Waiting two hours in a line for beef in a bun was never going to be a good idea

I'm all for delayed gratification. I will book theatre tickets six months ahead. I will take a shoulder of lamb, stud it with anchovies and garlic and half-submerge it in a broth of red wine, stock and piggy bits, so that it looks like the ravaged island of Dr Moreau, shove it in the oven and know it will have nothing of any interest to say to me for at least seven hours.

What I won't do is queue for a hamburger. In this, it seems, I am peculiar. Recently London's Covent Garden has seen the opening of the US operations Shake Shack and Five Guys. We also have home-grown outfits like Meat Liquor, and Burger and Lobster, which seem to regard reservation policies as bourgeois affectations. In the sense that bookable tables suit people with jobs, interesting lives and places they need to be which don't include standing dead-eyed and wet-lipped on a chilly pavement for the running time of The Godfather Part III, I suppose they are. And yes, it's not entirely new. The Hard Rock Cafe has long been famous for its queue, but that was so odd it was a tourist attraction, something people pointed and laughed at. The new queueing has got completely out of hand. It's taken for granted. I have wandered past these places on numerous occasions and been baffled. What in God's name possesses anyone to stand in an endless line – I've been quoted more than two hours for Burger and Lobster – for a lump of ground beef between two sugary buns?

Of course it's not just a lump of ground beef, is it? Over at the Shake Shack it's "our proprietary Shack blend" which makes it sound less like lunch and more like a haemorrhoid ointment; at Five Guys it's "hand formed burgers cooked to perfection". Really? Whose version of perfection, given that Westminster Council is trying to outlaw any burger served less than medium? Or completely buggered, as it's known.

I'll go that extra 10 miles to eat well. I'll cross London to secure an ingredient, take a flight to eat at the right restaurant. But queue? That's not an expression of greed. It's stamp-collecting. It's trainspotting. It's eating out as spectator sport. Except the only thing the queue has to spectate upon is itself, and there it finds validation: standing in line for a hamburger must be entirely reasonable; just look at all the other people doing it.

The counter-argument involves the P word: patience, and my total lack of it. Apparently patience is a virtue. Really? If everybody was patient, nothing would ever get done. The world depends on restless, impatient people. I should also point out that patience is one of the seven great Christian virtues. Nobody with an appetite should ever sign up to those. Obviously some are OK. I believe fully in humility. I am brilliant at that, do it better than anybody else. But chastity and temperance? Don't be silly. That's the point. Queuing for a burger is not about eating. It's about self-denial. And doing the restaurant's marketing for them by standing outside.

Me? I will go somewhere that serves a slightly less impressive burger and in so doing, trade a little of the perceived quality of the Shake Shack object of desire, for living more of my life. I've only got one of those, and I'm not wasting it in a queue.

With fab food and celebrity connections the Ring O Bells has a distinctly modern edge, but crucially, still feels like a proper pub

My thanks to a fellow Twitter chatterer for recommending a pub whose website shows Kylie Minogue singing on the bar. Clearly it has a story to tell.

A pin-sharp crescent moon has risen in a clear sky as I click the car locked. Early evening drinkers sit in the glow of standard lamps and log fires. Chalked over the bar are Wi-Fi password and single malts; on it, a batch of fresh sausage rolls. Beers are Butcombe and Sharp's. Nothing's trying too hard. This is how to do an unselfconscious update in a trad boozer.

Past the loos, manager Adam leads me along what must be described as a hall of fame. Gold discs and signed photos – Elton, Kylie, Tinie Tempah and Michael Bublé – line the walls. These are not the yellowing tributes of late-night theatre district takeaways. "Mine's a pint, Miles," writes Bublé, "Dear Miles, Good luck" says Sir Elton.

Miles is Miles Leonard. He runs Parlophone but spends family weekends here in the Mendip Hills.

Kylie really did sing in his local, in 2010, on a company jolly to Somerset, but the pub was ailing and, last year, Leonard and friend Matt Fisher (who owns music consultancy Squarepeg) bought it.

My room is set lower than the car park and wrapped in thick walls, which an electric heater struggles to warm. It's simple, aimed at walkers and trout fishermen here for Chew Valley and Blagdon lakes. Mattress just OK, pillows bit thin. Brrr, cold tiles on the shower room floor. I draw thick velvet curtains and settle into my cave.

A Latin jazz duo strikes up in the bar. The Novelist arrives for dinner, with A. "Not a single thing I wouldn't order on that menu," he says. Starters – fried aubergine with honey, and herby goat's cheese with burnt pear – are big hits. Ditto classic mains – fresh haddock in feather-light batter, generous and full-bodied braised ham hock – and A declares Cornish brill with camomile-smoked mash and capers her "dream dish".

"What a fantastic local," she says.

Daylight reveals steeply wooded hills. Wish my bed faced that view, and not the wall. Clearly fishermen don't linger over breakfast. Fires not yet lit, tea a Pukka bag in a cup.

"Got a pot?" One arrives filled with strong builders'. That'll put hair on my chest. No grim buffet, that's a plus. Bread is from the bakery down the road, but only arrives toasted beneath my scrambled eggs. Wouldn't mind some in a toast rack, with butter and marmalade.

Breakfast needs a bit of finesse, the bedroom a little more heat, but this is still a proper pub, and a very cool one at that. Whether Kylie returns for an encore or not.

• Accommodation was provided by the Ring O Bells

'This is far too lavish to be called boutique. It makes the Sanderson across the road look a bit Katie Price'

Iam dazzled by the beauty of this room, and I don't dazzle easily. It's breathtaking. We've approached via a lobby that makes other hotel lobbies look like Partridge-era Travelodges, and sink into the worst seat in the house: at the back, by the kitchen, the poor pal having nothing to look at but the walls and my mush.

But what walls: towering, soaring, exuberant, with frills of snowy stucco, every inch covered in gilt-framed art, the different-sized paintings and photographs interlocking like some kind of aesthete's Tetris. There's gold, too, in the backlighting for the twinkling bar. And vast, arched windows with gauze drapes, a Buñuel dreamscape. Of course, as with every grand café, there's a section for those-and-such-as-those: cappuccino-coloured leather banquettes down the centre, like luxury waltzers. If only.

Berners Tavern, in the supremely glamorous new London Edition hotel, is the second collaboration (after Istanbul) between Marriott and Ian Schrager, of Studio 54 notoriety and the man credited with inventing the boutique hotel. This is far too big and lavish – a rumoured £33m spent – to be described as boutique. It makes Schrager's Sanderson across the road, once the glittering height of metropolitan chic, look a bit Katie Price. Shrager has described it as "good old-fashioned good taste".

Our food is every bit as lovely. Currently as ubiquitous as kale, chef Jason Atherton is le patron– not actually cooking there, but with his signature style sprawled all over the menu: local produce; Med nudging against true Brit; rich, sticky, carby things in little saucepans (halibut served with a spot-on squid ink risotto, topped with crisp fried calamari). There are items served in jars; twists on comfort food – macaroni cheese that just isn't, it's fat paccheri pasta sorta-carbonara with a crunch of fried cauliflower. The dish that sums it all up is a deep-fried Clarence Court duck egg, a sausageless scotch, its orange yolk oozy and rich, on "mushy" peas of equally vivid hue and taste, with crisps of Cumbrian ham. Cocktails are made with "Coco Pops milk" and served in glass cartons with retro straws. It's the Atherton look, and it goes beautifully with its surroundings: a tingly mix of fun and fabulousness. Apologies: enthusiasm has made me come over all fashion-speak.

Anyway, I go back for lunch, and in the intervening couple of weeks it seems to have morphed into something a little less Schrager and a little more, well, Marriott. The art is less Wallace Collection and a little more Vettriano and The Range. Tabletops already look scuffed. And the food is far more lacklustre; perhaps it, too, benefits from clever night-time lighting. One pal orders the duck egg again, but this time it has a stiff, mass-catered quality. The crab that comes on braised leeks with brioche crumbs is curiously devoid of actual crabbiness, as though they've used pasteurised shellfish. Burgers, too, are weirdly polite, perfectly imprisoned by lovely, burnished brioche buns, no meaty juices to dribble down wrists, none of the minerality or funk I expect from "aged Scottish beef". And it comes with the most stoopidarse salad I've seen for a long time: chilly, frilly leaves, flower-arranged in a tin vase and glooped with dressing.

Even if I do love the comedy of serving a black pudding toastie – yes, the full Breville – with an emerald soup of potato and parsley plooked with Dorset snails, it all feels like a bathetic second date where the over-enthusiasm of the first suddenly seems a tiny bit embarrassing.

I'm not suggesting for a second that Berners Tavern isn't still a dazzler. It is. Service – for which Atherton, Schrager and Marriott are all well known – is brilliant, clued-up, just the right side of pally, not thrown by even the curviest of curve ball. And so, polite burger or not, I'm going back. I'm a sucker for a bit of the ol' razzle-dazzle. And one evening I'll score one of those waltzer banquettes if it kills me.

• Berners Tavern 10 Berners Street, London W1, 020-7908 7979. Open all week, lunch noon-2.30pm (11am-4pm brunch Sun); dinner 6-10.30pm. About £45-£50 a head, plus drinks and service.
Food 7/10
Atmosphere night 9/10, day 7/10
Value for money 7/10

Follow Marina on Twitter.

Hooked on China's more robust food styles? Head for east London's Sichuan Folk – and be quick about it…

32 Hanbury Street, London E1 (020 7247 4735). Meal for two: £70 (cash only)

A few years ago I gave a positive review to a Chinese restaurant on London's Shaftesbury Avenue called Golden Day, where the food made my scalp sweat. It specialised in the dishes of Hunan; nothing could be served unless it had first been pelted with fistfuls of fresh and dried chillies, even dessert. I loved their "dry pot" chicken, the liquor in the wok bubbling to nothing over its burner, and the slices of pork belly with pickled soya beans. The management laminated my review and stuck it in the window. I walk past often and, being thus reminded of what a great time I'd had there, would pop in by myself, hunker down behind one of the wooden partitions and bury myself armpit deep in plates of fire and punch with a bit of pig thrown in for good measure. It made me happy.

