I know what it feels like to be afraid that your children will go to bed hungry, your heat will be turned off or you'll be evicted

• Coming Monday: live chat at noon (EST) on what it's like to live on minimum wage in the US

I've worked at fast-food restaurants in North Carolina for the past 15 years. I've spent more hours at Church's Chicken, McDonald's and now Burger King than I can remember. I work hard – I never miss a shift and always arrive on time. But today, I'm going on strike.

I make $7.85 at Burger King as a guest ambassador and team leader, where I train new employees on restaurant regulations and perform the manager's duties in their absence. Before Burger King, I worked at Church's for 12 years, starting at $6.30 and ending at just a little more than $8 an hour.

I've never walked off a job before. I don't consider myself an activist, and I've never been involved with politics. I'm a mother with two sons, and like any mom knows, raising two teenage boys is tough. Raising them as a single mother, on less than $8 an hour, is nearly impossible, though.

My boys, Tramaine and Russell Jr are now 20 and 21 years old. When they were in middle and high school, I had to work two fast-food jobs to make ends meet. Most days, I would put them on the bus at 6:30am before working a 9 to 4 shift at one restaurant, then a 5-close shift at another. If I had a day off, I was at their schools, checking in with their teachers and making sure they were keeping up with their education. I wanted them, when they were grown-up, to not have to work two jobs.

My hours, like many of my coworkers, were cut this year, and I now work only 25 to 28 hours each week. I can't afford to pay my bills working part time and making $7.85, and last month, I lost my house. Now, I go back and forth between staying with Russell Jr and Tramaine. I never imagined my life would be like this at this point. I successfully raised two boys, and now I'm forced to live out of their spare bedrooms. That's why I'm on strike today.

About a month and a half ago, I saw a Facebook page for NC Raise UP, which encouraged fast-food workers in North Carolina to join with others around the country who are striking. Today, I am joining workers in 40 cities who are taking collective action for a $15 wage and the right to form a union without retaliation.

Most of the workers I've met on social media are just like me – mothers and fathers who wonder if they will ever get what they deserve, if they'll ever escape from poverty. We are walking off our jobs because we don't know how we are going to survive on these jobs. We're on strike because we can't afford not to strike.

Burger King says they can't pay employees like me higher wages because it would force them out of business. Yet last year it made $117m in profits and its CEO took home $6.47m. It would take me 634 years to earn that much.

I've worked in fast-food for 15 years, and I can't even afford my own rent payments. We just want fairness and to be able to provide for our families. No one who works every day should be forced to be homeless.

As a guest ambassador, my job is to keep customers happy, greeting them at the door, checking in with them at their tables and picking up their trash. I'm good at what I do. Customers have come in and have wanted to give me $25 gift certificates as a way of saying thank you. If only Burger King rewarded hard work in the same way.

I'm on strike today for the first time in my life, and surprisingly, I don't feel afraid. Like so many fast-food workers across this country, I know what it feels like to be truly afraid – afraid of having your children go to bed hungry, or having your heat turned off in February, or being evicted from your home. Today is not scary. Today is empowering.

How far will you go for a great meal? Here are 10 restaurants worth planning a short break around, with places to stay on site or nearby

The Ethicurean, Wrington, near Bristol

Created from the old orangery of an Edwardian walled garden, the Ethicurean (mains from £12) creates much of its menu from what it grows. Expect maybe rabbit confit with lovage breadcrumbs, or goat bacon, from a daily changing menu. Winners of the Observer Food Monthly's Best Ethical Eats award in 2011, the young team work to the motto, "eat local, celebrate native foods, live well".
STAYa five-minute drive away at Lower Stock Farm (01934 862 997, lowerstock.co.uk, doubles £75) set in 250 acres of working land

The Curlew at Bodiam, East Sussex

They like to point out that stile meets style at the Curlew at Bodiam (mains from £21) and big city cuisine almost certainly influences this country kitchen. Simplicity and seasonality are key to the evolved food at this converted coaching inn. Owned by Mark and Sarah Colley and awarded a Michelin star in 2011, the Curlew uses the best (mostly local) ingredients while still offering remarkable yet affordable dinners.
STAYin a modern-day shepherd's hut recycled from old touring caravans in a glade close to Bodiam castle with the Original Hut Company (01580 831 845, original-huts.co.uk, from £79 a night)

Le Champignon Sauvage, Cheltenham

Long before foraging became trendy, David Everitt-Matthias was cooking astonishing plates using the hedgerow's bounty to supplement top-quality produce. He and his wife Helen have been offering what many call "the meal of a lifetime" at Le Champignon Sauvage two-course lunch £26) since 1987. Now with two Michelin stars, the food shows a marked French terroir influence, cooked by or under the auspices of this quiet chef who has never missed a service.
STAYa short walk away at the Bradley, a five-star B&B (01242 519077, thebradleyhotel.co.uk, double rooms from £88)

The Hand and Flowers, Marlow, Buckinghamshire

At the Hand and Flowers (01628 482277, thehandandflowers.co.uk, two-course lunch £15), a posh pub in Marlow, owners Tom and Beth Kerridge earned a Michelin star within a year of opening, and another in 2012. Twice finalist on the Great British Menu, Tom Kerridge is now famous for his slow-cooked duck breast with peas, duck-fat chips and gravy, and his roast hog with salt-baked potatoes and apple sauce. So famous that the pub is fully booked at weekends for the next six months, but there are midweek slots.
STAYin one of the pub's four cottages, named after breeds of cattle (£140 a night B&B) just a stumble away

The Raby Hunt, Summerhouse, County Durham

This former inn has in just three years gone from family bistro to Michelin-starred restaurant. Before the Close family bought the Raby Hunt (two-course lunch £22.95) chef James was a professional golfer. His tasting menu runs like a list of ingredients and inspirations: Lindisfarne; razor clam; grouse; spring lamb; strawberry.
STAY in one of two bedrooms at the inn (£125 for two including breakfast) in this Grade-II listed Victorian building

The Gunton Arms, Thorpe Market, Norfolk

The Gunton Arms (01263 832010, theguntonarms.co.uk, three courses about £30) is beautifully set in a 1,000-acre deer park. Stuart Tattersall, formerly of the Mark Hix empire, cooks venison sausages from the park as well as ribs of beef on a 16th-century open fire in the middle of the Elk Room. Sweet crab from nearby Cromer comes with mustard mayonnaise, and salmon from Loch Duart is smoked on site. Bar snacks such as crackling and parsnip crisps are available all day in the pub still used by locals.
STAY in one of eight stylish antique-filled rooms (doubles from £95)

The Walnut Tree, near Abergavenny, Monmouthshire

The Walnut Tree (two-course lunch £22) was one of Wales's best-known restaurants (before it closed in 2007). It reopened under chef Shaun Hill, who moved here from Ludlow's Merchant House in 2008 and took the place to a new level. The restaurant offers "proper dining", with a confidently eclectic menu. Dishes such as suckling pig, empanadilla and morcilla brought another Michelin star.
STAY in Old Post Office Cottage or Ivy Cottage (£180 for two) in the grounds, or at the restaurant's own Angel Hotel, (01873 857121, angelabergavenny.com, doubles from £101)

Y Polyn, Capel Dewi, Carmarthernshire

From the statement on their website – "Fat equals flavour. Live with it" – to the warning that they don't pour your wine or use tablecloths, Y Polyn (mains from £10), this is a no-nonsense, all-about-the-food restaurant. Lamb from the Gower marshes, or Welsh black beef tell their own story on the plate. "We're not trying to win any prizes for innovative food," they say. But Y Polyn does win accolades for robust country cooking and down-at-home style.
STAYa couple of miles away at Llywn Helyg Country House (01558 668778. llwynhelygcountryhouse.co.uk, doubles from £119) which offers lifts to and from Y Polyn

The Kilberry Inn, Tarbert, Argyll and Bute

A 16-mile drive down a "wee" road between Lochgilphead and Tarbert brings you to the Kilberry Inn (01880 770223, kilberryinn.com, mains from £11) with its red tin roof and matching phonebox. Breathtaking scenery leads to a place offering the best of land and sea: beef and lamb from Ormsary, Tiretigan pork, scallops hand-dived in the Sound of Jura and mackerel smoked in a small cabin over the road. Chef Clare Johnson's cooking has earned her a Michelin Bib Gourmand.
STAY in one of the Kilberry's five rooms (DB&B £210 for two) – advisable as the inn is a long way from anywhere

Barley Bree, Muthill, Perthshire

Cuisine grand-mère is at the heart of Barley Bree (mains from £10.50) in the Perthshire village of Muthill, where Fabrice Bouteloup draws on a childhood spent on his grandmother's farm. Wife Alison, a master of wine, has built a wide list sourced from six suppliers. The menu at the 18th-century inn changes daily but a main course could be slow-cooked ox cheek with confit vitelotte potato, beetroot and curly kale, carrot and celeriac cooked on a custom-built French stove. Barley Bree was named rural restaurant of the year in the Scottish Restaurant Awards 2013.
STAY in one of six en suite doubles, from £105 B&B

Belfast's restaurant scene has been busy reinventing itself, and now offers fine dining and exciting mid-level restaurants alongside classic North Ireland frys

Belfast is metamorphosing from a city stuck in the past into an exciting tourist destination. Hotel infrastructure has grown to meet demand in recent years, now the restaurant scene is also on the up.

Niall McKenna's James Street South ( is one of the restaurants flying the flag for higher-end dining. Expect a heavy focus on Irish produce such as Mourne lamb and Rademon Estate wood pigeon. Deanes , under head chef Simon Toye provides classics like lobster thermidor as well as shining a spotlight on local produce such as Lissara duck that comes with cherries and an elegant confit duck croquette.

Then there's the new kid on the block, Ox whose opening in March this year was met with the kind of food arousal that would make Alvin Leung blush. The pairing of owners Stephen Toman in the kitchen and Breton Alain Kerloc'h out front brings a superb balance of fine dining on the plate, with a fist-pumpingly rocking atmosphere. The menu changes seasonally and gives an equally starring role to vegetables and proteins. Milk curd with grilled fennel and red pepper caramel, and saddle of rabbit with pork cheek, apricot and olive are both stunning dishes.

Northern Ireland has also made massive leaps when it comes to small artisan producers. Abernethy butter, used by Heston Blumenthal at the Fat Duck and by Marcus Wareing at the Berkeley, stands beside Broighter Gold rapeseed oil as two products that the country can be proud of. Both are available in Belfast's most exciting deli, Arcadia Delicatessen.

