, Matthew Drennan now runs this Hove bakery-cafe. It's a sharp, simple, utilitarian space which delivers upmarket daytime snacks and light meals, in the form of scrambled eggs with avocado and aged cheddar, seasonal pies, and perhaps a chicken sandwich jazzed up with a homemade spicy chipotle mayonnaise. It also, of course, doles out lots of tarts, cakes and pastries baked on site. Look out, particularly, for the American breakfast muffins (the oatmeal and maple syrup one, studded with raisins and pecans, is a bit of a revelation), as are the excellent open puff pastry flats topped with, say, ricotta and spinach. A flat white (£2.35) was without distinction, a complaint that I make with such regularity in this series that I might swear off coffee altogether. If you do need a credible caffeine shot while you're in town, Coffee@33 (33 Trafalgar Street), near the station, is very, very good.
• Snacks and pastries £1.95-£2.95, sandwiches and meals £3.10-£7.50. 63b Holland Road, Hove, 01273 321147,flourtown.co.uk

Pompoko

Open from midday to 11pm daily, this cute, compact Japanese cafe and takeaway, is the go-to address for busy locals who need tasty nourishment, quick. Along with a few stir-fried noodle dishes, the main focus is on simple donburi rice bowl dishes. None of these breaks the £5 barrier, so don't expect miracles. However, the main components in my dish of pork and kimchi (fermented cabbage) delivered good flavour and the short, stubby rice was well-cooked, even if the thin sauce was a little ho hum. Fans of Japanese food may also want to check out the rather more sophisticated E-Kagen (22-23 Sydney Street), upstairs from a Chinese supermarket and best-known for its affordable sushi and ramen. Unfortunately, it was closed for two weeks in mid-August, when I visited.
• Mains £4.50-£4.90. 110 Church Street, 07796 001927, pompoko.co.uk

Travel between Manchester and London was provided by Virgin Trains. Accommodation was provided by the Market Inn (01273 329483, reallondonpubs.com), which has doubles from £85 B&B, and two-night weekends for £160. For more information on Brighton, see visitbrighton.com

'For this standard of cooking, the prices are as gentle as a caress. If this were in France, the bill would give you the bends'

It's no secret that I'm disenchanted with the restaurant style known, clunkily, as "fine dining". What a crooked-pinkie Hyacinth Bucket of a phrase that is, summing up everything that's buttock-clenching about gastronomy's high end. I've endured too many dishes looking like Mondrians with skid marks, too many rooms offering all the fun of a date with a fruitarian, to get excited about multi-course degustations served by chaps in gloves.

I whinged about this to my restaurant writer chum Richard McComb, and he said, "You should go to Le Champignon Sauvage." So, biddable as ever, I do. And my shallow heart sinks at what looks like a former boozer just far enough away from the chichi bit of Cheltenham. (An aside: Cheltenham must be the most middle-class town ever: it has shopping streets lined with caryatids.) I resolve not to mention the rather dull little room, nor its reliance on carpet and veneer panelling. And, quite clearly, fail.

But oh my giddy Cheltenham aunt, the food. Either I'm missing something and have failed to see the dreaded 17-course tasting menu called something like Menu Prestige (a Big Sweary Gordon Ramsay trick half-inched from Guy Savoy and designed to make you feel, if you don't order it, like the poor relation), or they've decided to let people order what they'd like at prices that, for this standard of cooking, are as gentle as a caress. If this were in France, the bill would give you the bends.

Chef David Everitt-Matthias is a remarkable chap, adhering to some kind of laughable philosophy about a chef's place being in the kitchen. It'll never catch on. And long before René Redzepi "invented" foraging, his menus featured the bounty of local fields and woodlands. But you won't see him flogging his wares on TV while flunkies run the kitchen. He hasn't missed a service in 25 years.

Here are some highlights from a remarkable dinner. There's pigeon breast, deep burgundy, just the right side of over-ripeness. It comes with a delicate, pastry-wrapped pastilla of the rest of the bird, confited and scented with cinnamon and scattered with pistachios, garnet-coloured morello cherries and a sauce with the sour-sweet note of rosehips. A surprise: one of those morellos turns out to be intense cherry jelly, with a vanilla crisp as its stalk.

Or lamb, rosy and tender, with the spiky bitterness of young dandelion leaves. Clouds of goat's curd and small cushions of sweetbread add sultry texture, and a hint of orange pulls it all together. Dishes feature fungi and foraged leaves – fleshy little stonecrop, or tart sorrel – but all add something rather than simply box-ticking a trend.

There are, of course, the inevitable amuses (I'm still perving over the weeny bacon and sweetcorn muffins), pre-desserts and petits fours. But it's not tricksy. The flavours are massive, telling stories of pure, powerful stocks and fine ingredients. The menu doesn't bore on about provenance: it doesn't need to. David E-M's confidence in his abilities and techniques allows him to underplay to mesmerising effect. But there's modernity, too: the malty "milk crumbs" clinging to some caramelised salsify.