A few months back I ate there again and it was awful. It was now a culinary black hole, a place where appetite went to die. It felt like a different place entirely. Dreary bits of meat floundered about like corpulent German tourists testing the buoyancy of the Dead Sea, in sauces which had a similar level of subtlety as those waters. I told the manager how bad I thought it now was and walked him over to the window where the laminated copy of my review was Blu-Tacked in place. I insisted he took it down, which he did. It was a staggeringly self-regarding thing to do: bullying, bombastic and ludicrous. In my defence, I was really quite drunk, which is no defence at all. Then again I was also very cross.

I've since realised my sense that this was now a different restaurant was closer to the mark than I might have imagined. Not long after, I heard that the Golden Day chef had moved on to Yipin China on the Essex Road. I ate there and lo and behold all the power and attitude I loved was in place. This is something with which those of us who adore these niche Chinese restaurants, with their fighty repertoire far removed from the sugary staples of the Cantonese tradition, must contend. The kitchens of restaurants serving the food of Sichuan, Hunan and Xiandong provinces depend, for the most part, on an immigrant workforce. And that workforce tends to be more mobile than most. The restaurant is great until they sod off somewhere else. Then it isn't. I am constantly receiving emails from people telling me the place I praised is awful, that I am an idiot and have personally ruined their evening out. (The exception to this is the group around the Soho Sichuan restaurant Barshu, which maintains its standards.)

I hope today's restaurant stays as good as it was the night I ate there, but past experience means I advise you to visit sooner rather than later. Sichuan Folk was recommended to me by the brilliant Fuchsia Dunlop, author of the key English language cookery books on Sichuan food, who also trained at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine in Chengdu, one of the very first Europeans so to do. She is a consultant for the Barshu group, and regularly rolls her eyes at me when I big up the qualities of a rival, as if I'm a promising undergraduate who has overreached himself. So if she recommends somewhere it's generally worth paying attention.

And it is. Sichuan Folk is a small box of a restaurant on Brick Lane, down the road from the many truly awful curry houses which cluster here. There is a little wooden fretwork on the walls and some brushwork – Chinese characters, a few delicate bamboo shoots – for decoration. Tables are packed closely together, so that you end up pointing at dishes landing in front of strangers and barking: "Ooh, what's that?" As is standard in Sichuan places, the menu is picture led. It is a riot of overexposed saturated colours – or at least I assumed it was until the food arrived and it was just as vivid off the page.

We started with a bowl of sesame seed-sprinkled caramelised walnuts, as black as pebbles on a churned shingle beach and almost as shiny. These are the crystal meth of sugared-nut snacks, the thin outer layer giving way to deep toasted tones punched up by the sesame seeds. They are what Tsingtao beer was invented for.

Their meaty, thin-skinned "signature" dumplings are half the size of standard Chinese-restaurant offerings and come in a deep soy-based sauce which is less a salty hit than something intense with umami and more caramel. Our waiter insists on spooning the sauce over the dumpling's folds repeatedly before he will let us near them. We appreciate his ministrations.

Sichuan twice-cooked pork is slices of belly with fat the colour of marble that melts on the tongue, with a good handful of seared spring onions to make you feel it might almost be good for you, plus the welcome intrusion of pickled red chillies. It's served with steamed rice buns to be opened up and back-filled: you get soft sweet bun, the crunch of spring onion, the hit of fiery sauce and then the pork itself.

Fire-exploded kidney flowers is perhaps a little less pyrotechnic than it sounds – it's a stir-fry of sliced pig's kidney but is as gloriously unapologetic a piece of offal cookery as you will find in London.

The final combo is Chinese fish and chips. The chips are slices of flash-fried potato with a shedload of dried red chillies, garlic and salt. What's not to like? The fish is a "fish-fragrant" sea bass that arrives at the table whole, battered and curling up on itself, slathered with a sauce and a fine julienne of spring onions. The waiter displays then dismantles it. We fear bones, but by some miracle of expert deep-frying, the whole thing can be crunched through from head to tail. The flesh is white and pearly and soft. The sauce is sweet and sticky, with an edge of fire.

That's a repeated theme. Some Sichuan restaurants throw chillies and numbing peppercorns at you as if you're an addict craving a fix (and sometimes I am). Perhaps we only hit the gentle end of the menu, but here it felt like they were being used as a flavouring rather than some sweat-inducing declaration of intent.

Right now Sichuan Folk is an absolute gem, a true collector's piece. I just hope it stays that way.

Jay's news bites

■ The Red Chilli group has been a reliable source of kicking Sichuan food across the north for many years now. The most reliable remains the outpost on Portland Street, in Manchester. Portions are huge, and prices reasonable. Ignore any dish you've ever heard of and go instead for the likes of spicy hot-poached mutton in chilli oil. Some of it may hurt, but you'll like it…

■ While we're in that part of the world, Disappearing Dining Clubs, which stages pop-up dinners in unusual locations, has just extended operations from London to Mancs. The next one is on 28 November in Murray's Mills, Ancoats. Four courses cost £46 with £1 going to the Teenage Cancer Trust (disappearingdiningclub.co.uk)

■ This week sees the publication of A Fork In The Road, a collection of food-based travel writing from the Lonely Planet, edited by James Oseland of American food mag Saveur. There are contributions from big names such as Michael Pollan, Tamasin Day-Lewis and Fuchsia Dunlop…. Oh, and an essay on the joys of Essex oysters by, er, me.

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

'Tweeness aside, this is a lust-inducing cracker of a place, a posh gastropub with wit'

It is a truth rarely challenged that if there's a worst table in the house, it will have my name on it. And so it is at this spectacular new restaurant in York. The room we're delivered to is handsome in a wood-panelled, stag-antlered way, but it's populated only by a brace of silent couples and a lonely cheeseboard. We're nowhere near the wood-burning stove, plonked beside a chilly, viewless window, whereas the dazzling main room is alive with chatter, with glamorous women, and men who look like that hot headmaster from Educating Yorkshire. Could we move, please?

Justin, the tweedy rugger bugger who's shown us to our table, is astonished. "It's all booked in there," he sputters. Yes, but I've booked, too. I booked as soon as I heard there was an opening date for the highly-regarded Star at Harome's first sibling. For this converted 1836 pump house in the centre of York, a glorious location by the banks of the Ouse, above Dame Judi Dench Way, with huge, plate-glass windows looking on to Museum Gardens. I booked before most of these chaps carousing on the crushed velvet banquettes even knew it existed.

There follows a stand-off of surprising intensity. Tweedy Justin ain't budging, and neither am I. My pal looks as though he wishes the tartan carpet would open up and swallow him. Justin blusters off, finally returning with the deathless instruction, "I've managed to find a table. C'mon then, you." Blunt Yorkshiremen, indeed.

There's more Yorkshireness on the menu. I'm not being sneery: they milk it themselves with tea called "Ee by gum… Madam!" and home-cured charcuterie announced as a "Yard o' Yorkshire". Tweeness aside, this is a lust-inducing cracker of a place, a posh gastropub with wit. Chef Andrew Pern has spoken about a "rich man, poor man" approach to dish planning, so we find Harome-shot roe deer in cottage pie and carpaccio of beer-fed (!) Dexter fillet with corned beef fritters. Portions are Brobdingnagian, fuel for the fields rather than a potter round chichi cobbled streets. There's a "terrine" of oxtail, a towering barrel of slow-cooked, shredded meat titfered with two mini Yorkshire puddings. Hot, carroty gravy ("ale'n'onion soup") is poured over from a silver urn. So it's a surprise to find the "terrine" is stone cold. Is this deliberate? "Yes," says our cheery server, "Andrew says it's supposed to be ambient." Odd, yes, but it buffets you with vast, beefy flavours and would easily feed two. It's a starter.

More refined is my "cassoulet" of excellent, smoked "Hodgson's of Hartlepool" haddock (a direct import from the mothership) in cream sauce flecked with fresh herbs loaded with the tiniest, tautest haricot beans, so fine they could be Sicilian heritage cannellini.

"Butter roast" suckling pig comes with a stout, squidgy sausage roll, the filling spiked with dried fruit and Christmassy spices. Way to a girl's heart, in every sense. The crackling crackles, the rich, sticky gravy hums with apple brandy. It's the size of a baby's head. There's roast rump of lamb, pink, chewy, with the kind of ovine honk more often associated with hogget. It's dotted with barley, and there's bubble and squeak and "Yorkshire salad", which mostly features little gem and mint. For pudding, there's parkin (a touch burnt), and Welsh rarebit, four Bunterish slices, slippery with onion jam and served with a vat of fruity chutney in case your buttons are ever in danger of fastening again.

Snarky metropolitan types might snigger at loos titled "Helgas" and "Olafs", or at wall art of a knitted pig's head, or the dreaded crossed chive garnish. And the kitchen could lose 98% of the truffle oil it's so keen on; the smell hits you as you walk in. But this is a splendid restaurant. At night, it's like the approach to a fairy castle, the city's beauty creating the kind of ambience designers can only dream of. Justin chases us out the door when we leave: "Well," he barks, "did you like it?" It's fabulous, I gush. And I mean it, Justin, I do.

• The Star Inn The City Lendal Engine House, Museum Street, York , 01904 619208. Open all day, 11.30am-10.30pm. About £30 a head for three courses, plus drinks and service.

Food 7/10
Atmosphere Room A 4/10 Room B 8/10
Value for money 8/10

Follow Marina on Twitter.

• This article was amended on 23 November 2013 to correct the atmosphere score for Room B to 8.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was pie… Jay finds Oxford's Magdalen Arms is first class

243 Iffley Road, Oxford (01865 243 159). Meal for two: £70

This is meant to be a review of a place in which to eat. In reality it will end up as a review of the pie we ate there. A bloody marvellous pie. So less a review than a love letter, written on paper scented with dripping. There are some people who, reading about this pie, will clench their fists and bang things. They will bellow that it is NOT A PIE, for that requires a pastry shell from top to bottom and around the sides. They write to me about this, these defenders of pie, with a fury out of all proportion to, well, most things. All I can say is that if you are the sort of person to get proper furious because I called a dish with a suet pastry lid a pie, then congratulations. You clearly have nothing more important to get cross about.