Any trip to Belfast would be incomplete without trying a "fry", the city's breakfast of choice. Check out That Wee Café (189 Falls Road, thatweecafe.co.uk, fry from £3.95), in the Gaeltacht Quarter of west Belfast.

The number of independent coffee operators in the city may be low, but Ground Espresso Bar in Waterstones and Black Bear Café are two that stand by the old argument that quality is more important than quantity – a concept essential to making good coffee, but which so many coffee shops fail to grasp.

Belfast mid-level restaurants manage to combine excitement and value. Mourne Seafood (mains from £8.25) is head and shoulders above any other seafood restaurant in the city. For great Italian food there's Il Pirata (mains from £8.50), which has brought small plates and a touch of Polpo to Belfast.

Nearly every restaurant in the city has a burger on its menu, but you'll find the best at Alley Cat on Church Lane. OK, so it wouldn't beat London's MeatLiquor in a fight, but it'd certainly knock seven shades out of Shake Shack and Five Guys with both hands tied behind its back.

• John Ferris blogs at the Irish food and drink site Forked

The head chef of London's Polpetto restaurant reveals her favourite spots for coffee, cake, a bowl of noodles or a glamorous dinner

Quo Vadis was one of the first Italian restaurants to open in Soho, in the 1920s, and it has recently been given a new lease of life with the arrival of Jeremy Lee. Jeremy is a chef after my own heart. His cooking is simple yet superbly executed and he has a fascination with seeking out slightly unusual ingredients that he presents against a backdrop of the best British cooking traditions. The menu (mains from £15) changes daily but summer fare has included sweetbreads, squid, duck hearts, samphire and pickled gooseberries.

There are few undisputed champions in the restaurant business but I would argue that Vasco & Piero's Pavilion, a traditional osteria-style restaurant specialising in Umbrian cuisine, makes the best bowl of pasta in London. When I have a craving for spaghetti al pomodoro (£7.50, mains from £19.50) there is simply nowhere better.

The best time to go to Japanese noodle bar Koya is at about 5.45pm on a cool evening, just before everyone pours out of their offices and the queue for udon noodles snakes up Frith Street. This little restaurant is an absolute delight and consistently delivers well-measured portions of Japanese dishes (from £6.90) using locally sourced seasonal ingredients, whose flavours are both clean and satisfying. I usually try as many of the dishes from the specials board as I can handle.

I have a weakness for chocolate eclairs that means I'm often to be found sitting outside Maison Bertauxtrying to perfect eating one without dropping cream all down my front while doing a spot of people watching. While it seems increasingly popular with Japanese tourists, Maison Bertaux is a real Soho stalwart and has been around for over 100 years, so I always feel it's a little corner of local history.

There are three Fernandez & Wells coffee shops in Soho, and luckily one of them is a stone's throw from my front door. I'm particularly fond of its coffee and the rich custardy softness of the pasteis de nata, which I can eat happily at any time of the day. I usually pop in during the morning, on the way home from walking the dogs, to pick up a grilled ham and cheese croissant and a "stumpy" – a triple ristretto coffee with frothy milk.

In the dark days of Soho's gastronomic life, Andrew Edmunds held a candle for great quality, simple, seasonal cooking, and the flame has never really gone out. This romantic – if slightly cramped – bistro in Lexington Street is hard to get into as it effectively acts as a dining room for the great and not so good of Soho's literary establishment, who often frequent the Academy Club upstairs. But once you do secure a table you won't be disappointed.

Jacob Kennedy's Bocca di Lupo (mains from £15) was one of the first of the new wave of Soho restaurants that changed the local dining scene. His take on classic Italian regional cuisine is like the Silver Spoon cookbook brought to life with the stripped down simple food served in buzzy, glamorous surroundings.

Polpetto's first premises was above the French House and I have many happy memories of being there. The restaurant is now an extension to the ever-popular pub, but the dining room used to be run by Fergus and Margot Henderson before they opened St John, so it has great provenance. The pub is still full of Soho characters and in many ways is the beating heart of what's left of the authentic Soho life.

The Society Club is a bookshop and gallery in a pleasingly quiet nook of Soho, with a fantastic collection of new and vintage books, paintings, photography and objets d'art. I usually try and stop there in the afternoon for a cup of tea and a Tunnock's tea cake – with my two dogs in tow again. In the evening it turns into a little speakeasy-style cocktail bar and is a great place to meet for a surreptitious chat or a discreet liason.

Florence Knight is head chef of Polpetto, which will reopen in November at 11 Berwick Street, Soho. Her book, ONE: A Cook and Her Cupboard, is published by Saltyard, price £26. To buy a copy for £20.80 with free UK p&p call 0330 333 6846, or visit guardianbookshop.co.uk

Hotel restaurants are back in vogue, thanks to innovative menus from a new generation of talented chefs. Sally Shalam selects great places to stay, with food to match

Pennyhill Park, Bagshot, Surrey

There are fewer than 10 British hotels whose chefs have been awarded two Michelin stars, and outside London, that figure shrinks still further. Michael Wignall spent five years at North Yorkshire's much-loved Devonshire Arms, where he held one star, before moving to Pennyhill Park in 2007. Last year, Pennyhill's restaurant, Michael Wignall at The Latymer, was awarded a second star for his complex modern European cooking which is always a work of art. There is a 10-course tasting menu (vegetarian or carnivorous) and seven- or three-course set menus.
• 01276 471774, pennyhillpark.co.uk. Doubles from £215 room-only. Seven-course set menu £72

Cleveland Tontine, Staddlebridge, North Yorkshire

Regulars at this seven-room hotel, built in 1804, are returning after completion of a refurbishment which almost topped the £1m mark. The Staddlebridge location, close to the A19, places it on the radar between Teesside and York, handy for events at Mount Grace Priory and for the villages of Yarm and Hutton Rudby. This is Yorkshire, so you won't need a magnifying glass to see your assiette of heritage beetroot with horseradish ice-cream. Classics (prawn cocktail, moules, steak) co-habit with the likes of chilli and fennel risotto, and duck-egg custard tart with blackberries.
• 01609 882 671, theclevelandtontine.co.uk. Doubles from £110 B&B. Three-course dinner about £36 a head

Knockinaam Lodge, Portpatrick, Dumfries and Galloway

On a gloriously remote cove hugged by woodland in John Buchan country, on Scotland's rocky south-west coast, this 10-bedroom, trad, privately owned hotel is also easily accessible. Vegetables come from the hotel's kitchen garden and everything from potato crisps to ice-cream is made in head chef Tony Pierce's kitchen. Not for nothing does Knockinaam Lodge have the longest-held Michelin star in Scotland – Pierce delivers modern Scottish tasting menus which make the most of Hebridean shellfish, hand-dived scallops, meat from Galloway estates and smoked salmon from Allan Watson at Galloway Smokehouse.
• 01776 810471, knockinaamlodge.com. Dinner, bed and breakfast from £190 for two

The Samling, Windermere, Cumbria

This whitewashed Lakeland hotel has changed since I first visited more than a decade ago. Back then, all 11 gorgeous rooms were available only for exclusive-use bookings, so dinner was a clubby, private affair. Later, under the ill-fated von Essen hotel group, dining became more formal. Now the culinary team – headed by Ian Swainson (formerly of L'Ortolan and La Bécasse) with James Cross (from Noma in Copenhagen) – is putting The Samling on Windermere's map for lunch as well as dinner, with a relaxed atmosphere and the delights of Cartmel venison and sloe gin crème brulée.
• 01539 431922, thesamlinghotel.co.uk. DB&B from £230 for two, B&B doubles from £150

The Hambrough, Isle of Wight

This little boutique hotel, on the southern coast of the island, has been described as Notting Hill on sea. Bathrooms with a view have certainly proved popular but it was former chef-patron Robert Thompson who really put it on the map by gaining a Michelin star in 2008. Now Thompson has left and the hotel has a new head chef, Darren Beevers, straight from Club Gascon in London. He's putting autumn cooking classes on the menu, along with plenty of game.
• 01983 856333, thehambrough.com. Dinner, B&B for two from £280.

Kinloch Lodge, Isle of Skye

Kinloch Lodge, on Skye's southern shore, holds the island's only Michelin star. The former hunting lodge, hung with ancestral Macdonald portraits, is tucked down a long driveway. Canapes and aperitifs are followed by a new five-course tasting menu and wine flight. Also, this summer, chef Marcello Tully has launched his chef's table for four. Watching your Knockraiche crème fraîche and vanilla panna cotta with Skye blueberry compote and caipirinha sorbet being assembled in front of you will almost rival the views from your bedroom. Pick dates in early November for deals and amazing autumn colour.
• 01471 833333, kinloch-lodge.co.uk. DB&B £170pp, special winter offer from 1 November-31 March 2014: DB&B from £99pp

The Pig, Brockenhurst, Hampshire

Ditch the jacket and tie: The Pig doesn't stand on ceremony when it comes to mealtimes. This is a hotel (and restaurant) for the frazzled in search of earthiness, comfort and downtime dining. Its website reads like a Jamie Oliver cookbook – all potted herbs, hand-drawn arrows and recipes from the head chef. Hams and fish are home-smoked, fruit and veg picked and pulled from the beautiful walled garden behind the 26-bedroom hotel … you get the picture. Go now for an afternoon treat of wood-baked flatbreads on the terrace.
• 0845 077 9494, thepighotel.com. Doubles from £129 B&B, three-course dinner about £35

Fairyhill, Reynoldston, Gower, Swansea

For foodies and wine lovers, delightfully informal Fairyhill is a Welsh institution. A Georgian house with eight bedrooms, it comes complete with walled garden and trout stream on a 24-acre estate. Head chef David Whitcross has only just taken the reins (after working at The Fat Duck). You can still enjoy signature deep-fried cockle canapes on the terrace but menus now include temptations such as wild sewin (sea trout) with creamed potato, beans and peas, watercress and beurre blanc; and Gower lamb loin with filo of lamb belly, laverbread and capers, globe artichoke, and aubergine and peanut purée.
• 01792 390139, fairyhill.net. DB&B from £270 a night for two