We order a ridiculous-sounding dessert out of mischief. It proves to be the most extraordinary dish of the bunch: a play on a spectrum of flavours, from the most vivid citrus – orange jelly that tastes like essence of all the world's oranges – to quenelles of liquorice cream. Wow, just wow.

Atmosphere and buzz are provided by people: the brisk, clued-up staff and Helen, Everitt-Matthias's wife, distributor of welcome, knowledge and warmth. Punters include tables of middle-aged gal pals, couples of all ages and persuasions, even children: if (urgh) fine dining can be described as democratic, this is it. It might not convert me to the whole pantomime, but hats off to the Everitt-Matthiases. And thanks to Richard.

• Le Champignon Sauvage 24-26 Suffolk Road, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, 01242 573449. Open Tues-Sat, 12.30-1.30pm, 7.30-8.30pm. Two courses £48, three courses £59, four courses (with cheese and dessert) £69. Set lunch/dinner: two courses £26, three courses £32. All plus drinks and service.

Food 10/10
Atmosphere 6/10
Value for money 9/10

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A restaurant that serves only chicken and eggs. It must have sounded like a good idea to someone – but who?

Kingly Court, off Carnaby Street, London W1 (020 3747 9820). Meal for two, including wine and service, £90

Let's not pretend: the only people who order the chicken in restaurants are those who don't care enough about their dinner. There are exceptions: the whole roast poulet de bresse at L'Ami Louis in Paris, which is so expensive it won't so much empty your wallet as pillage it; the chicken at Tonkotsu, which makes every other deep-fried hen look like a waste of corn-fed biomass. For the most part, chicken is the beige of the restaurant world; it's the Ikea shelving unit, the Vauxhall Vectra. It does the job, but not much more. You can do it better at home. The only downside is you have to tidy up afterwards.

That's the point of the rash of recently opened one-dish rotisserie chicken joints, the Chicken Shops, Clockjack Ovens and the rest. By doing one thing pretty well, their economies of scale keep the price down to a point where you're merely paying someone else to do the washing-up. I am, however, scratching my head over the point of Whyte & Brown, which has a menu based solely around "free-range chicken and eggs". I know the restaurant market is crowded. I understand each business needs a point of difference. I just can't quite work out why anybody thought this one was such a killer idea.

The menu feels like the work of a backpacking student who's desperate not to come home for lectures and so keeps travelling: a bit of America here, a touch of Asia there, a little Italian and French on the side. It's also spectacularly overwritten. A gruyère quiche is "filled with a silky quichness of egg". Lettuce "shells" are "cool"; a Vietnamese minced chicken salad comes with a "rick of slaw", which is barely English. There are outbreaks of "chunky", "nest", "vibrant", "muddled", "plump" and "crunchy". It's not even worth playing menu language bingo because everybody would be shouting: "House!" Equally, the setting is mannered. The free-range birds we are eating may get to romp about in lush fields; we get industrial vents to eat them under, and bare floorboards.

Hidden beneath all of this is some reasonably solid cooking, though it never quite matches the greatness of the crisp chicken shards with which it begins. Whoever came up with the notion of serving slabs of seasoned, deep-fried chicken skin has a filthy mind. It's £1.75 of glorious, salty artery blocker. Other starters have flowery 15-word descriptions but amount to dippers and wings. A Bangkok scotch egg sounds like something a businessman in Thailand might pay to witness late at night. It's a fine scotch egg with a soft yolk, but without the fire or punch that the Thai reference implies. A bruschetta of soft salty ricotta cheese, whipped through with peas and pea shoots and topped with a poached egg, is fresh and lush but unbalanced by a pillow of cheese mix large enough for a child to rest their head upon. It's unfinishable.

The brick chicken for £12.95 is, I suppose, the reason for being here: half a roast hen, "steeped" – oh do please stop – in lemon, thyme and garlic, with gravy. It's roast chicken with crisp skin and moist meat. It functions. And I do also own an Ikea shelving unit which has been holding up books for years. By the time we get to the perfectly serviceable roast chicken breast with pancetta and clams in more sticky-salty chicken gravy, we're getting quite bored of, y'know, chicken. Thank God we ordered the chicken Caesar salad, without the chicken.

The dessert menu is noticeable for not offering a soufflé, which would strike me as an easy win for an egg and chicken restaurant. It does have a passionfruit mousse tart with a very soggy biscuit base, and a much better Eton mess, because it seems to be the law right now that every menu must.

Whyte & Brown is not bad. It's just a little odd. The curious thing is that by attempting to stand out in a crowded market, it fails to make an argument for itself.