But let's leave the pie in the middle of the table for the moment, and consider the pub in which it is served. The Magdalen Arms – pronounce it how you wish; I merely have to type it – is a rare thing: a nice place to eat in Oxford. It's a peculiar town, full of people who are brilliant at passing exams and some who happen to be clever, too. A few have book deals or research grants, or both. There's money and lofty versions of taste, acquired or otherwise, and yet very few places in which to use any of it. It will take someone smarter than me to work out why this is; perhaps someone smart enough to be at Oxford.

All of that makes the Magdalen Arms not just a nice gastropub but a public service, delivered through dishes which are sturdy and big boned, served on tables without tablecloths in a broad, low-ceilinged room. The walls are painted a deep claret which helps to make a functional space rather cosy on a damp November lunchtime. It serves beer and has a well-priced list of almost entirely French and Italian wines. What matters is its DNA. The current version of the Magdalen Arms is run by a former chef and a former manager from the Anchor and Hope in Waterloo, which in turn was born out of Fergus Henderson's St John in Clerkenwell.

The St John story is well known. Henderson, a trained architect with an architect's love of white space, brought his cosmopolitan upbringing to bear on a few classic British traditions. He put roast bone marrow on the menu, and chitterlings and big, shiny-domed pies and is credited with reviving a whole category of British cookery. In truth he did nothing of the sort. He came up with a mythologised version which is far better than anything our great-grandparents ever got their rotting teeth around.

To cook this sort of British food, you have first to be steeped in French technique. (Indeed, Henderson freely admits he got the bone marrow dish idea from watching the movie La Grande Bouffe with a whole bunch of other food pervs one wet afternoon in the Hampstead Everyman.) Throw in an Italian hankering for uncluttered plates and a taste for what Leopold Bloom in Ulysses called "the inner organs of beasts and fowls... which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine" and a food cult is born.

St John style food is now like nits in Year 4: bloody everywhere. I have seen the bone-marrow dish on menus from one end of this country to the other – even eaten it in Los Angeles. As a result, St John is arguably now a victim of its own huge success. Getting a table there used to require the thumb prints of three European popes. These days it's much easier. After all, you don't have to go to St John to eat St John's food. You can go to Anchor and Hope, or Great Queen Street or Hereford Road.

Or you can go to the Magdalen Arms in Oxford, where you can start with warm smoked herring, which could give its glossier and less-sustainable cousin smoked eel a serious run for its money. There is wood smoke and fish oils that mean business (but won't make you clever; ignore the voodoo medicine) and to cut through it all, a potato and parsley salad with the poke of capers. There is thin-sliced "duck ham" with fat the colour of polished alabaster and meat the same shade of claret as the walls, all sent on its holidays to the Med courtesy of a fennel, olive and orange salad.

And then there is the pie, served in a big enamelled cast iron dish. It costs £28 for two, but would serve three. The burnished suet crust is so shiny you can see your reflection in it. For a while we stare. It is one of those dishes that forces you into the present tense. The rain outside does not matter. We have pie. Finally I take a spoon to that suet crust and there is a crack; the sound that only a pastry made with animal fats will supply. Beneath, there are large pieces of beef that have been allowed to wallow in this ale-rich braising liquor for so long the strands are starting to wave each other goodbye. The gravy is serious. You cannot see your plate through a puddle of it.

They bring us pots of mustard. We are lost in pie. Eating it becomes our shared endeavour. There are other things on the menu: short rib with celeriac purée, lamb faggots with split pea, turnip and mint, tagliatelle with forest mushrooms and garlic butter. But we always knew it would be the pie and that while we will eat other things it is the pie we will talk about later when asked how lunch was. There is a bowl of crunchy buttered greens. We eat some because we think we should. We do not finish it because that would fill up room that could be left for pie.

We order sticky toffee pudding because the pie has earned its company. It's a serviceable version, though towards the end a little dry, which is never a good thing with sticky toffee pudding. A pear and almond tart is equally fine. But my companion and I both know that they are not what lunch was about; that as we roll into the cab taking us away, all we will say to each other is, "Oof, that pie.' And then we will sigh, happily.

Jay's news bites

■ Of all the son- of-St John ventures, perhaps the most obscure is the Canton Arms, an old boozer in Stockwell, London, which has been given nothing in the way of a fancy-pants makeover. The kitchen is run by Trish Hilferty, previously of the Eagle and the Anchor and Hope. Expect big roasts, bistro classics like leeks vinaigrette and haggis toastie. cantonarms.com

■ Ever dreamed of living in a five-star hotel, full of heavy furniture? Ever wanted to make your dining room look like a poncy Michelin-starred restaurant? Now's your chance. The Lanesborough Hotel by Hyde Park is closing for nine months for a refurb, and they're flogging off all the fixtures and fittings. Room service not included. thelanesboroughsale.com

■ First Great Western, which operates services from London to Penzance, has employed chef Mitch Tonks to source 50 products for their on-train catering, all from within 15 miles of the line. Think kippers from Somerset's Brown & Forrest, Tribute Ale from St Austell Brewery and seafood from Kingfisher of Brixham. And if the trains could also run on time...

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

From travelling to Lithuania to eating out in Berlin, here's a quick roundup of some of the things you can do with the dark-web currency

Accommodation

Want to pay your rent with Bitcoin? Not a problem. You just have to be happy to move somewhere you have never wanted to live, or even heard of. The holiday resort of Druskininkai in Lithuania, for example, where for €10 a night you can rent a room in a 10-bedroom apartment just a short walk from the aqua park. With regular access to water slides, you'll soon forget the fact you're crying yourself to sleep from the loneliness of linguistic isolation. Other options include: a log cabin in Glaciers Reach, Canada; apartments in Rio de Janeiro and Dubrovnik; and a boutique tour of Vietnam.

Health and happiness

Here's the great news: you can already pay your dentist using Bitcoin. The Penny Meadow Dental Practice in Ashton under Lyne has gone digital. They even have 41 likes on Facebook. If your teeth are fine but you've been hitting the booze too hard, a trip to Swiss detox clinic Escape Ambulatorium could make a world of difference. Or at least a little aromatherapy, courtesy of Happy Tree Cosmetics.

Going out

Berlin restaurant "ROOM77, the restaurant at the end of capitalism", boasts on its website, "we're too fucking cool to brag about ourselves", lists its address right down to "Earth, Solar System, Milky Way" and promises visitors "warm beer, cold women and fast food made slow". So, you know, book now or live for ever in regret. If that doesn't appeal, you can take a trip to Salt Lake City's Firehouse BBQ, famous, according to the site's "What you all are sayin' about us!" section, for its world-beating pulled pork. Or, if you happen to have $250,000 in Bitcoin to spare, you could always splash out on a brief trip to space with Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic.

Food and drink

The options for Bitcoin foodies are limited but eclectic. You can sample George's Famous Baklava, for example, described by testimonials on its website as the "best ever", "awesome and amazing" and "De-Lish!", or stock up on emergency rations and "cave food" for the coming apocalypse at SurvivalFood.com. American vineyard Rollingdale Winery sells a pinot noir and a pinot grigio, while "Booze4Bitcoin" offers a range of alcoholic beverages packaged, for some unknown reason, like high-end shampoos, in flavours including "tea bitter", "citrus" and "outlaw". The last, at 72% alcohol, could come in especially handy when you just want to get drunk enough to forget moving to Lithuania.

Staying in

Online board game retailer Nestor Games offers family favourites such as chess and backgammon alongside the unimaginable delights of "Sugar Gliders", "Tattoo Turtles" and "The Aztec Market". If you have the place to yourself and feel a little saucy, you could experiment with one of several sexual hypnosis downloads, visit 3D fantasy and sci-fi porn site Lynortis, hire a Birmingham escort, or get into gambling with Singapore horse-racing analysts kranjiracing. The more devout may choose, instead, to make a donation to the Church of Saint John the Evangelist in New York, which claims to be the first Catholic church to accept the online currency.

Clothes and shoes

From babbletees ("T-shirts for cheeky-cool smart people!") to Heat Slingers' Nike trainers ("Simply put, we are sneaker heads"), there are plenty of respectable choices for the snappy Bitcoin dresser. There are also a few more exotic options. Mono für Alle, purveyors of "T-shirts made in Berlin from garbage", competes for your clothes-you-will-never-wear-in-public dollar with pirate shirt company R-Shirt and a libertarian T-shirt site (right) that appears, sadly, to have vanished in the cut-and-thrust of the free market.

Interior decorating

Worried that apartment in Dubrovnik lacks a certain sense of academic decorum? Bitcoin's furniture-makers have the answer. Add a formal air to the living room with an acrylic podium, from which to lecture guests and practise the speeches you'd have given at this year's weddings if you didn't live in Dubrovnik now. Less intrusive ornaments include an array of colourful bubblers, pipes and dabbers from an online glass-blower and Pocket Artillery's "mini cannon to end all mini cannons", which looks like a hole punch but fires ball bearings across the room at genuinely dangerous velocities, to the delight of owners and the terror of their dinner guests.

New Jersey waitress Dayna Morales claims a family left no tip and a gay slur on a bill. If she made it up, it's a disservice to all servers

• Tips are not optional in the US

We need to talk about Dayna Morales.

Dayna is the New Jersey waitress who made headlines earlier this month for a Facebook post she made complaining that a family left no tip on a $93.55 bill and wrote her a note: "I'm sorry but I cannot tip because I don't agree with your lifestyle & how you live your life." Now the hateful receipt appears to be a fabrication.

I've waited tables before, and if there's one thing I know for certain, it's that Dayna could have posted any of the genuinely hateful notes you receive on a regular basis instead of making one up:

"Get a real job"

"NONE! :)"

"No tips for dykes"

I've gotten them all, and I'm sure Dayna has, too. I'm a tall woman with short hair that wears combat boots to work to prevent slips in the kitchen. I'm well aware of the hate that comes our way. However, the customers that allegedly left a note shaming Dayna for her lifestyle have come forward with their receipt copy and even a credit card statement, showing that they tipped her a solid 20%.

I'm inclined to believe them. Credit card slips are very easily altered. Credit card statements? Less so.

I also believe Dayna – to a degree. I believe that she's likely been harassed for being gay, and likely been slighted on tips. Whether those two things are always correlated, I don't know. There will always be people who stiff you as a waitress, but most of the time it's not about you.