The Peacock at Rowsley, Derbyshire

Originally the Peacock was built as the dower house for Haddon Hall (where The Other Boleyn Girl was filmed) but its history as a hotel stretches back almost 200 years. Expect modern haute cuisine, however, from current head chef Dan Smith, who joined six years ago from Tom Aikens in London. Wild sea trout with crab vinaigrette, pink grapefruit, cauliflower and avocado purée followed by lemon and olive oil cake with pinenut, yoghurt and olive oil sorbet are on the formal dinner menu. Three-course light lunch (half-size main) for £16.50 in the bar is a daytime treat.
• 01629 733518, thepeacockatrowsley.com. DB&B from £215 for two

Briarfields, Titchwell, Norfolk

Standing beside the A149, which traces the north Norfolk coast, Briarfields comes straight out of the nature-lover's little black book. Twitchers leave sighting notes in a journal in the lobby. Briarfields has good, unfussy rooms, a private path to the beach, and a surprise element of rather special dining. Start with Brancaster mussels steamed with white wine, shallot, garlic, parsley and cream, or a marinated beetroot salad with Rosary Ash goat's cheese and sherry vinegar, followed by baked sea bass with brown shrimp butter.
• 01485 210742, briarfieldshotelnorfolk.co.uk. DB&B from £145 for two

The Michelin-starred chef dishes up a tour of restaurants and foodie highlights in his home city, Edinburgh and further afield

For me, sourcing produce from a farmers' market is a delight, and most of what you find is seasonal and local, which I'm fanatical about. It's also a wonderful way to learn about ingredients straight from the experts who grow, farm and produce them. Stockbridge Market is on every Thursday and Sunday, and it's up the street from our gastro pub, the Scran & Scallie, which opened in March, so I like to pop along to see what local suppliers have fresh that day.

Not far away in Leith, the Ship on the Shore seafood restaurant and champagne bar is where, as a family, we often spend Sundays. It epitomises everything I enjoy about Scottish pub food. They respect the produce and keep it simple.

In central Edinburgh, Castle Terrace restaurant is going from strength to strength. The proprietor, Dominic Jack, is a talented chef and has made his mark on Edinburgh's culinary scene. His menus are modern and innovative and he makes the most of the fantastic produce we have on our doorstep, delivered straight from land and sea and cooked that day.

Edinburgh has really upped its game in the past few years when it comes to dining at all levels, and we have some of the best restaurants in the UK, where the chefs really focus on the quality of the produce. I really enjoy Ondine, Roy Brett's restaurant off the Royal Mile. The shellfish is of fantastic quality and I especially like the eye-catching fruits of the sea platter.

Something my wife Michaela and I love to do when we can is get together with friends and head out of town. Whenever we do, we make a stop at the Lobster Shack on the harbour in North Berwick, a small seaside town just outside Edinburgh. The lobster is freshly caught and served with garlic and herb butter.

Although I've travelled the globe with my job, there's nowhere quite like Scotland. St Andrews is a must visit for anyone coming to Scotland and my wife and I love The Peat Inn, which is close by. Geoffrey Smeddle and his wife, Katherine, do a fantastic job up there and the food is first class.

Up in the Trossachs, Monachyle Mhor overlooks Lochs Daine and Voile, a few miles from Balquhidder. The stunning surroundings make it an idyllic retreat. It's a family-run business and some of the produce is sourced on their doorstep: the bread they serve is from their bakery, and their farm provides the fresh eggs, pork, venison, beef and vegetables they use in the restaurant. It's a real Scottish hidden gem.

Over at the Gleneagles Hotel, in Auchterarder, Andrew Fairlie is one of Scotland's finest chefs. His eponymous two-Michelin-star restaurant is in the heart of Perthshire, where I grew up, and sits in a spectacular location.

Tom Kitchin is Michelin-starred owner of The Kitchin, Leith, Edinburgh (0131-555 1755, thekitchin.com), and owner of The Scran & Scallie, Stockbridge, Edinburgh (0131-332 6281, scranandscallie.com)

Manchester and the north-west was known for music, fashion and clubbing, but not for its food and great restaurants. Until now, says chef Mary-Ellen McTague

If British food in general was the laughing stock of Europe 30 years ago, I dread to think how the north-west of England in particular was viewed. We had our Eccles cakes and Chorley cakes, and our Bury black pudding, but it's not very sexy.

We've always done other stuff brilliantly in the north-west: art, music, fashion, design, clubbing, brawling … But we never quite got that combination of cool and quality right where food is concerned. But things have changed around here over the past couple of years, and we have a load of places to be proud of.

OK, you could argue that some of it is a northern interpretation of a London thang. The Venetian small plates at Cicchettion the ground floor of House of Fraser in Manchester may have been inspired by Polpo. Almost Famous– whose Manchester gaff was sadly destroyed by fire, but which now has a new site on Liverpool's Parr Street – may owe something to MeatLiquor. But the important thing is how well a concept is executed, and it is precisely this that is changing in the north-west.

There is little more cringeworthy than a trend badly replicated (remember the crimes committed against good taste in the name of "fusion") but we are now seeing much more substance over style, and high-concept dining offered with real skill. What's even more exciting is that, once a few places of real quality get going, it is catching: everyone works hard to keep up, and standards rise all over.

All the more reason to be happy that Manchester is now home to a Simon Rogan restaurant, the French at the Midland Hotel (three courses £29). His flagship Cartmel restaurant L'Enclume has been doing beautiful and innovative things with food for over a decade, and it is a delight to have a chef of his class in our city. So many people said a Michelin-starred restaurant couldn't survive in Manchester. I am almost certain that Mr Rogan is about to prove them wrong.

Umezushi (sushi from £3, hot dishes £12) is a fabulous sushi joint under the railway arches near Victoria station. It is in such an unlikely location that on several occasions I have struggled to convince taxi drivers to take me there. The restaurant is tiny, with maybe 20 seats, so booking is advisable. I've been three times this year out of the, ooh, five or six times I've actually gone out. The sushi and sashimi are the freshest and best I've had in forever, the specials are always interesting (burdock root, crispy pig's ear, sole pirate ship!) and the Japanese wine is excellent, as is the sake. Plus, it is the work of two plucky young things who sought to provide excellent food and drink while operating on a shoestring, and I applaud that.

Food shopping round these parts has been on the up for some time – we now have a few Waitroses, and a Booths at MediaCity. But the local markets are the best bet for interesting local produce. As well as permanent markets, there are regular farmers' markets. Find them at localfoods.org.uk/local-food-directory.

I may be biased as it is my home town, but I think Bury Market is the best for food. A sign outside states that it is "World Famous", which used to make us weep with laughter as schoolchildren. I mean, the hubris! It stank! That was the 1980s though; it really is very good nowadays. Check out the website intro. Turn it up loud.

We use Brian Iddon's fruit and veg stall a fair bit, as much of the produce is grown on their farm up near the Fylde estuary, and the rest comes from their neighbours. The fish and game stands just behind Brian's stall are also very good, and of course there are the black pudding stalls, cheesemongers and butchers.

Katsouris deli (23-25 Market Square), just around the corner from the main outdoor market, is a Bury institution and I know many that swear by its hot pork roll. Mr Katsouris himself is delightfully grumpy. If you are lucky, he might even tut at you for joining the wrong queue (it's a confusing system, OK, Mr Katsouris? That's why so many of us go in the wrong queue. It is not solely to piss you off. At least, it wasn't the first couple of times …)

If my wallet, my restaurant and my children would allow, I'd make the hour's trip to Fraiche (0151 652 2914, restaurantfraiche.com, three courses £35) in Birkenhead every week. Quite how Marc Wilkinson produces such exciting and exquisite food with no assistance, blows my mind. I have had meals there that easily match and may even out-do many two-Michelin-star establishments: every course is so well thought out, and then so well executed that ... that … it makes me feel a bit angry inside. But mainly I love eating there and think Marc is an incredible talent. Due to its size (tiny restaurants seem to be a bit of a thing round here) and its popularity, it isn't always easy to get a table at Fraiche, so book weeks or months in advance.

The Parker's Arms at Newton-in-Bowland (01200 446236, parkersarms.co.uk) is well worth a trip. It takes just over an hour from Manchester, and the drive up through Lancashire is beautiful, if often a bit drizzly. The landscape gets more dramatic north of Clitheroe and there sometimes comes a point, as you are exactly in the middle of nowhere, when you lose mobile signal and the sat nav stops working. But that's kind of exciting.

Perservere, and you will find the perfect country pub. Owner Stosie Madi is a fabulous cook, and a fabulous woman. She produces such great food because she is a real enthusiast, concentrating on finding exceptional produce and treating it real nice. Whatever the time of year, you'll be offered the best produce from right on their doorstep (the lucky buggers have excellent farms and producers all around), cooked with love and care. The fires are nearly always lit, and the welcome is equally warm. You can't really ask more from a country pub. Oh, and the wine list is top-notch, too.

Finally, Ramsbottom. I grew up near here and though once upon a time its pubs were mainly for fighting, that has now changed. The Shoulder of Mutton (mains from £11.96), the Hearth of the Ram (01706 828681, hearthoftheram.com, mains from £12.95) and the Eagle and Child (01706 55718, eagle-and-child.com, mains from £9.95) are all doing great stuff with local produce. There is also a decent chippy and an excellent south Indian restaurant, Sanminis .

And then there'sRamsons (mains from £11.50) a place close to my heart as I spent two years prior to opening Aumbry working there. I really like its downstairs Hideaway restaurant. You get the same incredible Italian wine list as in the main restaurant, but the food is more rustic Italian: beautiful cured meats, cheeses and fresh pasta, as well as slow-roast meats and stews. It is a tiny, dimly lit, cellar-like room, perfect for those cold nights we have coming our way soon.

• Mary-Ellen McTague is chef and co-owner of Aumbry (0161-798 5841, aumbryrestaurant.co.uk) in Prestwich

The Michelin-starred chef of the Yorke Arms in Pately Bridge reveals her top restaurants, pubs and food producers in the county

Yorkshire has the most beautiful collection of monastic ruins in the country. The discerning Cistercian monks knew how to choose a serene position that was not only beautiful but that would serve the their communities' needs. Culinary knowledge was passed down by the monks, and local produce and farming methods advanced as a result.One result of that is the wonderful artisan produce available in the dales today, and also in our sophisticated spa town of Harrogate, Ripon and the lovely old market town of Masham.