Restaurants selling pizzas, chickens and burgers have seen their stock rise leading to private equity firm buyouts

Nando's The peri-peri chicken joint beloved of Dizzee Rascal, Beyonce and just about everyone else started life in Johannesburg as Chickenland. Opening its first restaurant in Ealing, west London, in 1992, the chain soon left behind its takeaway origins, almost inventing the niche of fast food with time to linger in a relaxed setting.

Pizza Express When Peter Boizot opened a pizzeria in Soho in 1965 inspired by his Sicilian holiday, he transformed the British eating-out scene, then dominated by formal French restaurants with multiple courses and rich sauces. Today Pizza Express has more than 420 restaurants and has changed owners several times, although many of Boizot's original ideas – dough balls and Veneziana pizzas – remain on the menu.

Giraffe With its cheerful décor and plentiful supply of crayons, Giraffe has gone down a treat with parents, ever since it was first opened by Juliette and Russel Joffe in Hampstead, north London, in 1998. Analysts will be watching if it can hold on to that charm since its sale to Tesco for nearly £50m in March, as the supermarket seeks to revive its ailing out of town superstores.

Wagamama Hong-Kong born restaurateur Alan Yau proved that Britons were not averse to eating with strangers at the same table, when he opened Wagamama in Bloomsbury, central London, in 1992. Yau sold the business in 1998 when it had just two outlets, but a succession of private-equity owners have expanded the noodle bar, turning it into a chain that operates in 17 countries.

Byron Byron burger is still a fairly small chain but has a plan for growth that burger fan George Osborne might envy. The company started by Tom Byng in 2008 to serve "proper burgers", is on course to open 45 restaurants by the end of the year. Owners Gondola Group, who also own Pizza Express and Ask, recently failed to sell it, as bidders balked at the £100m asking price. But industry watchers think a sizzling deal is still on the cards.

From double tipping to wineglass-filling fascism, some restaurant practices are certain to cause indigestion. Our restaurant critic reveals her biggest peeves

There is almost nothing I would rather do than sit around a restaurant table with people I like. It's always a thrill, every bit as fizzy as the contents of the chilled coupes we've just been upsold. But it's not all bonhomie and bubbles: there are things that buzzkill as effectively as a sign that says "prop: Gregg Wallace". Here are my worst culprits, the grit in the mussel of restaurant-going.

Tipping and double tipping

The bill has had its 12.5% duly levied, but the card machine starts hectoring you for more cash like a crusty with a dog on a string. There is a school of thought that says you should bung a tenner on top of service if you've been properly schmoozed, but with a meal for two in London routinely costing well over a ton, I fret that if I do they'll think I haven't spotted the charge and undertipped.

No matter how often I eat out, tipping remains a minefield. I like it when service isn't included: I sing hallelujah and tip properly. Alas, there are way too many who don't: when I worked in restaurants, people would sometimes furtively cache a 50p coin under their saucers. My tactic was to run after them bellowing: "Excuse me, sir, you've left your bus fare on the table." These days I pay the service charge, hope and pray it gets to the staff and scuttle off into the night, suffused with some vague sense of guilt and shame.

No reservations

Yes, I know all about the financial imperatives behind this, the necessity for businesses to keep the tills ringing in the face of recession. And I'm aware that for some there's nothing sexier than a long, hot, hard queueing session. But it's not for me: the idea that I might not end up with a table at my chosen restaurant fills me with a nameless, black panic. I've been known to sidle into the likes of Spuntino or Pitt Cue Co at unpopular hours, noon or 10.30 at night, but this is evidence of solitary vice rather than sociable interaction. Stop muttering "get a life" at the back there, and hashtagging #firstworldproblems. This is my life.

Waiters who act like your best pal

"Hey guys, how you doin'?" beams our new best pal, as though he were Joey from the Lower East Side rather than Jeremy from Swindon. He hunkers, comfy-like. There is no evidence of an order pad or new techno thingie on which to commit our order. All of which makes me want to hurtle, screaming, straight to the nearest chippie.

Nobody admires front-of-house practitioners more than I do, but when I'm with my actual friends, I don't need a new, temporary one for the evening. I do not want to be called "laydeez" or be told that the pudding course is "what you've been waiting for". I really do not want to be led to the actual Ladies and have the door held open for me with a knowing grin. Once, in Babylon, Kensington (now owned by Richard Branson), the waiter ushered me into the Gents to show me a kind of peephole into the Ladies. While I'm assured it's no longer there, there is such a thing as being overserved.