You could ask a random sampling of servers across the country, "who are the worst tippers?" and they'll all tell you a very similar list. I'm going to generalize a bit here, but you get the idea. The worst tippers are the most showy. They're the type that can't get out a complete sentence without mentioning how devout of a Christian they are, or the ones that mention that they're not from America before you've had time to finish saying hello, or the ones who giggle about how high-maintenance they're going to be before running you ragged.

When foreigners don't tip well, it's often because they simply don't know. Nobody ever told them that in this country, the server waiting on them makes $2 an hour, and in some cultures tipping a lot is considered offensive, an insinuation that the server deserves charity and pity. Some bitter servers insist that by the time an immigrant or international tourist is brought up to speed on the tipping etiquette, they've long since noticed the low expectation, and are more than willing to pretend to be clueless in order to save some money. So if someone goes out of their way to make it very clear that they're foreign, it's a clear insinuation that the server won't be making much.

Showy pennypinching isn't reserved to those who make a show of how exotic they are. Many people have learned through positive reinforcement that complaining long and loud nets them free food, extra drinks, and a discounted tab. When a customer has a legitimate complaint, it is common practice for an establishment to apologize by way of free items or discounts, typically on top of replacing the offending item. Instead of being grateful that their concerns were addressed and reparations were made, some begin to feel entitled, now putting on the bellyaching act at every opportunity, leaving harsh notes and no tip on their already heavily discounted bill. If a table recites a list of very specific and unreasonable expectations, announcing how "every other time we've been here it's been horrible" before you've had a second to speak, they're also not worth too much of your time.

God is also very popular excuse for not just skipping out on the tip, but also for doling out moral advice and harsh judgements. I should know, considering someone once left me a note that said: "I give God 10%. Why do you get 18?"

Never has a table announced their religion to me because any amount of love or generosity is coming my way. I've long since been made aware that if someone places a hand on their heart and says to me with a simpering smile, "now as a Christian..." the only thing coming my way is a terrible tip and unwarranted advice. As Jesus himself said, you shouldn't celebrate how pious you are by making a show of your religion (Matthew 6: 5-6). I'm sure hundreds of devout Christians have come and gone without me noticing their religion above their courtesy, but the ones that stand out in my memory as unmistakably Christian are far from a shining example of the love, humility, and charity found in the Bible.

It's easy to tell a bad table from a good one. Most dirtbags will begin setting the stage for their cheapskate production as soon as you're within earshot.

"Ugh, did you see that look she gave you when you ordered water? Probably wanted us to spend $30 on just drinks. What a salesman." There was no look.

"Can you believe how long our drinks took to come out? There must be something wrong with this restaurant." Nope.

"Ugh... this steak is gross. I should send it back." If you order well-done, you're going to eat well-done.

I would say 95% percent of tables are just fine. They look you in the eye, order from the menu, and leave a decent tip. The good tables are not loud. They are reasonable. They understand that if they ask for fresh coffee, it's not going to come out immediately.

However, I've come to believe that about 5% of people are scum. They are liars. They are cheats. They will say anything and do anything to keep those few extra dollars clenched in their fist. They'd rather actively ruin someone's day, besmirch them to their manager, insult them, condemn them, and stiff them than shell out a few bucks.

If Dayna fabricated a rude note and sent it directly to a pro-LGBT organization with thousands and thousands of fans, shame on her. Thousands of dollars came her way because of it, making her little better than the bellyaching liars or the finger-pointing Christians that make life hard for servers everywhere. I hope she realizes that she's also adding to the bitter skepticism that might cause dismissal of a legitimate claim of discrimination in the future.

5 tips for being a good table

1. Say hello to your server. Don't greet them with "Diet Coke, extra ice." Follow some basic courtesy guidelines. Just because I'm bringing you your food doesn't mean I'm below you. I've been called everything from "waitress" to "beer bitch" even though I was wearing a nametag.

2. Understand that extra requests mean extra time and effort. Many requests are well within your server's ability, but try to feel grateful that they did something extra for you, not annoyed it took an extra two minutes.

3. Wait your turn. Is the restaurant full? Am I carrying half my body weight in dirty dishes? Do I have five steaming hot plates of food balanced on one arm? Am I currently having conversation with another table? If the answer is yes, don't flag me down, don't yell at me, and most of all, DON'T touch me. Do not tug on my apron like a child, this tray holding 10 drinks might not be as well balanced as you'd think.

4. I am not a babysitter. If your child spills a drink on himself, do not expect me to crawl around under your table with a towel while you continue eating. I am more than willing to take a second to make your toddler laugh, but your child cannot follow me around, no matter how "precious" it might be. Restaurants are by no means childproof.

5. Don't blame your server for the kitchen's errors. I've never worked in a restaurant kitchen, but I've sure been hollered at like I personally overcooked a steak. I don't control the air conditioning, or the lighting in the parking lot. If you communicate your concerns, I am both capable and happy to help find a solution, but please try to understand what is and isn't within a server's control.

Marina O'Loughlin considers the horrors and delights of eating in restaurants over the festive season

Why you should stay away

Turkey and all the trimmings If ever there were a phrase to strike fear into the heart, it's this one. Apart from "All you can eat buffet", these words are the excuse for the most crimes committed against food in this country since Marco Pierre White first plastered Knorr stock cubes over an innocent chicken breast.

There's the stuffing, a sub-Paxo horror of clag that attaches itself to the roof of your mouth like the creature in Alien. Chipolatas with the texture of ossified rabbit droppings. Leathery roast potatoes, sugary, filling-bothering cranberry jelly, grouty bread sauce with enough clove to cure toothache. And the turkey – a greige, stringy beast, slumping exhaustedly on its bier of parsnips. It's the poultry universe's least appealing bird thrust into a limelight it deserves about as much as I deserve a Brit award. And do not even get me started on what batch catering does to sprouts. Sulphuric.

A homemade Christmas dinner can be a thing of Dickensian beauty, but restaurant versions seem to have gone through some kind of transmogrification machine last seen in The Fly. Never has any meal made me want cheese on toast more.

Christmas Day is a time for giving And giving until it hurts. The festive season is an excuse for many restaurants to get as enthusiastically loot-hungry as those vultures at Valentine's who smilingly scalp you because you're so loved-up you won't notice the extra 50 quid for the banal set meal and the "free" red rosebud. A ton a head is about par for the course before you even attempt a small sherry; and I hope they're platinum-plating the truffled chicken they're serving at Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester, given that Christmas Day lunch there costs £295 a skull.

You could, of course, go to a branch of Scoff & Banter for a mere £60 each. You could – if you fancy spending Christmas in a place with a name that makes you want to stab out your own eyes with a cracker trinket.

Other people Other people behave very strangely at this time of year. In the lead-up to Christmas, it's the office party, that arena for people who don't normally go to restaurants unless they sell bread roll "subs" by the yard and pollute the high street with a stench almost as bad as Lush's. There's crying and singing and bad party hat-wearing and fighting and snogging and vomiting – and that's just the management. Post-office party, I once tried to get a lift from one of my then board directors by kicking her Porsche really hard and saying, "Take me home, beeyatch." She kindly obliged, so I stole her lighter and gloves. It was the tequila, m'lud.

On Christmas Day itself, the mood is more sombre. Restaurants are populated by families who leap at the excuse to slope off home early to the farty torpor of The Queen and the EastEnders Christmas special, so as not to endure too long a session with barely tolerated relatives. This is an event whose curious form of melancholy cannot be punctured by any number of cheap crackers.

All Christmas puddings Here's just what you want after a gazillion-calorie lunch: a gazillion calorie dessert. I realise I'm in a minority here, but I loathe Christmas pudding, an oafish, doughy oik of a thing, reeking of antiseptic spices and gluey with fat and wrinkly fruit. And then – excellent idea – lard it up with brandy butter. I hate mince pies, too, especially if the restaurant has helpfully microwaved them so the mincemeat is about the same temperature as the sun. Bite into one of these and it will strip off layers of skin from your gob as effectively as an acid peel.

Chefs like to get creative with these kinds of things, so they give us Christmas pudding ice-cream. Or mince-pie brûlée or cupcakes. I've seen mince pie macaroons and "Christmas trifle truffles", for God's sake. Things are not quite as bad as they are in the US, though: ice-cream specialists Salt & Straw in foodie Mecca Portland, Oregon, is offering a turkey gelato. A small sliver of perfectly affiné stilton is the only sane riposte to this kind of utter nonsense.

Restaurant staff at Christmas Basically, they hate us for so many reasons. Big parties tip appallingly (see above for general behaviour). Family parties, ditto, because the last time Pa had to pay for everyone, they were lucky to get a pound note, and Ma likes a substitution or two ("Could I have the turkey, but with the gravy on the side and broccoli instead of sprouts, and don't you have custard?"); she also vibrates with tension if there's a gap of more than three minutes between courses.

As far as chefs are concerned, they're just trying to get rid of the stuff that's destined to die a lingering death while the restaurant has its annual shut-down, hence the increasingly desperate-sounding "specials". Sea bass with Pernod and cranberry, anyone? Surliness and tired food: who could resist?

Seasonal decorations This is the time of year when even the most chic of restaurants resorts to glittery kitsch. Glittery kitsch can be a wonderful, life-affirming thing if it's done with wild abandon and Rabelaisian lack of restraint: fairy lights à gogo, sparkly bunting, vast trees heaving with a thousand mismatched baubles. But Christmas doesn't lend itself to moderation. When those minimalist beige swankpots try to do festive – a few poinsettias and a single "important" bauble – the effect can deliver a bad bout of tristesse.

The restaurant decoration that lives in my memory most was at the Heron, a notoriously "authentic" Thai restaurant in west London. They'd carefully snow-sprayed several snowmen around the walls and pillars of the basement space, on to which someone – who knows, perhaps the Heron themselves? – had equally carefully sprayed large snowmen penises. Jingle balls.

Why you should dine out

Someone else takes the strain The bliss of this. The sheer, serene joy of not having to plan several weeks in advance a meal that will take about an hour to demolish to a sprouty rubble. Not having to order the Norfolk Bronze turkey or free-range goose before it's too late, not having to feed the Christmas cake at regular levels as though it were a needy, boozehound baby.