In Harrogate Baltzersen's (22 Oxford Street) styles itself as "Yorkshire sourced and Scandinavian inspired". It's a fab, fun, quality cafe – tuck into a meatball sandwich with fried onion, lingonberry jam and jarlsberg cheese – they're not shy in portion sizes, and for £6.50 this is just so good.

For relaxed fine dining in Harrogate, try Van Zeller. You'll enjoy a serious meal with great seasonality. The cheese counter at Weetons Food Hall makes you proud to be British: you cannot afford to miss out on such mouth feel.

With that sensation in mind, head north to stately Fountains Abbey, to immerse yourselt in the sheer beauty of the area – and enjoy the tea room. As you munch its delicious sourdough bread, think about the ancient apple cultures that the monks may have used to form their wild yeasts.

A few miles away, Ripon cathedral towers majestically over the city, which goes about its business around it, including making pork pies. In the north of England the competition is fierce over who makes the best pork pie, but one certain contender is T Appleton & Son (6 Old Market Place).

In a listed building in the centre Lockwood's offers true Northern hospitality and is the place to eat in Ripon.

Heading up into Wensleydale, the pretty town of Masham is home to the Black Sheep Brewery . Its depth and balance is amazing, and even better consumed with piece of Wensleydale from Hawes, just up the road.

Just off Masham's famous marketplace is Vennells Restaurant. This modern British restaurant has an excellent reputation for game in season.

Heading back towards Pateley Bridge, over wild windswept moors with grouse and partridge flying high and sheep munching the heather, you come to the village of Lofthouse, in Nidderdale. Its Crown Inn (01423 755206) is an honest pub, of the kind you rarely find, with homemade food in the true sense of the word.

Further down the road is Wath, with the Sportsman's Arms reached by a lovely little packhorse bridge. Its bar has a welcoming open fire, and the restaurant offers fine dining (including a wide range of locally shot game). There's a collection of old station clocks from when a railway used to run up the dale, and it also has 11 en suite rooms from £60 a night.

Frances Atkins is the Michelin-starred chef of the Yorke Arms, Pately Bridge, (01423 755243, yorke-arms.co.uk)

'This tiny restaurant in increasingly branché Bermondsey is an instant smash. To say it's a bit French is like saying cheese is a bit nice'

It's insanely hot, and the humidity is making my person stick to flat surfaces. A large bug has just flown into my bra and I'm not entirely convinced it isn't still there. We haven't been able to score one of the pair of outside tables, the entire blackboard menu is only nine dishes long, and the pal has ordered the dish I wanted, so I'm stuck with that old cliche, lapin à la moutarde. My mood isn't sunny.

The rabbit arrives and it's uniformly shades of beige. It's in an unlovely tangle, plonked on top of its pommes purée, looking more like pulled pork. And then I take a mouthful and the irritations of the day slip from me as easily as the rabbit slips down my neck. It is gorgeous: the meat silky and slow-cooked, still tasting quite definitely of bunny; the mash of the Robuchon school, rammed with butter, rich and luxurious. There's a light, creamy, mustardy sauce that just – just – stops short of richness overkill. I want to anoint myself in it, bathe in it, sink into it with a beatific grin. I think I may be in actual love.

This tiny restaurant in a former sandwich shop in increasingly branché Bermondsey is an instant smash. To say it's a bit French is like saying cheese is a bit nice. After our flirtations with America and south-east Asia, it seems we're rekindling our horn for trad French. Unlike the big, glittery jobs, the Balthazars and Zédels, this is a distillation of the trend, bijou and delicious. The red leather banquettes, the black-and-white-tiled floor, the paper tablecloths with booking names (and the occasional paean of customer praise) scrawled upon them: it adds up to a big, garlic-breathed, Gallic bear hug.

Owner Hervé Durochat is out front, a consonant-mangling sweetiepie who treats his customers as though they were long-lost pals. His partners are sommelier Alex Bonnefoy behind the bar, and in the kitchen, ex-Morgan M chef Sylvain Soulard. This pedigree goes some way to explaining why there are people still fighting to get in long after 10pm. Durochat polished his charm at José Pizarro's neighbouring mini-empire; between them, they're turning Bermondsey Street into a must-visit destination.

The menu changes every day. Here are some recent items: caille rôti, lentilles de Puy; suprême de volaille aux mousserons; Paris-Brest; tarte au citron. If it wasn't so heartfelt, it'd be 'Allo 'Allo comical. But it's not hackneyed: the classicism is given… well, not the dreaded full twist, but judicious tweaks. So quiche lorraine arrives as a kind of cheesecake, the trembly, savoury custard set on top of what I can't stop myself describing as a buttery biscuit base. Crisps of salty cured ham – Bayonne? – are perched on top, and dotted all around is more ham, chopped into little hummocks with wholegrain mustard. Sublime céleri rémoulade is coated with homemade mayo (more mustard), slivers of green apple and masses of peeled crevettes grises. There are cubes of an oddly granular apple jelly, too, which I'm writing off as youthful enthusiasm.

There's nothing I don't like about Casse-Croûte. I'm not fazed by its steak au poivre, a pungent, chewy bavette with an underpowered, too-creamy sauce and odd, tomato-laced sauté potatoes. And why serve this in a bowl? I don't mind the over-crisped chocolate profiteroles. The wine list may be all-French, but it features some recherché crackers: we try an almost sherry-like Jurançon vin jaune and a perky, biodynamic syrah-grenache called Poivre d'Ane. I even forgive tables so Frenchly close together that you're forced to eavesdrop (according to the enchanting chaps beside us, it doesn't matter how much you fork out on dating, it still doesn't guarantee you a, um, happy ending).

I'd come here weekly if I could. This is reasonably priced food designed to deliver pleasure from chaps who know how to have a good time. They've recreated a France viewed through rosé-filled glasses. Santé.

• Casse-Croûte, 109 Bermondsey Street, London SE1, 020-7407 2140. Open all week, 9am-10pm (5pm Sun). About £25 a head plus wine and service.

Food 8/10
Atmosphere 8/10
Value for money 9/10

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A Michelin-starred chef and a sculptor admit that they're not afraid to speak their minds. To appear in this column, email meandyou@observer.co.uk

HIS STORY Tom Kerridge, 40, chef-owner at the Michelin-starred Hand & Flowers

Beth's first sentence to me was: "Will you give me £3 for the stripper, please?" We were at a club in north London and I thought: "This girl's pretty cool." We'd only known each other a few days, but she went to work and left me asleep in her flat. She had worried all day I was going to rob her. Instead she came home and I'd cooked her tea – a simple chicken dish. I'm not sure if she was more pleased with the tea or the fact that her telly was still there.

After that, Beth would come and meet me after work, we'd go out and party until six in the morning, go for breakfast somewhere and then go home. It was all pretty rock'n'roll. I like to think we still are a bit. I've just turned 40 and we've had the biggest party the world has ever seen. It was in a big converted barn up the road, just like a massive illegal rave from 1991, but with loads of 40-year-old chefs and our mates.

When we opened the Hand & Flowers, the idea was for me to be able to cook and for us to make enough money for Beth to afford to be a full-time sculptor. Three years turned into five, and now, after nearly nine years, the pub is hugely successful and Beth is now much more of an artist than a restaurateur. Which is just as well because, in the first year of running the pub, she left me three times! We both are passionate and outspoken – neither of us is afraid of saying what we believe in. Beth certainly isn't a "yes" woman, which is great.

We both respect each other's skills. I'm a huge fan of art. I like to buy it and I love visiting galleries. But to see Beth making art is one of the best things ever. I sent her to Carrara in Italy for three weeks, where they have the marble Michelangelo used for his sculptures. She made a fantastic piece – a serpent as a collar and tie – which is my favourite as it represents that she does what she loves now.

HER STORY Beth Kerridge, 43, sculptor and co-owner of the Hand & Flowers

I realised Tom was the one about three days after we met. And then it took me six weeks to ask him to marry me. When you find the one that's it, isn't it? I was in awe of him – he's a hugely dynamic guy. I went and bought a ring with my sister, and then met Tom after work, late on a Saturday night. He said yes before I finished my sentence. We sat in Leicester Square with a bottle of champagne. It must've been about two o'clock in the morning because the guy that was sweeping the road came over and said: "I don't know what you're celebrating, but congratulations anyway."

We're like best friends, really. Our secret is just being honest. There aren't many people whose opinions I respect when they're saying something about my sculpture, but Tom is one of them. He's the same with me about his food. There was one instance where he'd bought these beautiful plates, and he was very proud of the meal that was going on them. And I told him: "It's great food, but I hate the plates." I didn't want him to put food out where the plate was more dominant than the food. He went in a proper strop about it, but the next day the plate had disappeared.

He's the same: he's very good at seeing the obvious stuff that I overlook sometimes with my sculpture. We've got a great understanding of each other – we're not takers, as far as our relationship is concerned. Although I still do owe him that £3.

Proper Pub Food by Tom Kerridge is published by Absolute Press, £20. To order a copy for £15, with free UK p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop. Tom Kerridge's Proper Pub Food is on BBC2 later this summer. For information, go to thehandandflowers.co.uk

If you'd like to appear in this column, email meandyou@observer.co.uk

Wonderful food, great service, a sense of calm… the only things to suffer in this great Edinburgh diner are your arteries

58a North Castle Street, Edinburgh (0131 220 2513). Meal for two, including drinks and service £130

The Honours in Edinburgh does the thing that the very best restaurants do: it lets you through the door and then very politely bars the way to the rest of the world. For the time it takes to eat there it is a place apart. If they slung a sign across the front that read, "Do come in; nothing bad can ever happen here," I would take their word for it. Inside it is all honey-toned wood veneer, black and white tiling, down-lighters and the soft slap of leather banquette on arse. It feels like being locked away tidily inside the drinks cabinet of someone with exquisite good taste. It is the very essence of bourgeois Edinburgh, realised in 60 neatly laid-out covers.

The professionalism is to be expected. It was opened in 2011 by Martin Wishart who, long ago, led the way for upscale dining in the city. This is meant to be his more downmarket offering, though only in the manner of a string of pearls for those who have tired of wearing diamonds. The website claims it is named after the discovery by Sir Walter Scott, who lived nearby, of the Scottish crown jewels, also known as the Honours of Scotland. Likewise, they say it is a tribute to Scottish flavours, though having eaten there I would have to say it is only those Scottish flavours which have a second home in the Dordogne. This is an unashamedly French restaurant.