Wineglass-filling fascism

There are restaurants where they deliberately leave your wine at a remove from the table so you have no control over your booze intake. Just typing that sends a chill through my marrow: an empty glass during dinner dismays almost as much as begging to have it filled. But worse is one that's relentlessly topped up, a waiter or sommelier permanently at your elbow, destroying anecdotes and galumphing over confidences. To your horror, you discover that the bottle is magically empty and you've only just finished your starters. You order another bottle, trying not to think about the already stratospheric bill. Top relaxing evening guaranteed.

Restaurant websites

These are almost universally awful: clubby music, "clever" flash animation ("please wait while we load" … Next!), the chef's "philosophy", stock photography of random food and a lot of waffling about seasonal and local gleaned from watching Gordon's Kitchen Nightmares. Even worse are those designed for Continental Big Names whose idea of fun is making you chase the cursor around a tableau of dancing hams. All I is want is the menu with prices, maybe some nice photos of the interior, opening hours and contact details. How hard can it be? Almost impossible, apparently.

A nice chat with the chef

When I see the chef looming over to my table, I do not think, "Goody – here's a chap who will love to hear my constructive overview of his cooking," and settle in for a nice tête-à-tête. Unless you're prepared to toe the party line of everything's-bloody-marvellous-you're-a-genius-how-do-you-do-it?, chefs are not interested in your feedback. Try telling them that the duck was overcooked, the chips tasted frozen and the asparagus wasn't local. Go on, I dare you.

'High concept'

An email arrives announcing a new "free-range chicken and egg" restaurant. Menu items include the Bangkok scotch egg made with minced thigh meat and Thai herbs. There's a risotto scotch egg too. I'm not making this up. I long to try these dishes almost as much as I long to swallow my own tongue.

Here are words to strike fear into any food-obsessed heart: "Prezzo opens chicken, burgers and rib concept, Cleaver." That is like telling hardcore musos that the new act is a Bieber-Swift mashup with topnotes of Perry. Or how about Tanner & Co in Bermondsey, which imagines we'd like to eat our dinner in an environment designed to reference school gymnasiums? School gyms only make me think of sweat and despair, not all of it mine.

These are "concept" restaurants, only ever the work of gym-conditioned Justin and almost-anorexic Amanda in the "ideas room" of a catering conglomerate; Apprentice candidates who have somehow escaped into the real world. People who love food and enjoy restaurants don't open "concepts". Nor should we eat in them.

Tasting menus of more than 12 courses

I have never finished one of these things sober. By course nine or so, it's all gone blurry. Because, believe me, you need that Elysium muscat to help ram down the artichoke and foraged elderberry caramelised earth. These menus are all about the chef. For the diner, they're not about pleasure, they're about macho endurance – yes, even for the gals. It's wallet-flexing, every bit as subtle as driving up in a liveried Ferrari wearing head-to-toe Burberry check. Multiple-course aficionados consider themselves way superior to someone stuffing themselves with 97 hotdogs. But by the time you're nibbling course 11, even if it is eel-skin crackers with cherry-smoked backfat, it still amounts to eating as a competitive sport.

'That table is booked'

This is my very favourite. So I've studied the hotshot new openings and booked at the first portentous "booking lines now open" tweet, pecking at my phone like a demented budgie. And still I'm led to the worst table in the house, the one facing into a corner or squashed next to the lavs. As I point tentatively to an empty table in a part of the restaurant that doesn't scream "Hahaha Siberia you loser", the reply comes: "I'm sorry, madam, that table is booked."

It makes me shrieky. How is it booked, how? Who are these people so clued-up that they not only book before anyone even knows it's open, they can specify an actual table?

Of course, the truth isn't "that table is booked", but "we're keeping it for someone better designed to exemplify the brand values of our new white-hot establishment, someone with tattoos, a beard and an artisan salami company. Or some hedge-funders.'"

77%* of restaurants outside major cities

The menu riddled with "jus" and "medley" and "symphony of"; the crescent moon side dishes of mangetout and baby corn; the salad bristling with raw green pepper; those high-backed leather dining chairs you find in the back pages of Restaurant magazine; the staff who have no idea what they're serving. Yep, we're in the provinces. And before you rage and froth and call me all kinds of obnoxious scenester consumerist chimpanzee, I too live in Not London, where I routinely put up with crooked-pinkie culinary pretentions – tomatoes carved into roses, "fennel and gnocchi salad" (truly), crabmeat packed into a lovely plastic crabshell, or, if the chef has ambitions, a dome of smoke over something that once tasted of fish – because there is little alternative. And that's before I start to rant about "food service" companies that knock up that lovely boeuf bourguignon in faceless industrial estate kitchens. No, I don't mean you, you 23%* who are brilliant, who bake all your own bread and pay your staff properly. But if you're looking for me, I'll be on the train to the Smoke.

*Statistics do not stand up to scientific scrutiny.

'The table is yours for a two-hour timeslot'

Aka table-turning. No, ta. Ta-ta.