There's no need feverishly to scan magazine articles in which celebrities pretend to adore Christmas, feeling utterly inadequate that you haven't airily knocked together a Christmas lunch table that looks like a Fortnum & Mason festive window display. You don't have to pin to-do lists to the cooker hood, documents as complex as a military campaign. And, most glorious of all, there's no washing up.

No leftovers Any restraint I might pretend to practise flees in the face of Christmas leftovers. I've been known to have a Boxing Day sandwich composed of turkey, cranberry, stuffing, jellified gravy and solidified bread sauce (recommended). Hell, I've even fried up stuffing for breakfast (also recommended).

The slumpy inertia of the festivities' dog-end days means that the only exercise many of us get is slumping from the sofa to the fridge, each time coming away with a corner of brie, a chipolata or a chunk of sage and onion. If you don't have the feast, you don't have the temptation. I'll miss that sandwich, though.

Christmas spirits For 364 days of the year, I regard Bailey's Irish Cream and its league of siblings and imitators as some kind of treacly, cloying abomination: a curious tincture resistant to any form of normal inebriation. Order this from any self-respecting sommelier, and you'll be met with a sneer of Kenneth Williams-esque proportions.

But something weird happens at Christmas and suddenly I find myself quite fancying one. And the gloves are off; the sommelier will just have to bite it. You can drink what you like. Order away. Drink mulled wine until your head spins and your lips are stained cinnamony purple. I do draw the line at Advocaat, however. Especially a cocktail made with the Dutch eggy mess with a splodge of cherry brandy on top. Its name? The Burst Boil.

Christmassy restaurants There are restaurants that can imbue even the most festive-resistant curmudgeon with all the joys of the season. Wood-panelled old timers who give it gay abandon with the tinsel. Ones furnished with spitting log fires and the aroma of roasting meats, the kind of place that feels odd to visit in blazing sunlight.

I'm thinking of the likes of The Witchery in Edinburgh, a seasonal setting as enchanting as Narnia (its menu helpfully doesn't bother with turkey at all, offering instead pheasant pithiviers and roe deer). Or my beloved Rules, where they hang glittering baubles from a portrait of Maggie Thatcher and serve a stout, gooey steak and kidney pudding. Or historic Fitzbillies in Cambridge, where they've been known to deep-fry whole turkeys as enthusiastically as notorious US queen of excess, Paula Deen. (It's a surprisingly effective way of dealing with the beast.) I'll see you there. But no way am I wearing a paper crown.

Aiden Byrne's brilliant cooking is left to fend for itself at the maddeningly overbearing Manchester House

18-22 Bridge Street, Manchester (0161 835 2557). Meal for two: £140

I am staring at my plate and trying not to be distracted. This has happened to me before with Aiden Byrne's cooking. The last time I ate his precise but gutsy dishes was at the Dorchester Hotel's Grill Room, where the walls heave with 10ft-high murals of strapping men in kilts tossing cabers. It's not camp. No, no, no. It's just big men in their prime, exerting themselves so that sweat runs down the creases of their highly defined trunk-thick thighs, the hems of their tartan skirts rising skywards with the exertion, the better to let us view their rippling…

Hang on, where was I? Oh yes, at Manchester House, staring at Byrne's food and trying once again not to be distracted (albeit in a different way) from the fact that he can cook; that he marries serious, nerdy technique to an instinct to flavour. Just getting bread is a moment here: there's an ineffably light brioche, a quenelle of sweet salty caramelised onion butter, plus a little roasted onion consommé topped with a pungent parmesan foam.

That's followed by a silky chestnut soup, with pitch-perfect bursts of acidity. Next a board arrives looking like a Barbara Hepworth sculpture, both rough hewn and polished: to the right, a smoked-eel beignet perched on a tiny mound of apple and smoked-eel salad. In the middle, a shiny curl of smoked apple purée. To the left, inserted into a forest of metal filaments, a fennel cracker the colour of coal. Soon the Hepworth is gone in a burst of salt and smoke and fish and the high notes of sour apple.

Best of all these miniature dishes is a stew of braised snails in the richest of bourguignon sauces, all reduced red wine and stock and effort, topped by a thick potato foam which avoids tipping texturally towards something Gillette would market to men with stubble.

The good things continue into the starters. Frogs' legs Kiev is an absurd amount of work. Ever considered half boning out a frog's leg and then back-filling it with garlic butter? No, which is why we get people like Byrne to do it. These are crisply fried and presented so as to be picked up by the remaining sliver of bone. They form meaty little bonbons, bursting with old-school garlic butter. A duck dish is less successful, though the ambition is immense. The leg meat has been braised and then reformed around the bone and perched on the plate, claw to the ceiling. There are sweet-sour cherries, a pistachio crumb and some freeze-dried cherry spooned on to the plate tableside with a billow of dry ice. There is a nipple-pert ball of smooth foie-gras parfait in a cherry gel. A piece of breast has been cooked sous vide and, as too often, the skin isn't quite crisp enough. It's all a little confectionery-shop sugary. And yet you can feel your £16 worth.

No quibbles on my main. It is, quite simply, one of the best lamb dishes I have ever been served. Two thick-cut chops arrive alone under a porcelain dome. It is removed to a puff of bonfire smoke. A still-smouldering faggot of wood, one of those it was cooked over, is removed. There is a trickle of sticky lamb jus. This has the funk and depth of an animal that has lived a proper life. Alongside is a bowl of fried ricotta cheese balls, lambs' tongues, dinky little dumplings and a lighter lamb broth. It is simple and close to perfection. I gnaw the bones clean.

Not everything works. A misjudged turbot and sauerkraut dish produces fishy cabbage. Desserts – a peach and chocolate parfait construction; a take on the custard and raspberry jam concoction known as Manchester tart – are too processed. There is a touch of the Arctic roll to both of them. But these can be fine tuned. There is much else on the menu I would like to try.

If only that's all there was to say: great food in Manchester, a city which historically has done high-end poorly. The problem is not the food. It's the restaurant, which cost £3m. It's all so overworked, mannered and, well, just so damn Manchester. It's a terrific city, full of energy and enthusiasm, but it has a tendency to tip over into overkill. Manchester House delivers all that self-conscious, tiresome swagger via fixtures and fittings. The space, reached by a lift in an ugly office block, is all about size. Everything is BIG and overengineered. The tables are so huge a booking for two feels like a lonely table for one. My companion and I consider chatting by instant messenger until she simply shifts herself around to sit side-on to me.

It's there in the service, conducted by bearded men in waistcoats and jeans who yearn to appear informal but won't – and I mean this in the sweetest way – sod off and leave us alone. Lunch begins with a dreary speech about menu options and permutations. We're given a hard sell on the "extended à la carte", £15 for those mini dishes at the start. Suddenly we feel on edge. Can't we just choose things to eat?

The wine list is full of think-of-a-number prices. I imagine nervous 20-somethings bringing dates here for the first time and shuddering as the digits swim before their eyes. The cocktail list contains essays on each one, plus – oh God – tributes to Mancunian culture, such as a concoction called the Stone Roses. It "toys with Manchester's music history and love of performance and presentation". What a mixture of gin, elderflower and cucumber has to do with all that goodness only knows. If it was a fizzing glass of liquid amphetamine sulphate with an MDMA chaser, then maybe – but cucumber? My, but they really are jolly mad for it, aren't they.

Our waiter also insists on putting the word "my" before each dish name as he delivers it. As in: "This is my chestnut soup" and "Here's my lamb." Really? It's yours? Because I thought Mr Byrne's brigade over there in the open kitchen cooked it. That's not the waiter's fault: it's probably how he's been trained. But it's annoying. I flinch each time he arrives. I want to concentrate on Aiden Byrne's often brilliant cooking. I want to focus. But almost everything at Manchester House makes it a struggle to do so. I am struggling to dig this terrific food out from under a drift of unnecessary cobbler. It's a real shame.

Jay's news bites

■ For a robust taste of Greater Manchester, head to the Mark Addy pub in Salford by the canal, where chef Rob Owen Brown does gutsy things with black pudding, duck fat and Eccles cakes. He's also just published his first cookbook, entitled, rather deliciously, Crispy Squirrel and Vimto Trifle (markaddy.co.uk).

■ Terrific news: cheese has been cultured using bacteria collected from food writer Michael Pollan's belly button. The cheeses, one of 11 produced using cultures from people's body parts, are part of the Grow Your Own exhibition at Dublin's Science Gallery. "Everybody has a unique and diverse set of bacteria living on their skin that can be amplified... and grown in milk to form and flavour each cheese," says Christina Agapakis, the US scientist responsible. Why did I throw away all that stuff from between my toes? (dublin.sciencegallery.com)

■ The "UK's first Marmite-infused Indian menu is being launched at…" No, I won't complete the PR's job for them. If you hunger for "stir-fried shrimp, Marmite and pepper" you'll have to find it for yourself. Google a therapist while you're at it. Three-course lunch £27.50.

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

The Goulash Co-operative has until Thursday to raise the funds to buy a restaurant with a rich reputation for rebels and Rabelaisians

Is it madness to want to save a 60-year-old restaurant, the Gay Hussar in London's Soho, because of fond memories of goulash, fierce argument and good humour– and to want others to have similar experiences? The late Tom Driberg tried famously to persuade Mick Jagger to stand as a Labour candidate there; Victor Sassie, longtime maître d', whose claims to Hungarian parentage were diluted by his less trumpted familial links to Barrow-in-Furness, witnessed libidinous former foreign secretary, George Brown, fall outside in the gutter. Even in my time, Tribune dinners were attended by among others, Michael Foot, Barbara Castle, Kenneth Clarke and the late Lord Rothermere, who, having been kissed by journalist Nick Cohen, took himself and Foot off for a nightcap at the Ritz.

A group of us, call us devotees, have formed a co-operative to buy the restaurant, having invested time and money in the place – the latter often courtesy of our employers – over many years.

We think we are in good company.

At the back end of 1994, I met Tyrone O'Sullivan, the now legendary south Wales miners' leader, who had a plan to save his colliery from closure. He took me to the pit face under the Rhigos Mountain, and outlined his plan – to get the workforce to invest their redundancy payments in what became known as the Tower employees buy-out (TEBO) – a glorious co-operative venture which virtually everyone apart from Tyrone said could not be done. But it was done, brilliantly successfully, and still to this day, as new plans are made now the deep-mined coal has finally run out.