A crab cappuccino could almost be given the tag "modern retro". A decade ago it was apparently illegal to serve a soup in this country unless it had first been bulked up with cream and then beaten to a froth with one of those hand cappuccino beaters that were all the rage back when we also thought flares were cool. I used to love taking the piss out of those soups, though mostly, I realise now, because they were so ubiquitous. It's rather lovely to get one again, especially done as well as this. It's a big flat bowl – rather than a faux coffee cup – of intense crab soup, with 10 udder squirts of cream, tumescent with froth. Lurking in the depths are hunks of white crab meat and dollops of garlicky rouille. It is a soup to get lost in.

A tuna tartare with a cucumber mousse that's so light it is flirting dangerously with being called a foam, is a self-consciously delicate plate of girl's food, but gets extra marks for the seasoning of the fish. Too often tuna is left to fend for itself and becomes just so much lightly fishy protein; here it has been properly dressed. Ox cheek bordelaise is the sort of thing French people would come here to eat out of nostalgia: long-braised jowl the colour of teak, duvets of mash whipped up with half a day's production from the dairy, a sauce you could weather-protect fences with (in a good way) and glistening pearls of bone marrow.

Only a dish of slightly overdone halibut, cooked on the bone, lets the side down. But it comes with a de-boned and mousse-filled pig's trotter, so everything's fine. A few judiciously chosen bits of pig can save most things. A side of creamed spinach, with big punches of nutmeg, is simply outrageous. Spinach is meant to be good for you and this isn't. It's both too much and completely irresistible. We do not resist it.

The soufflé of the day – how can you not love a place that changes its soufflé like the rest of us change our pants? – is wild strawberry. This is grandstanding. There's very little point doing anything with wild strawberries other than eating them whole and fresh. But it's a fine piece of work: pert and soft in the centre and crisp at the edges. A dollop of lime sorbet adds necessary zing. A gateau of pear and chocolate and espresso is equally smart and shiny.

We drink a crisp white Austrian wine, hand them the contents of our bank account and, having taken a deep breath, head out the door. Out there the real world has been waiting patiently for us. And finally we are ready to meet it again.

Cumbrian venue nabbed the top spot in annual top 50 ranking with cuisine that is 'not science but nature'

If cod "yolk", oyster pebbles or sandwort are to your taste, and distance is no object, it would be wise to book now for a table at L'Enclume restaurant, as it has just been judged the best in the UK.

Chef Simon Rogan's riverside restaurant in Cartmel, Cumbria, has taken top spot for the first time in the Good Food Guide's annual top 50 ranking, pushing Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck at Bray, Berkshire, into second place.

The two Michelin-starred restaurant, which was featured in The Trip, a 2010 BBC comedy starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, was awarded the No 1 spot for Rogan's "fantastic way with seasonal ingredients from the Cumbrian land and coast that are a joyful celebration of this country's magnificent diversity".

The Good Food Guide, which was first published in 1951, was bought from Which? by Waitrose earlier this year. Some expressed concern this might result in bias, as the upmarket grocer uses Blumenthal in its advertising campaign and he has created a ready-meals range for the supermarket.

Clearly not so. The independent inspectors, who secretly review the restaurants, gave both a perfect 10 cooking score – L'Enclume for the second year in a row and The Fat Duck for the sixth year in a row. But the guide's consultant editor, Elizabeth Carter, said: "Rogan rightfully takes his place as leader of the pack when it comes to modern British cooking."

Rogan, who trained under Marco Pierre White, said: "This is something we have always dreamed about. We have received this accolade because of our focus on both the food product and the customer – keeping it natural and fresh in the kitchen, and friendly but professional in the dining room."

Until recently Rogan was of a Hestonian persuasion himself, deconstructing and reconstructing in his own culinary lab.

Although having always labelled the cuisine as "not science but nature", the restaurant switched in 2010 from the molecular to the earthy, with seasonal, but still unusual, farm produce.

Each day the spontaneous menu is based on the availability of vegetables, herbs and edible flowers sourced from Rogan's 12-acre organic farm, and served in the converted 800-year-old smithy.

Taking advantage of the Cumbrian soil, he often places vegetables at the centre of his creations: "A [vegetable] dish shows far more skill and imagination than turning out meat and two veg".

Food critic Jay Rayner has said Rogan made his name with his "small, precise and complex plates". There is no à la carte, just a choice of tasting menus of between eight and 12 courses – with prices ranging from £45 for a lunch menu to a dinner tasting menu of £120.

Typically the first eight courses to come from the kitchen are smaller snacks, with the rest resembling proper "dishes" and other smaller dishes to finish. Unlike a lot of other leading restaurants, L'Enclume, meaning 'anvil', doesn't have a three-month waiting list, and occasionally has "free-for-all" tables.

Reviewing the restaurant in 2011, Rayner wrote: "L'Enclume gets much of its ingredients from its own farm and while there is nothing rustic about Rogan's food – it is modernist and unashamed about its interest in process – it does show a commitment to the good stuff. Indeed, the whole enterprise is defined by self-confidence."

He added: "Service is slick, and the wine list doesn't make you feel like you are being punished for a nameless crime. But let's not pretend it's cheap, or even on nodding terms with cheap. It costs and big time. It's the kind of expense for which you would make a special trip; the sort I should have made years ago."

The 2014 edition sees all 10 restaurants from 2013 hang on to their top 10 ranking, with Cornish favourite Restaurant Nathan Outlaw rising to number three. Restaurant Sat Bains in Nottinghamshire and Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in London are at numbers four and five.

L'Enclume Menu on 3 September 2013:

Small plates

Oyster pebbles, Radish and perilla vinegar, Cream cheese wafer, Smoked eel with ham fat, Chicken skin and black pudding, Ragstone, malt, artichoke, Kales in hyssop, egg, ox tongue, Pea, calamint, crab sacks.

Mains

Cod 'yolk' with watercress, runner beans, salt and vinegar, Atlas carrots, chicken of the woods, truffle, nasturtium, Valley venison, charcoal oil, mustard and fennel, Grilled scallop and cauliflower with strawberry, raw scallop with wood sorrel, Potatoes in onion ashes, lovage and shoots, Wild bass, sandwort, thyme, grilled courgette with cockle, Reg's duck, sweetbreads, beetroot, fat hen, sweetcorn, elderflower vinegar, Blackberry, gooseberry, honey wine, Plum with malt, brown sugar, Anise hyssop, raspberry, milk skin, Meadow sweet, blueberry, bucklers sorrel, walnut, Sea buckthorn, sweet cheese, woodruff, Apple marigold fizz.

'We eat too much, if only to confirm they can keep up the standard. They can'

Restaurants can be like clever comedy: it's the seemingly throwaway lines that are the most telling. Our meal at The Dairy is bracketed by a duo of remarkable acts, neither of them ordered or charged for. As curtain-raiser, homemade rustic bread in a jute sack, served with a dollop of room-temperature butter smeared, as is the fashion, on a large pebble. It's a curious, not entirely appealing colour. But wow, the taste: it has been whipped up with smoked bone marrow. I didn't think there could be anything more luscious than good butter, but it seems there is.

And then the finale, just as we're winding down. A vintage biscuit tin with a scrumpled menu inside. On it are weeny homemade doughnuts, still warm, dusted with something peppery and aromatic (hibiscus sugar? Er, pepper sugar?); shards of the thinnest, most friable shortbread; and limpid apple jellies, concentrated appleyness, as sour-sweet as a gourmet Tangfastic. These may not have starring roles on the menu, but they're scene-stealers, little extra nuggets of solid gold after the credits have rolled.

If this is the stuff they give away… well, it's clear we're somewhere a bit special. The Dairy opened a few months ago with no marketing or publicity, but a ready-made audience of well-off restaurant-going neighbours pining for something better than Clapham's leerier joints. (It was food writer Diana Henry who pointed me to it.) The brick, neon and "reclaimed" furniture looked more nouveau burger bar than gastronomic blast, but slowly the jungle drums started pounding and the place has been rammed almost since day one.

No wonder. Our meal is a series of small thrills. From the little explosions of taste in a pea dish – thyme buds, lemon verbena jelly, mint granita – to the almond milk that comes with small rectangles of pork belly, it makes you beam with pleasure at the knowledge there's more to come. Chef Robin Gill's CV reads like a box-ticking of places to namedrop, including Noma and Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons. Their influences are plainly decipherable: the herbs and vegetables grown on the roof (sorrel and mint, broad beans and radishes); their own beehives; an emphasis on seasonality and the cult of the ingredient.

Take those peas: cooked just enough that there's still bite, with weeny cubes of blanched celery, fronds of celery leaf, torn nasturtium leaves and a mound of mousse so light it looks set to float off the plate. It has a wreathed-in-sunshine brightness of flavours. The pork belly's skin is so thin and crisp, its flesh and fat so marshmallowy, it's like eating piggy crème brûlée.

We eat too much: chicken liver mousse of preternatural lightness with a cap of peach and apple; a scotch egg where the sausagemeat is made from squid and a loose, pungent chorizo, the quail's egg yolk still almost liquid. But it's hard not to – if only to confirm that they can keep it up. They can.

There's an endearing knockabout quality to The Dairy: the fact that it operates as a cocktail bar till the wee small hours; the informality of both setup and staff; those old-school chairs and cinema seating, which I suspect aren't really salvaged at all. Some of the dishes could be finessed (I'm thinking of a slab of slow-cooked short rib that had a slight whiff of school dinner about it). And I do worry about the staff, tottering under the weight of heavy stoneware, bowls and basins, seemingly designed for Game Of Thrones feasting, not Clapham noshing. But I'd far rather be eating Robin Gill's wonderful food here, with his wife Sarah in her slouchy shorts singing the praises of their quirky and alluring wine list (we love the dangerously gluggable, unfiltered, natural Litrozzo from Lazio) than in some constipated temple of haute cuisine. Lucky Claphamites: with the arrival of this star turn, they're laughing.

• The Dairy 15 The Pavement, London SW4, 020-7622 4165. Open Tue 6-11pm, Wed-Thu noon-11pm, Fri noon-midnight, Sat 10am-midnight, Sun noon-8pm. Dinner £20-25 a head, plus drinks and service.

Food 8
Atmosphere 7
Value for money 8

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Cumbrian restaurant L'Enclume has been rated the best in the UK by the Good Food Guide – affirmation of a proud gastronomic revival in the region

Simon Rogan says the reaction to his second Michelin star was staggering, but the hullaballoo that greeted last week's accolade "topped the lot". His Cumbrian restaurant, L'Enclume, has been crowned the best in the UK by the Good Food Guide, beating Heston Blumenthal and The Fat Duck, 250 miles to the south in Berkshire. The distance is significant. Rogan's most recent honour is a triumph forged in – and for – the north.