The Gay Hussar restaurant in Soho is not really comparable to a mine in south Wales, save that its larger owners want to divest themselves of it and a group of us, mindful of its rich history and the loyalty of staff and customers alike, fancy that it too has a future as a diners and staff co-operative venture. A helpful endorsement from a Guardian editorial spurred a group of us under the tutelage of experienced co-operator, John Goodman, to form the Goulash Co-operative. The directors of this venture also include this newspaper's award-winning cartoonist Martin Rowson, and a former editors club, which includes Bill Hagerty, Julia Langdon (ex Guardian political staff), Chris Kaufman and me. Our honorary president is that scourge of the Murdoch media empire, Tom Watson MP, who has been known to have enjoyed one or two dinners at the Gay Hussar over the years.

We are urgently selling shares in the co-operative in order to be able to submit our sealed bid by this Thursday. And since the Gay Hussar has not only been a canteen for Tribune over the years, but the Guardian as well, we hope that some of the Guardian's staff and readers who agree with us that the restaurant's rich reputation for rebels and Rabelaisians is worth encouraging further, will consider taking shares or parts of shares. You can read more about doing that here.

In recent weeks there has been an attempt – predictably by some in the Murdoch media and in the Tory party – to batter the co-operative movement and mutuals, so as to link the Reverend Flowers' predicament to the Labour leadership. Never mind that the Co-operative Bank really began to founder once it had dropped its tried and tested ways and opted for the bad habits manifested so painfully and globally by the Anglo American banking system. The Goulash Co-operative, should we be successful in our bid on Thursday, will not be employing the Reverend Flowers as a consultant, but we do have plenty of ideas for making the Gay Hussar every bit as successful as other similar ventures.

Our bid must have some merits, for not only have many of the usual suspects taken out shares, but so has former Conservative party chairman, Lord Ashcroft. So we wish him more success in plotting against David Cameron in the upstairs rooms of the Gay Hussar, than some of us ever had against Tony Blair. And lest it be forgotten that while Tyrone and the Tower miners were launching their successful buy-out bid, Messrs Blair and Mandelson were pedalling the nonsense that Labour's historic commitment to common ownership meant "nationalising the corner shop".

So if we are successful, could this be a model – as the Guardian suggests – that could be adopted elsewhere by Ed Miliband and the Labour party? Well, we could always encourage those nascent energy co-operatives couldn't we – or get Lambeth council to desist from selling off its housing co-operatives to developers?

Louboutin heels, Botox and no taste: fine restaurants are wasted on their pampered clientele

As Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, hell is other people. Many would agree, including the London-based Russian restaurateur Arkady Novikov. Recently he used an interview to slag off a whole bunch of hellish people, namely spendy Russians. "I find it embarrassing," he said. "Who are these girls drinking champagne and carrying crocodile Birkin bags? It's like a disease people get when they have money. I don't want to be associated with this thing." Doesn't he? That's unfortunate because they are precisely the ones thronging the £100-a-head gastro-disaster that is Novikov in London's Mayfair. If you haven't heard of Novikov be grateful. It's Dante's 46th circle of hell, a nose-bleedingly expensive septic tank containing all that is wrong with flash restaurants, where the Italian food tastes like cheap Chinese and the Imperial sashimi platter costs £227. Before service.

Dear old Arkady is at liberty to slag off Russians in London. I am not. Instead I will simply slag off everybody with stupid money, whichever corner of the globe they happen to come from, including our own. God knows there's enough of them. Right now there's a luxe food economy, focused on a couple of London postcodes, which is entirely supported by a grotesque, preening, Louboutin-heeled, gold-plated iPhone-carrying, plastic-crashing, Bugatti-driving, natural resource-pillaging excuse for humanity that floats like some gold-flecked scummy head on the warm beer of the rest of an economy simply trying to make do.

There has been an explosion in the numbers of high-end restaurants in recent years. None of them would exist were it not for this lot. They sit nightly at the tables, flicking selfies at each other on digital currents, air kissing one another's bottle-bronzed cheeks, their Botoxed eyebrows feigning constant surprise, while picking irritably at platters of exquisitely carved Jamon Iberico, or Peking duck with skin like lacquered rosewood, or bits of sashimi cut just so. For this is the real tragedy. Many of these restaurants are actually rather good: superb ingredients, great cooking, skilled service. And all of it is completely wasted on the very people who can afford it; the ones who book into them not out of greed or even a tinge of hunger, but because they like the way the lighting flatters their complexion and the toiletries in the bogs make them smell like one of Dita Von Teese's freshly pampered armpits.

It gets worse. Obviously there are people who don't give a toss about restaurants like this. Even if they were in a position to save up, this is not how they would wish to spend their money. Fair enough. But there are many others who do care, who will strain to save the necessary pile of cash needed for their one high-end eating out event of the year. Only to find themselves locked in a dining room with a bunch of tossers. What's more as we now know, were it not for all the people those expensive restaurants are wasted on, they wouldn't even be in business for the people who do appreciate them. Of course, some of you may have clocked that I don't just go to them once a year. I have to go all the time. And finally you recognise the depth of my tragedy. Being a restaurant critic is assumed to be heaven. It's meant to be bliss. Instead, because of other people, it all too often becomes something else: a complete and utter hell.

A spat between a Bondi cafe owner and a critical customer on Facebook underlines the seeming power of diner restaurant reviews. But how much do you rely on them?

Given the delectability of all those slender, young, Nautilus-raised male waiterettes, with whom Manhattan is now stocked eyebrow to plucked eyebrow, who would want even the pertest, cutest girls serving at table?

Experience Preferred … But Not Essential is a film that is being much discussed over the smarter tables of Manhattan. It is talked of as a classic about another age, on a level almost of Upstairs Downstairs. It is set in a North Wales seaside resort in 1962; its sense of history, to the New Yorker, dwells in the fact that its heroine is, temporarily, a waitress.

The waitress is almost an extinct creature here now. This is the age of the virtuoso waiter. A woman is what has to be hired occasionally, the also ran for slacker lunchtimes or as a desperate measure while Andrew/Steven/Peter or John are finishing their off-off-Broadway showcase runs, beer commercials or soap shots.

Given the delectability of all those slender, young, Nautilus-raised male waiterettes, with whom Manhattan is now stocked eyebrow to plucked eyebrow, who would want even the pertest, cutest girls serving at table? The keyword is service. Women do serve, there is, alas, no way of escaping that cultural, biological image. Young men are involved in something far grander than the lowly scribbling of orders and bearing of plates. Almost all are actors, singers, dancers waiting for discovery; the restaurant table is but another theatre in the round.

The most convincing exponents of this art are to be found at the new restaurant opened in Columbus Avenue's DDL Foodshow. Dino de Laurentiis, the famed movie producer, and owner of this food extravaganza, culled the finest waiters from his Columbus competitors. Each one is more lithe with more presence than the last; this is the sound stage of their dreams. DDL is the new Schwabs drugstore; each waiter is today's Lana Turner awaiting discovery. Any one of these lovable, tousle-haired fellows might be destined to be Kevin Kline, the blond Viking type to be William Hurt. Everyone wants to be on Broadway while dishing out the strip steak, double rare.

The real elite, meanwhile, is to be found waitering for the catering services: $12 an hour, no tips, but the best of clientele. Private parties, celebrity dinners and cocktails: nor is it unknown for he who tends bar to be invited to stay on afterwards as a guest… if he be cute enough, which he always is. Restaurant waiters are costumed as chorus boys; catering waiters in their tuxedos are understudies to the stars. This year, your turn; next year, mine.

'It's theatre and dinner all rolled into one'

I blame Momofuku's David Chang for the whole rock'n'roll-ification of cheffing these days. It had all calmed down since Marco Pierre White caused mass swooning over his lank locks, smouldering eyes and razor-sharp cheekbones. It pains me like you wouldn't believe to watch him these days, fondling chicken breasts, palms spread with stock cube. My ex-idol has feet of salt and maltodextrin.

Anyway, the difference between Chang and White is not just the cheekbones, but the former's swooning fans tend to be male rather than female. Fanboys in whites, kimchi-ing anything that stands still long enough. I know that other chefs, Pierre Gagnaire for one, have tinkered with the double-umami whammy of pairing kimchi with blue cheese, but it was Chang's transgressive croissants that brought it to a drooling wider audience.

So here's chef Michael Bremner, owner of 64 Degrees, a new 27-seat restaurant that has foodie Brightonians in something of a tizz, with his kimchi chicken wings with blue cheese. I bet he's either been to Momofuku Milk Bar or owns the cookbook. It's a play on the classic buffalo chicken wing, but instead of vinegary, Lee & Perrin's-laced sauce, Bremner's are sticky and lipsmacking with gochujang. A fermented cabbage leaf, dehydrated until paper-thin, pokes out of the glass bowl like wafer from an ice-cream; the blue cheese is foamy, squirted from an espuma canister. It's a great dish, one that makes you stretch your eyes with its unholy tang.

There are only 16 dishes on the menu and we eat nearly all of them. We don't intend to, but each new arrival is such a blast it seems rude not to. There's cauliflower in several iterations – roasted, puréed, shaved – scattered with pomegranate seeds and topped with a gloriously lacy and crisp shallot bhaji; the whole thing is like a molecular version of curry house favourite aloo gobi. I love it. Or tiny logs of potato knödel, toasted and nutty outside, truffly within, with swirls of emulsified smoked butter and cabbage.

Bremner makes great use of his advanced kitchen kit, his dehydrator and water bath. The restaurant's name comes from the "house egg", bathed at 64 degrees precisely until its white is translucent but set and its yolk as spoonable as honey. We have this with ham hock – a little underpowered (I'd have liked more salt and heft) – and woody girolles. And he's not above jokes. "Fish & chips" is exactly that: a smoky, grilled chunk of bream, yer actual chips, pea purée and a pickled quail's egg with, by way of garnish, a slab of batter. Then, after all this playfulness, comes a sticky toffee pudding as conventional-looking as a Tory wife, albeit one who's hiding a good swig of bourbon.