"The connection to our surroundings has been the absolute reason for our success. It's dependent on our location," Rogan said. L'Enclume lies on the wet western slopes of Cumbria, close to Morecambe Bay, across which lies Lancashire and, beyond, the vast conurbations of Manchester and Merseyside.

Throughout the north-west of England, Rogan's achievement has been celebrated as the latest affirmation of a proud gastronomic revival. The oft-prevailing view from the south, of philistine palates and chips and gravy, is dismissed as bigotry.

Yet even Rogan, from Southampton, admits that when he started L'Enclume in the village of Cartmel 11 years ago, he was not impervious to such prejudice. "When we opened, our location was largely a negative, being so far away from the media, so far away from civilisation. With the after-effects of foot-and-mouth disease it was quite a depressing area.

"But as the reputation has grown, its location has become a key feature. I was probably a naive southerner when I arrived, I didn't think much was going on up there. That quickly changed. I found out pretty quick that it was not all doom and gloom. If you are at the top of your game, you can flourish here as much as you can in Mayfair."

On Thursday Rogan's northern love-in continues apace with the opening of his Mr Cooper's House & Garden in Manchester, building on the spectacular success of his other Mancunian establishment, The French, itself number 12 in the Good Food Guide's top 50 and judged its best new entry, one of 14 debutants from the north-west.

Three other restaurants from the region feature in the top 50, including Fraiche in Prenton, Merseyside, while, across the river Mersey, Liverpool restaurant Delifonseca is judged readers' restaurant of the year in the guide, published on Monday.

Three years after BBC2's The Trip, featuring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, introduced the concept that culinary refinement might actually exist in the north of England, many are advocating the north-west as a foodie destination in its own right.

Thom Hetherington, managing director of Northern Restaurant and Bar Show, the region's hospitality event designed to showcase an evolving gastronomic elegance, said: "A serious foodie could come to the north-west, eat in Michelin-starred restaurants, visit the most incredible Japanese and Chinese restaurants, every cuisine. You could put those people in the north-west for two weeks and they would leave with an phenomenal experience of what dining is available in the UK."

Mark Garner, founder of Manchester Confidential, an online magazine that scrutinises the city's best restaurants, says that during the 1980s the north-west had three restaurants of note. That figure is now 136. The influx of professionals due to Salford's MediaCity, a growing regional self-confidence and a greater appreciation of the potential of the local produce and suppliers were helping drive standards, said Garner.

"Farmers are not just thinking of supplying the milk board, but are getting a bit of kit and making artisan cheese," he said, speaking after interviewing celebrity chef James Martin, who is opening a restaurant in central Manchester this month and who, according to Garner, was "marvelling at the ingredients and quality of local produce".

Ten miles from L'Enclume, across the southern flanks of the Lake District, is Crosthwaite's Punchbowl Inn and Restaurant. Head chef Scott Fairweather, 22, says the burgeoning culinary standards of the area alongside the quality of the produce had stopped young chefs from heading "down south".

Fairweather, Cumbria's young chef of the year, who talks to local suppliers daily to ensure consistency and quality, believes an intense competition is pushing up diners' expectations, citing the recent arrival of Ian Swainson, finalist in ITV show Britain's Best Dish, who has just joined the Samling, which overlooks nearby Lake Windermere.

"Everybody is pushing each other, bouncing off each other's ideas," he said. This week Fairweather will present a cookery demonstration with television chef Phil Vickery at the Westmorland County Show, whose food tent is the largest in its 214-year history.

Three miles from the county show is The Plough at Lupton – one of this year's Good Food Guide new entries, and where manager Abi Lloyd regularly caters to customers who have driven hours to sample Cumbrian produce. "We've noticed our clientele starting to ask a lot of questions. What's good? What's local? There is much more awareness about local food," she said. She mentions one of their most popular dishes, the £11.95 fisherman's platter; the source of its components constitute a geographical guide to the area – Morecambe Bay, Lune Valley, the port of Fleetwood, the Lake District village of Hawkshead and railway hamlet of Oxenholme.

Garner said the region's natural diversity and history should make it obvious that it was capable of sustaining a complex gastronomic culture.

"London forgets that the region has a bigger gross domestic product than Denmark, which is currently boxing well above its weight with very poor ingredients. We've got the ingredients, not moss scraped off a beach with hot water poured through it or molecular-style cooking, which will not last.

"London and the south still have a certain view of the north – cloth caps and whippets, and Coronation Street does us no favours – but when people come here and have a look they are gobsmacked at the quality of life."

Another reason for the soaring culinary standards, says Hetherington, is Manchester's food blogging culture. "The number of food bloggers and food nerds based in Manchester is off the scale. Once, these people were flying to Spain, Biarritz, The Fat Duck, they were Manchester-based and travelling constantly. Now they're delighted that they can do it on their own doorstep."

How much fun can you have in Soho for £3.30? A lot more than you'd think if you head for Leong's Legend

4 Macclesfield Street, London W1 (020 7287 0288). Meal for two: £40-£60

It began with a craving and ended with garlic breath so powerful it could have floored the cat. I'm not apologising – I've never much liked my cat. Here's what happened: earlier this summer I went to Yank Sing, a huge Chinese restaurant in San Francisco so highly regarded for its dim sum that on Sunday lunchtimes it feels like half the city is queuing for tables. By far the best thing we ate were the xiao long bao, the famed Shanghainese soupy dumplings, the silky skins holding a bolus of minced pork surrounded by hot broth. God knows how they're made – cold when the broth is a solid jelly? – but they are one of the most powerfully comforting food items ever devised by this or any other species.

Back in London I wanted them again. I called my friend David Coulter, a musician who survived seven years in the Pogues. Every restaurant critic needs a musician among their circle. They tour a lot, get bored and hungry, and end up knowing where to find the good stuff. "Go to Leong's Legend in Chinatown," he said. "Plus, they do those pork buns that David Chang flogs for big bucks in New York." Ah yes: slices of long-braised pork belly stuffed inside soft fluffy steamed buns, with greenery and sauce. Chang, who is New York's Asian answer to Gordon Ramsay, only without the people skills, has built a career flogging them. Yum Buns, the street-food outfit which now has a permanent base near Farringdon, has also lovingly ripped them off for London. I didn't know you could get them at Leong's Legend, too.

A few weeks ago I said the pleasing but nose-bleedingly expensive food at Hutong in the Shard was available in other places at a fraction of the cost and without the view. Leong's Legend, which specialises in the genre-crossing food of Taiwan, is one of them. It barely has windows, let alone a view. It's all teahouse hardwood stools and bare tables; the waitresses don't so much provide service as carry stuff while gossiping over each other's phones. All to the good. It makes the food the star.

They offer variants on xiao long bao, but we go for the basic, which brings eight pouches of loveliness for £6. The skins aren't quite as delicate as those in San Francisco, but not far off. The challenge is to eat them at the right temperature. If they cool they'll stick to the steamer's greaseproof paper then tear when you pick them up and leak the stock. That would never do. Eat them too hot and you'll scorch your tongue. David's smart ruse was to pluck them out – by hand; you'll perforate them with chopsticks – and cool them in the saucer of dark vinegar with its julienne of fresh ginger. They are a truly absorbing eating experience.

The pork buns are listed as Taiwanese mini kebabs and are the most fun you can have in Chinatown for £3.30. Stuffed inside the neutral pillow of bun are tangles of pig plus fronds of coriander, the crunch of peanut and a little sugar. Gosh. The menu offers many things designed to scare the children – spicy pork intestines with crispy skins, anyone? – but also the ripe promise of a fresh oyster omelette: sweet salty molluscs and spring onion enclosed in an eggy blanket with a dribble of sweet-sour sauce.

And then the cat-flooring dish of stir-fried chilli crab, Wind Shelter Bay style. Apparently in Wind Shelter Bay they like to fry their crab and cover it with dunes of deep-fried minced garlic, spring onions and red chillies with a little sugar and (not too much) salt. I picked meat from the shells by hand, until my fingertips were salty and sticky, and finished up by spooning the unmissable fried garlic into my mouth, unable to let it go. And then back home I breathed on the cat, and I'm absolutely certain it winced. Leong's Legend is exactly what we all need now and then: a place that satisfies a basic need.

Boundary-pushing pizzerias are serving toppings that would make a Neapolitan swoon – and not in a good way. But some of them are delicious. Would you order a doner kebab pizza?

In Naples, there are militants who insist that there are only three truly authentic varieties of pizza: marinara, margherita and margherita extra, with buffalo mozzarella. Across wider Italy, the list of acceptable pizza toppings is tightly circumscribed. It's a decent bet, therefore, that Italians will hate the coming trend in Britain's pizzerias.

From Homeslice's oxtail and bone marrow pizzas to the Welsh lamb and mint pesto slice at Baravin in Aberystwyth, a new wave of restaurants is slipping the shackles of Italian orthodoxy and getting creative with toppings. In Manchester, at Artisan, you can even order a lamb doner kebab pizza. Yes, really.

More remarkably, unlike their Hawaiian and peking duck predecessors, some of these experimental creations actually work. Dressed with a soy glaze, Homeslice's mushroom, ricotta and pumpkin seed slice cleverly balances savoury depth, freshness and a nutty textural variety. "I'm not Italian, and I've never felt confined by the traditional toppings," says the New Zealand chef and co-owner, Ryan Jessup. "I didn't want any kind of gimmick, I just wanted to put flavours together that worked, using traditional processes and quality ingredients."

America's irreverent approach to "pie" was a key inspiration for Pizza East and Voodoo Ray's gently innovative gourmet pizzas, both in London. The latter sells a savoy cabbage and bacon slice, which anglicises the cult brussels sprouts and pancetta pizza sold at Motorino in New York. Using local ingredients is a hallmark of these new, upstart British pizzerias.

For others, getting creative just seems to be a natural progression. As a nation, we've finally got to grips with the basics of real pizza (proper 00-flour doughs; wood-fired ovens); the next stage is to put our stamp on it. At Pizzaface in Brighton, which tops its pizzas with lamb proscuitto, smoked tuna and chipotle chillies, or the Crate Brewery in London, which serves a laksa chicken pizza, the approach is pretty radical. Lardo, also in London, represents a quieter shift to more sophisticated Italian ingredients (porchetta, lardo itself), which are unheard of as pizza toppings in Italy.