We're on stools, right in front of Bremner and, as the wine goes down (unlike the food, which is served in considered and decorative crockery, it comes in the sort of horrid institutional glasses we used to drink Creamola Foam from at school), pester him with questions. Despite the place being mobbed, he's all good grace. There's no hiding place: we watch as he prises shimmering discs of bacon gelée to perch on top of scallops, and dismisses in disgust a plate on which the blob of coconut is not the desired dimension for his blow-torched but otherwise raw mackerel. It's theatre and dinner all rolled into one.

Yes, there are hiccups and snafus: one very grumpy chap, who has booked, can't get a table and is determined to share his irritation: knife-resistant tortillas under an otherwise wonderful dish of pressed pig cheek, somewhere between rillettes and pulled pork with a clever accompaniment of scorched, pickled pineapple; those glasses. And if you long for obsequious sommeliers and linen tablecloths – or even room to swing a cat – this won't be for you. It's teeny and cramped and a bit frantic. But, food-wise, it's the most exciting thing to hit Brighton for years. Actually, maybe ever.

• 64 Degrees 53 Meeting House Lane, Brighton, 01273 770115. Open lunch, Tues-Sun, noon-3.30pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 6-9.45pm. About £25-30 a head plus drinks and service.

Food 8/10
Atmosphere 6/10
Value for money 8/10

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Grasmere's modest Oak Bank Hotel boasts a remarkable secret: the brilliant cooking of Darren Comish

Broadgate, Grasmere, Cumbria (01539 435 217). Meal for two: £70-£100

The small Oak Bank Hotel in Grasmere is not one of the Lake District's fanciest establishments. To be frank it's not even one of the fanciest establishments in Grasmere. At the front there is a comfy lounge with a log fire, and at the back one of those white wipe-down conservatories that you see advertised in Sunday colour supplements. For all the self-consciously modern art on the walls of the bar and dining room, this is very much the sort of place where hill walkers would feel comfortable taking off their boots and warming their stockinged feet by the fire.

It is not the sort of place where you expect to be startled by the quality of the cooking, as in the full "Gosh!" and "Oh my!" and – whispered, so as not to offend the owners – "What is this food doing here?" Stuff of this quality and ambition tends to come with flummery and fuss. Here they just bring you nice plates of food.

Chef Darren Comish arrived quietly back in May and began cooking. He has an interesting CV which includes a stint at the Michelin-starred bit of the Devonshire Arms at Bolton Abbey. It's not that he is terrifyingly original; Lord save us from that. I've seen plates that look like his in other places. It's that almost everything on Comish's plates counts and makes sense. There's brightness and an unusual clarity. And blimey but it's good value. At lunch three courses (four, if you count the exceptional pre-starter) cost £19.95; even in the evening when the choice, along with the largesse, expands, it's still only £35.

The fact that we are the only diners for lunch on a Monday simply adds to the impact. In seclusion you have no choice but to focus on what is placed in front of you. Which is what we do when three mini loaves of warm bread arrive, along with some salted butter and logs of same flavoured with seaweed or lemon and herbs. The lemon is lovely, the citrus and dairy seesawing with each other. You could imagine it melting away on a grilled piece of fish. But oh the seaweed butter! It has a slap of iodine and umami and a deep, creamy end. Suddenly I am perving over butter. We are forced to portion it up.

And then that pre-starter: a lightly battered frog's leg. Beneath is the soothing lick of confited egg yolk. Around it is an intense seafood soup, a bisque by any other name, with a thick dusting of an even more serious seafood "powder" which is the sort of thing you would want to dab at with one fat fingertip. We almost take the glaze off the bowl it's so good and sit staring at the empty porcelain wondering what it had been doing on this table.

A coarse game terrine comes with a crumb of the famed Grasmere gingerbread, which brings the waft of the spice cabinet to the plate. There are splodges of chutney-like purée in among a salad of crisp autumn vegetables and, best of all, tiny cubes of pickled onion jelly. Finely mandolined pickled vegetables turn up as the foil to a tranche of mackerel which has been given a proper spanking on the grill, so the skin is crisp and bubbled. It's what so many mackerel dishes are aiming for but don't quite have the guts to be.

As there are only three starters we conclude it would be churlish not to have them all. So here comes a bowl containing two smoked chicken rissoles, sprinkled with another fighty powder which is the essence of every roast chicken dinner you've ever had. Somebody should flavour crisps with it. Around this is poured a celeriac soup which has all the high, airy, vegetal notes you expect but also something more profoundly savoury. Somewhere in here is a brilliant stock, probably made with the rest of the chicken that provided the powder.

Next, a "tasting of pork". There are tiny onion rings. There are dabs and splodges of butter-rich mash. There is a sherry-based sauce of a richness that manages to stay the right side of something with which you would weatherproof a fence. Most of all there is pig: not just cheek but, as is pointed out, both inner and outer, one denser than the other. There is belly. There is liver, dark and sticky and serious. It is porker central.

A tranche of salted cod has a pleasing meatiness, but eaten alone is just a little too salty. It is the one fault, the one thing we could niggle at. And yet when it comes together with the various riffs on cauliflower and Romesco with which it is served – ground down into a "couscous", caramelised – it seasons the rest of the plate. Even the light "curry" sauce, a notion from the French classical kitchen which all too often traduces the entire culinary tradition of the Indian subcontinent, works here.

There are three desserts, so again we put our backs into it. A sticky toffee pudding is an ethereally light bit of sponge, so not quite the dense puck it should be, but the sticky toffee brûlée and the banana ice cream which crowd on to the plate make up for that. There is an uncommon delicacy and lightness to a mango délice with a layer of frisky gel on top, alongside a "cannelloni" of mousse. Best of all is a single ripe fig, roasted within a thick toffeed pastry shell with a quenelle of cardamom mousse. Most brilliant desserts are a trip to the nursery. They infantilise. This is thoroughly grown-up. You could imagine small children recoiling from the plate; we adults fall quietly in love.

There is a chance to meet the chef, so I take it. I want to know how many people cooked this glorious meal. He shrugs. Just him. It's a Monday and only one booking, so he did it alone. Even on a busy weekend there are only three in there and one of them does the washing-up. I say thank you. I also give thanks for having stumbled across the blog of Cumbria Foodie. I had asked for Lake District recommendations via social media. There were lots of sturdy and hearty-looking pubs. All seemed fine, but hardly worth the paragraphs. Nobody but the Cumbria Foodie had written about Darren Comish and the Oak Bank Hotel. I decided to take a punt. God but I'm glad I did.

Jay's news bites

■ For more food in unexpectedly modest hotel settings, try Allium at the Best Western Abbey Hotel in Bath. Chef Chris Staines made his name at Foliage at London's Mandarin Oriental, before a career diversion which eventually took him to Bath. Try his quail glazed in chilli caramel, or his lamb shoulder pastilla. The £21, three-course set-price menu until 7pm is a steal (abbeyhotelbath.co.uk).

■ It seems playing with your food pays. Double Michelin-starred chef Sat Bains has successfully claimed tax credits for his development kitchen, the ultimate status symbol for any self-respecting gastro pioneer. He argued it was an R&D enterprise of the sort run by hi-tech industries. The tax man cogitated. Then agreed. Sat got the cash (restaurantsatbains.com).

■ The combined award for most shameless over-promising while cashing in on people's vulnerabilities goes to The Fast Metabolism Diet Cookbook: Eat Even More Food and Lose Even More Weight, which is being published on 31  December – just in time for New Year resolutions.

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

'It looks like someone has slung a giant, uncooked pizza base over a super-sized Alvar Aalto wave vase'

There has always been a lot of chuntering about whether cooking – especially at the haute end of things – can be described as art. Some of the more self-aggrandising chefs would say it is. But they would, wouldn't they?

More pointy-headed types than me have also argued that sublime cooking has transformative qualities and can contain layers of meaning, so, yeah, art. But I'm not convinced: surely food's eventual fate precludes it from any aspirations to high culture? Not that it stops rabid foodies using it as shorthand for the old kunst. A recent piece in the New York Times stated, "Nobody cares if you know about Mozart or Leonardo any more, but you had better be able to discuss the difference between ganache and couverture." (Mind you, the same article also said that food is unable to provoke anger or sorrow. The writer clearly hadn't visited Gregg's Table.)

So here's the latest gallery restaurant, at the new Serpentine Sackler in Kensington Gardens. It's light years from the traditional art world hospitality of cling-filmed carrot cake served in the vaults. Designed by Zaha Hadid, it's little short of extraordinary. The 200-year-old former gunpowder store looks as though someone has flung a giant, uncooked pizza base over a supersized Alvar Aalto wave vase. In daylight, sitting inside this cream- and sorbet-coloured curiosity, with its swooping columns that manage to be simultaneously phallic and yonic, makes you feel all Alice In Wonderland, as if strange creatures are rustling in the greenery outside. In the evening, with trancey DJs and mood lighting, it's like one of those wildly designed joints in Vegas or Singapore. It's very, very Not London.

The chef, too, is very Not London. Oliver Lange is Berlin-born and has worked with Nobu and at pop-up "happenings" here and abroad. His dishes are characterised by brow-wrinkling complexity. Take this simple-sounding number: robata lamb tartare, aubergine and cornbread. First conundrum: how can a tartare be also robata'ed? Raw and grilled? The two large meat patties look and taste uncooked, but have about them a whiff of smoke, as though they'd had a brief grapple with the robata behind the bike sheds. The tiniest petals of acidulated onion cradle emulsified blobs of this and that – mustard, pea (I think) or aubergine, glossy and tongue-coating with oil. There's modernist "snow" of maltodextrin, fragranced with chives. And cornbread, reduced to wafer-thin crisps.

Or there's "Ollysan's" (cringe) sushi: bizarre items topped with fried quails' eggs and truffle, or tofu and basil, scattered with seeds and served with soy jelly. Or whipped butter topped with powdered black Hawaiian salt. Or bread made with black pudding. Pork belly – a huge serving – features a hectic homage to the carrot: orange glazed; purple scattered with bacon-y dust; processed into a mousse-like sauce. Puffed pork rinds provide contrast and crunch. Oh, and there's a slow-braised pig's cheek, too. It's vaguely exhausting. Cauliflower also gets the treatment: served with cod in paper-thin raw cross-sections, and roasted and caramelised, and violently pureed. There are nuts and seaweeds, too, in case you're tempted to nod off. Puddings, particularly one made with tonka bean-scented tapioca, mango sorbet and dragonfruit, are like some kind of in-joke. I'm not sure I get it.