"We're obsessed by food and we love playing around," says Lisa Richards, co-owner of Great British Pizza Co in Margate, whose recent specials have included a Parma ham and nectarine pizza, and a take on Turkish lahmacun, topped with minced lamb, parsley and lemon juice. "And," she adds, "our specials always sell out."

As a co-owner of Pleb, a Lewes street food operation that serves authentic Roman pizza, Joe Lutrario doesn't particularly like this trend. He and his business partner still argue over whether to use onions or not, never mind braised lamb: "It's semantics, but at that point it probably stops being Italian pizza. Capers, olives and anchovies go really well with mozzarella and tomatoes and, in my opinion, there are probably only another 10 ingredients that do. We're pretty conservative."

However, in his other life as a senior reporter at Restaurant magazine, Lutrario predicts that "British" pizza could well take off: "Possibly at the expense of established places, such as Pizza Express. Local ingredients, local beers, pizza – it just works as a business model. Pizza is high-margin, relatively easy to knock out, and it doesn't encourage people to stay for long."

At Artisan, on a wood-fired pizza menu that also includes a (pretty awful) Thai curry number and a (pretty awesome) shaved potato and chorizo pizza topped with game crisps, the doner kebab is its biggest seller. It is a novelty dish, but a surprisingly effective one. After all, what is pizza but a flatbread? This is just an open doner kebab.

Artisan's executive chef, John Branagan, actually wanted to call these pizzas flatbreads, but watched Jamie Oliver fail to communicate his topped British flatbreads concept at Union Jacks. "We were too chicken," he says. "It's been done before and people have reverted to using the word pizza." Think of these new-wave pizzas as flatbreads, however (at Artisan, generally the ingredients aren't cooked on the pizza, but added after), and it all begins to make more sense.

Branagan likes to retain a pizza look by including some sort of tomato sauce, but he plays around with it to make it suitable. For example, the pulled pork pizza uses a BBQ sauce. On certain Homeslice pizzas, Jessup has dispensed with tomato sauce altogether, using beurre blanc on his mackerel pizza and a kind of creamed corn soup on his corn and chorizo. Get over the necessity to start every pizza/flatbread with a tomato sauce, and suddenly the potential variations are endless. "The base is just a carrier," says Branagan.

Not that Italians will be persuaded. "My father-in-law is Italian, a retired chef," says Branagan, "and he would pass out [at this]."

Stories have always been shared over a good meal, but now chefs and artists are using the food itself to spin yarns, from ancient myths to family memories

It is the final balmy evening of summer and the streets of Southwark in London, where city slickness is swallowing up the area's Dickensian shabbiness, look like a film set. I am in a modern, glass-walled restaurant, sitting at a blond-wood table. A candle flickers from an incongruous Wee Willie Winkie-style holder and the menus are tucked inside an old, handsomely bound tome. When the first course of bread and dripping arrives, the waiter points out that the molten wax pooling beneath the candle is in fact beef dripping.

The restaurant, which opened in the spring, is called Story, and it is perhaps the most literal example of the current cultural enthusiasm for revelling in the narrative powers of food. Each dish is delivered with a backstory (beef dripping was one of chef/patron Tom Sellers' dad's favourite tastes), and diners are encouraged to leave books and their own tales.

Italian chef Massimo Bottura (whose restaurant in Italy is No 3 on the World's 50 Best list), is all about stories, too. Without them, he says, he'd have no recipes. The tagline on his website is: "12 tables in the heart of Modena tell a story of tradition in evolution," the menu quotes Proust's madeleine moment. He has even made videos of the yarns behind some of his dishes, such as Homage to Thelonious Monk and An Eel Swimming up the River Po.

You could be forgiven for dismissing all this as pretentious twaddle, but Sellers earnestly says he first embraced the narrative side of food when he had taken his technical skills as far as he could. "I kept asking why I was eating something. It all leads to a story," he says. "Subconsciously, when you eat something, your brain is always comparing it to what you've had previously; it tries to find a similarity. The more powerful the story behind the food, the more it evokes the memory, which in turn enhances the flavour."

There is no doubt that flavour is inextricably linked with memory and emotion. They're all processed by the same part of the brain. So in posh cuisine terms, the story element could be seen as a natural progression from the sensory play of Heston Blumenthal and Ferran Adria's "molecular gastronomy", adding another cerebral and emotional layer. And a good story can engage us like nothing else.

The artist Gayle Chong Kwan, who has been working with food and memory for more than a decade through community-based projects, views the restaurant world's foray into this area as somewhat gimmicky. She finds food a refreshingly accessible medium to work in, and rejects "the way in which playing with food and bringing out memories and stories and sensory experiences now seems to be for the very rich."

Next week, as part of a series of artist-hosted public dinners at Tate Modern, Chong Kwan will present a menu centred around the myth of Adonis, and her own Chinese-Mauritian heritage. The starters will be served on a bed of lettuce, similar to that upon which Adonis's body was laid to rest after being gored by a wild boar. His porcine killer is represented by five-spice-crackling pork with plum sauce. The spices are relevant because in ancient Greece, and in other cultures since, they were seen as "highly dangerous in arousing women's passions".

For Caroline Hobkinson, an artist whose theatrical, gastronomic storytelling events have become her full-time job, food is: "a manifestation of our longings. It is also how we remember holidays and big life events. It is almost the vocabulary of our life." She has concocted dinners in an air-raid shelter and a Berlin flat divided into pre-unification East and West, and leads a foodie walking tour of Shoreditch called Broken Biscuits, covering the original site of the Old Nichol, one of the most notorious slums of Victorian Britain.

On a more basic level, though, mealtimes are the traditional setting for friends and families to share and pass on stories. Good food loosens tongues. "When I like someone," says Hobkinson, "I say we should have dinner – as in, we should tell each other our stories." This chimes with Sellers, too. In his teens, he says: "I didn't give a shit about what my brother was doing, or my mum. But once a day we'd sit around the dinner table and everyone said what happened at school or work. Food brings people together and becomes a story in itself."

Many of the tales that have inspired Sellers' and Bottura's menus focus on the ingredients and the land that produced them, mirroring the current obsession with provenance (especially post-horsemeat scandal). But whether it's the stories, the fantastical recipes they inspire or the sense of fun in contributing something to his restaurant that sparks the diners' desire to share, Sellers says that people have deposited all kinds of books. One woman inscribed hers with a note explaining that she'd bought it for a holiday, but never got to read it because she met her husband on the trip. Aw, I say, can you remember which book? "I'm sorry," he replies with typical cheffy bluntness, "I've so many fucking books, I don't know."

• Gayle Chong Kwan's Garden of Adonis dinner will be taking place in Meschac Gaba's Museum of Contemporary African Art at Tate Modern on September 16

'Cheap ingredients, massively marked up, leave a murky taste in my mouth'

As a descendant of actual Italian peasants – the photo of one black-clad great-great-grandmother, clutching a scythe, a patch covering her empty eyesocket and looking like a jovial grim reaper, is a particular family favourite – I approached Paesan with a degree of caution. Turns out there's nothing about the place that doesn't make me want to grab Nonna Fedele's scythe and put it to fruitful use.

Why does it give me such a bad dose of the pip? Is it that they've ripped off their entire look – from the reused Crodino bottles, tomato tin ice-buckets and salvaged chairs to the clipboard and butcher's paper menus – from Russell Norman's Polpo? I'm particularly needled by the "artfully" cracked exterior tiles. If only they'd copied the strength of Polpo's cocktails, too: our negronis are weaselly, over-iced disappointments. Or the insistence that they're purveying "cucina povera" (a style of cooking born of extreme Italian poverty)? Meat is rarely used in this; and, if it is, it's of the innards and extremities variety.

Using this as a hook to serve cheap ingredients, massively marked up, to droves of affluent London thirtysomethings leaves as murky a taste in my mouth as Paesan's arancini. Oh, and how does steak "tagliata" with parmesan and Roman misticanza salad sit under this banner? Answer: it doesn't. The whole thing is just so much clunky marketing coglioni.

Anyway, who cares, if the food is great, right? If only. Some of it is so actively unpleasant it defeats the pal, who's been known to eat day-old pizza with anchovies and salad cream for breakfast. The risotto, with radicchio, gorgonzola and dusty-tasting walnuts, makes me think of those medieval drawings of lions and elephants by people who'd never seen the animals. This, dense and stodgy, constructed more like a pilau and tasting viciously of raw garlic, comes across as if it's been made by someone with no experience of an actual risotto. There are orecchiette, Puglia's favourite ear-shaped pasta, with trend-ticking n'duja and cavolo nero. Well, allegedly: all we can taste is heat and smoked paprika. Perhaps the sausage and brassica have been microwave-nuked? It's as lava-hot when we give up on it as it was when we started.

Gnudi are a tricky number to pull off: featherlight ricotta dumplings, all air and fragrance. Paesan's feel as if they've been made from masticated blotting paper. Their sauce tastes freakishly like a tin of Sainsbury's chopped tomatoes with onion and basil tipped on top.

I've been waiting for pizza fritta (fried) to hit the mainstream over here: this wonderfully reprehensible carbfest was born in Naples and has become a bit of a thing in New York. When done well, as at Naples' Starita, it's the snack of the gods. Paesan's version is thick, doughy, raw-tasting, dotted with "fennel salsiccia" as compacted and dun-coloured as Findus's finest.

And those woeful arancini – lemon and courgette, they say. All we get is salt, dried-tasting herbs and a footy whiff suggestive of that parmesan that comes in cardboard drums and looks like what's left in the bottom of your Ped Egg callus remover. The consistency is soggy pap.

I look at our leftover risotto and am struck by an unnerving thought. But I'm not going there, I'm not. Is there anything good? I'll grudgingly allow them the fritto misto: the fish are fresh and it's fried well enough. But it lacks any form of seasoning. Perhaps they ran out after the arancini.

That this derivative throwback exists in the same street as Moro and Caravan smacks of sheer gall. That it's rammed to its walls demonstrates how depressingly easy it is to snow the punters. Paesan's corporate speak whiffles on about "cucina povera" being "a way of life" and talking "from one paesan to another". The owners are also responsible for the tourist trap Pasta Brown in Covent Garden.

As one paesan to another, I'd like to say, do please vaffanculo.

• Paesan 2 Exmouth Market, London EC1, 020-7837 7139. Open all week, lunch noon-3pm (from 10am Sat & Sun); dinner 5-11pm (closed Sun). Three courses plus drinks and service, about £45 a head.

Food 2/10
Atmosphere N/a (it doesn't belong to them)
Value for money 2/10

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In his quest to find superb cooking, Jay is prepared to go where most of us can't afford to – Britain's priciest restaurant

Great Milton, Oxfordshire (01844 278 881). Meal for two, including wine and service £400 (yes, really)

I once claimed I ate in lousy restaurants so you wouldn't have to. The circumstances today are subtly different. I ate at Raymond Blanc's Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons because you never will. Granted, that's less selfless, but it is realistic. Look at the price: £400 for two. And that's without shaking down the excruciating wine list – we had a few by the glass – or choosing the nine-course tasting menu at £154. Add the premium wine flight to that at £299, plus 10% service and – bingo! – it's a grand for two. Is Le Manoir the most expensive restaurant in Britain? How about "yeah"? I think "yeah" covers it nicely.

Cue outbreaks of words like "obscenity" and "shameless", and that's from my own family. To which I can only say go get angry about something that really matters, which does not include the way those lucky enough to have the surplus income choose to spend it. At this level Le Manoir's customers are buying memories, not a cure for rickets. The memories they are buying may not be those that you seek, but they suit others. Nobody chastises the bloke who, say, spends £500 on a weekend in Paris merely to watch the rugby. This is no different.

All of which is, of course, an endless apologia for one fact. I was gagging to eat at Le Manoir. I have been in this gig for nearly 15 years and yet I had never been there – which is like being a trainspotter who's never been to Crewe. I'm also a big fan of late-career television-friendly Blanc. It's not just that he punctuates his BBC2 series by barking "Ooh la la" like it's normal (it isn't). It's also his refusal to compromise. Many TV cooks try to claim that preparing great food is a piece of piss. That's a big filthy lie. Blanc doesn't pretend. He shows you that great cooking isn't easy. It's complicated and takes not just great taste, but oceans of experience and hard graft. Plus, killer ingredients, which is the point of Le Manoir's kitchen, led these days by head chef Gary Jones, with Blanc never far away. To understand it you need, before dinner, to take a stroll across lawns which haven't so much been manicured as trimmed with nail clippers, through the doorway in the old red-brick wall, and into the glorious Narnia of the kitchen garden beyond.

Many restaurants big up garden plots which rarely amount to more than an old bath planted with some knackered chives and rocket that bolted three weeks ago. Le Manoir's is a Kitchen Garden with a capital K and G. Here are artichokes and fennel, beans and salad leaves many and various. There is a mushroom valley, a plot of micro herbs and a brass scarecrow modelled on Blanc himself. Why, of course. Here is everything any serious cook could ever want and a bunch of other stuff they never knew they needed.

The food served in the honey-coloured stone house with its thick-carpeted, softly lit dining room, is an expression of this garden. No single dish will astonish you through inventiveness. The food at Le Manoir isn't clever. It's just bloody nice. Nothing is gelled or squirted through a nitrous gun to look like fairy spit or dehydrated and reformed into the shape of the Ruins of Antioch. The killer ingredients are simply allowed to be themselves.

So we take our seats, along with the extended family celebrating a milestone and the gay couple and the elderly pair from Yorkshire, he with his napkin suspended on a gold chain and clip affair that I covet.

We start with a pitch-perfect terrine of humble beetroot with a quenelle of horseradish sorbet. It tastes like that Jewish condiment, chrain. It is indeed that flavour, but re-presented in bespoke Armani. It is both itself and so much more. It is earth and sweet and a hint of fire. There is a risotto of summer vegetables with the lightest of chervil creams, that herb hinged deftly between tarragon and parsley. Of course the rice is bang on, each grain separate but clinging to its neighbour. What matters is the crunch and sweetness of the vegetables within. The garden returns to the table once more in a salad accompanying roasted scallops and langoustine. Both dishes are riffs on Le Manoir's horticulture.

Veal kidneys, a blush of taffeta pink at their heart, come with half the contents of the allium section – baby leeks roasted just so, the soft hit of onion so many ways – all brought together by a red-wine sauce that has me mopping (with their own sour dough) at the plate until the glaze risks wearing thin. Sea bass and more langoustine turn up with lightly smoked mashed potatoes that have you tapping your wrists to check the blood can still push through the narrowed arteries.

At dessert there is a thin, crisp globe of nougatine filled with poached meringue and cream and lightly fried apricots. You wonder at the craftsmanship even as you destroy it. There is what they call "our millionaire shortbread" – hilarious given it probably is eaten regularly by millionaires – which is all toffee and crisp biscuit and salted butter ice cream and big medical bills.

Recently I visited a restaurant in California called Manresa which, like Le Manoir, holds two Michelin stars. The Japanese-accented food was interesting, but the experience was rendered tortuous by the intensely stupid service. Waiters had been drilled to walk in single file with one hand stapled to their backs; a sommelier attempted to flog us a wine 60% more expensive than the one we had chosen, and then turned frosty when we declined. It sapped the will; it poisoned the well.

Happily, Blanc's gaff restored faith. Front of house engaged like normal people and though we had to chivvy them along once – there's relaxed service and then there's service that's so laid back it's prone – it did feel like a special event. Which is to say, the staff were completely complicit in our collective act of delusion: that there is something justifiable about such ludicrous expense, however good the ingredients. It isn't justifiable. It's hard to excuse. But it is fabulous. And that's a different thing entirely.

News bites

If you crave Le Manoir's ingredient-led approach without having to sell your children, try the extraordinary £65 tasting menu at The Sportsman near Whitstable, where chef Stephen Harris does grand things with the best of Kentish produce. It looks like a knackered old pub; however, dishes such as his braised brill fillet in smoked-herring roe sauce or his mussel and bacon chowder are pure class. Look, the man makes his own pork scratchings. The Sportsman, Seasalter, Kent (01227 273 370)

The grouse season is underway and, despite good supply, prices vary from £125 for a five-course menu at William Drabble's Seven Park Place, through to £35 at Corrigan's to £26.50 at Le Café Anglais. Best deal: the Yorke Arms in Ramsgill where it's on the £35 all-inclusive lunch menu.

Read of the week Restaurant Babylon by Imogen Edwards-Jones, a glorious behind-the-scenes account of London's debauched hospitality business. Love the tale about the old man who died during the starters but stayed at the table as his family didn't want to make a fuss.

Why not pass on coke or tea and try something more adventurous such as basil water? Some experts offer their advice for teetotal dining out

For non-drinkers, eating out can be a depressing experience. As friends deliberate over a heavy wine menu and the sommelier makes recommendations that promise an ambrosial marriage between food and drink, deciding whether to opt for still or sparkling water feels a touch boring.

But despite the soft drinks market growing 3.3% last year, and a bewildering array of smoothies, energy drinks and, most recently, coconut waters flooding supermarket shelves, few are food friendly. "There's this implicit idea when you go for a meal that there's nothing good that goes with food," says award-winning mixologist Tony Conigliaro, designer of the drinks menu at the recently opened Grain Store, who created a bespoke nonalcoholic range that offers the same food-matching flavours as wine. "Soft drinks and fruit juices are full of sugar," he says, "but you can have savoury flavours that actually complement what's going on in the food." Take his hay and grass water, designed to match a dish flavoured with smoked hay: "It's had a great reception, and people have opted out of drinking alcohol because they've got these options."

Alcohol consumption outside the home fell by 30% between 2006 and 2011, and as many as 15% of the UK population describe themselves as teetotal. For Jameel Lalani, founder of boutique tea company Lalani & Co, it's part of a wider trend towards towards lighter dining embodied by restaurants like Gauthier, which focuses on vegetables and puts calorie counts on the menu. "People are looking at food and health as one and the same, instead of being separate," Lalani says. "They're moving from having just alcohol all the time to half bottles, lighter styles of wine, and now away from wine to nonalcoholic offerings."

But pairing nonalcoholic drinks and food brings its own challenges. "Alcoholic drinks have a length, they have a structure and a texture," says Conigliaro. "Other drinks don't have that, even the ones supposedly designed for the nonalcoholic market." His response was to bring the same molecular techniques from cocktail making – his bar, 69 Colebrooke Row, boasts an in-house laboratory – to fashion nonalcoholic drinks that approach the complexity of wine: "By adding bitter notes, tannic notes, polyphenols, you can create these natural structures that stretch the flavour out. It's like you're trying to entertain the brain for longer."

HKK, the latest offering from the Hakkasan group, has also launched a nonalcoholic range, a decision born out of what head sommelier Serdar Balkaya sees as a responsibility to its customers: "We should provide options to anybody. To Hindus, if they don't eat beef, or non-pork dishes if they're Muslim. And we should provide drinks to people who don't drink alcohol as well." Like Grain Store, HKK's nonalcoholic Orchard drinks are made from fruit and vegetable blends, but restaurants like Gauthier Soho are also experimenting with teas. Lalani, who designed Gauthier's tea flight, argues that tea's 5,000-year history, and the impact of soils, altitude and ageing methods, give it a similar complexity to wine that's only starting to be explored for food pairings.

"The fundamentals are the same," he says. "You want to match intensity, strength, you either want to complement flavours or contrast. But beyond the rules – like how you'd have a particular wine with a particular dish – it's largely a blank state." Lalani's tea sommelier training programme, which they've been running for the past two years, has seen an upsurge in interest from sommeliers looking to expand their knowledge, and who are especially intrigued by how different brewing methods and temperatures impact on an individual tea's taste. "It's an extra skill for really ambitious sommeliers to take on, and adds another level to their role. There's more than just selection and storage."

But even if you have neither a tea sommelier nor a cocktail laboratory to hand, making drinks at home to complement food isn't tricky. "Say you're having a bolognese, you can make a basil water," says Conigliaro. "Two or three basil leaves, stir them into iced water, and you'll get that beautiful perfume. All you need to do is release some of the essential oils, and herbs are great for that because they've got a quick release." As with food, it's about experimenting. If you aren't going to reach for a ready meal, why settle for a Coke? "People need to be more adventurous," agrees Balkaya. "Try things. Get some orange peel, cinammon, cloves. Just boil them up into syrups, mix them up and see what happens."