My favourite art-food collision on the planet – The Wapping Project– is about to close (go while you still can). I'm not sure this, a five-year installation, will replace it in my affections. But it's worth a visit, to be wowed by Hadid's vision and looked after by charming Juan Calatayud and his sharply dressed team. The food sure made us react, and I've thought about it a lot since. I suspect the gallerists will be delighted to have us uncultured restaurant critic types scratching our heads to make sense of it. But is that art?

• The Magazine The Serpentine Galleries, London W2, 020 7298 7552. Open, Wed-Sat, 10am-11pm; Tues and Sun, 10am-6pm. Meal with drinks and service, around £60 a head.
Food 6/10
Atmosphere 8/10
Value for money 7/10

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For bartenders, there's nothing jolly about a bunch of obnoxious drunks in velour Santa suits. I'm no Grinch, but SantaCon sucks

Imagine entering your workplace to find a sea of grown men in red velour. Someone is throwing coconut shavings in the air to "make it snow", and someone else is playing a vuvuzela. The aromas of beer, sweat, and suspended adolescence hang thick in the air.

This was the scene my first year working SantaCon as a bartender in New York City. My second year, we had to remove one of Santa's elves for throwing a stool at her boyfriend (let's call him Rudolph the Drunken Trust Fund Reindeer). We won't even talk about my third year.

SantaCon, for the blissfully uninitiated, is a bar crawl that takes place each December – an annual New York staple that's caught on globally too. Participants dress up as Santa (or a slutty elf, or an anthropomorphic reindeer, or really any Christmas-themed nonsense) and attempt to annoy as many people in as many bars as possible before succumbing to alcohol poisoning.

The debauchery begins at 10am and continues until the last merry miscreant pees himself in the cab home. While I've been unable to confirm it with any participants, there do seem to be extra points given for urinating in non-traditional locations. I've been told that there is an aspect of charity to the event, but, as a bartender, I've also been told that gin doesn't damage fetal health, "because juniper is organic". SantaCon will be held this Saturday in NYC and is the culmination of everything that is wrong with America.

"But wait! What's so terrible about a harmless costumed bar crawl?"

Everything.

"Surely it's just a bit of holiday fun?"

No.

"But it's for charity!"

Go back to Jersey.

It's difficult to explain to anyone who hasn't had a slutty elf with "23 BIRTHDAY" written on her forehead in Sharpie ask for a "low cal holiday shot", but something about the anonymity of the costume combined with intoxication causes bar patrons to behave in ways they would never ordinarily consider acceptable. Poor tipping, vomiting, fake IDs, walkouts, idiotic drink orders, declined credit cards, and general douchebaggery all come with the territory for a bartender – but during SantaCon, these behaviors are the norm rather than the exception.

For me, the worst part is that the Santas seem to be completely aware of how horrible they are:

So, like does this totally suck for you? This must totally suck for you. Do you have to be here all day? Anyway, lemme get seven car bombs, and keep a dollar for yourself, honey.

There's a definite attitude of privilege and excess surrounding SantaCon. They descend in groups of twenty or so – all demanding immediate service from the two bartenders on shift. They want shots, they want them RIGHT NOW, and they do not feel they're being served fast enough. Also, they would like their bartenders to stop making drinks and take pictures of them looking like idiots.

Worse, they don't expect to pay for the privilege. Santas will run up tabs higher than my take-home for the shift and leave without signing their credit card slips, leaving me without a tip. Some groups just crowd the bar, order rounds of water, and leave to head to the next bar without tipping. I've had SantaCon participants apologize for being jerks in one breath and then tell me my tits look great and ask if I'd like to go out with them in the next.

That sound? Oh, it's just my vagina snapping shut like a bear trap. There is nothing less attractive than a smarmy asshole who thinks that more than a drink is available from his lady bartender, except of course that same guy in a velour Santa suit.

So why not put a stop to the whole affair? These idiots think they have the right to behave like complete assholes, and unfortunately, they do. It's definitely not illegal to be a douchebag. Most bars would go under if the activities of the douchebag community could be legally curtailed. Plenty of drunken Santas have been arrested in years past, but they can't be arrested on attempted drunk and disorderly charges. We have to wait until they actually are drunk and disorderly, and by then the damage is done.

Dressing up and getting drunk is completely legal, and while some establishments will be closing their doors to costumed drinkers, not all bars can afford to turn down business, even if we desperately want to.

So if you're in New York City and want to avoid the inevitable boozy catastrophe of SantaCon, don't go south of 50th street in Manhattan this Saturday. And no matter where you are, if you see a Santa behaving badly, try calling his mother. If she knew about this, she would be livid. There's not much else you can do, because being an asshole is Santa's God-given legal right in 'Murica.

In the cut-throat world of high-street restaurants, a new player has just rolled into town. Are you ready for Grillshack?

61-63 Beak Street, London W1. No bookings. Meal for two: £20-£40

Let's rehearse the old gag: how do you make a small fortune in the restaurant business? Start with a big one. Oh, the oceans of cash that have been lost on the fragile dream of monetising the business of showing people a good time. On paper it looks straightforward. Flog nice food and wine to enough people, with a good enough margin and a smile, and happiness is yours.

The obvious problem is that the number of people willing to be shown a good time is never guaranteed, while the costs are. Rents and rates, utility bills and wages all have to be paid regardless of whether anybody wants to eat your finely honed dish of liver in lager. You can shed the odd waiter. You can trim your ingredients costs by compromising on quality – ignore the stirrups accidentally left in with the consignment of extra cheap "beef" – but it won't make a vast amount of difference. If you can't drag in punters you'll quickly be wallowing in red ink. The gap between huge losses and cheery profits can be remarkably narrow.

And there's another problem with trying to make big money from restaurants. They work best when they are the expression of an individual. As a result it's hard to create a saleable asset. In its pomp, for example, Gordon Ramsay Restaurants was hugely successful. Its profits would have valued the whole business at north of £50m. Except that, if sold, it would become Gordon Ramsay Restaurants without Gordon Ramsay. That would be just so many lease assignments, wine stores and fine bone china, and no fruity expletives.

The more orthodox way to make money from people eating out is to create a replicable chain; a brand that can spread along Britain's high streets like chicken pox through a nursery. Ramsay understood this. It's why he bought the venerable Foxtrot Oscar in Chelsea– a hilarious play on his expletive of choice via the Nato phonetic alphabet – which was meant to be the cornerstone for a huge roll out, but never was.

Others have got it right. In October the 34-strong Byron chain of hamburger restaurants – George Osborne's favourite – sold for £100m. It was an enthusiastic valuation for a company earning £6.9m a year. But then the buyers weren't just taking over a bunch of restaurants. They were buying the potential to open a whole load more. A month before the Byron deal, Richard Caring (the chap with the blindingly snow-white teeth and the winter-in-Tunisia tan who owns the high-end Caprice group, including the Ivy, J Sheekey and Scott's) did a mass-market deal of his own. Côte, the chain of French bistros, was also sold for £100m. Caring owned 51%.

Now with Grillshack, opened just as Côte was being sold, Caring is at it again. Grillshack is worth knowing about because, if all goes according to (his) plan, there will be one near you shortly. Even allowing for concerns about the identikit British high street I suspect this one will be regarded as a moderately good thing.

The room is cafeteria chic, all hard wipe-down surfaces, cheery gashes of colour and US diner iconography. There are mustard-coloured walls and curving wooden slatted benches which echo the wooden venetian blinds. The all-day menu, designed by former Ramsay head chef Mark Askew, is short: a flattened rump steak with shoestring potatoes for £9.95, half a grilled chicken for £7.95, a haloumi salad for £7.75 and a couple of hamburgers, plus various sides.

What keeps the prices down is the utilisation of new tech. Although you can order at the counter, you can also do so from terminals in the room or, without getting up, via a smartphone app. The food is then brought to you.

I decide to be terribly modern and download the app, which I am told will work quicker if I access it via their own Wi-Fi. I have to input a lot of card details. Just before I send the order I notice that I don't need a side of shoestring fries because they already come with my steak. Going back to change the order is fine – except all my card details are lost and I have to start again. When it comes to ordering dessert I cannot be fagged with the effort. I give up and go to the counter. The app is probably most useful if you are ordering food to take away. It should also be noted that the process dumps at least three emails into your inbox, one of which looks like spam.

So far so tech. None of this is relevant if the food doesn't do the job. For the most part it does. In an age when getting a good steak generally involves selling your children on the open market to pay for it, the flattened rump here is very good value. We're talking a big sheet of very fast-grilled beef. Don't go looking for a pink tinge inside. It's so thin there is no inside. But it's tender, tastes properly of animal and comes with a rustling pile of matchstick-thin chips and a hunk of smoked butter. No Dijon mustard, sadly, which is an oversight.

The grilled chicken has crisp, well-seasoned skin and meat that hasn't been cooked to death. We like the seasoned fries. There are also a couple of specials on offer, including the obligatory pulled-pork bun. Breakfast options (until 11am) include pancakes, French toast and a bacon brioche all for around £3.50. This is a volume business run on very tight margins.

Not everything is thrilling. Buttermilk fried-chicken nuggets are hard and dry as if they've been hanging around a little while. A spin bowler could do damage with one of these. A crisp radish slaw is OK, if a little under-dressed. Corn on the cob with chipotle butter and grated hard (unnamed) cheese is probably fabulous the moment it's cooked, but less so a while later.

Dessert choices are narrow: a cheesecake, a passable carrot and walnut cake and the blunt instrument which is the triple choc chip cookie ice-cream sandwich. Drunk, late at night, one of those would make an awful lot of sense. In the cold light of day, the chiller treatment does the cookie no favours. And yet for all these (minor) faults, Grillshack is a robust proposition. I suspect that very soon there really will be one near you. And that, a little while after that, Richard Caring will make another fat dollop of money.

Jay's news bites

■ For another smart way to use technology try London's Honest Burger, which has expanded swiftly from one branch in Brixton to Soho, Camden and Portobello Road. They text you when your table is ready so there's no standing in line, just a casual saunter off for a nearby drink. The burgers are up there with the best; the rosemary-and-salt-dusted chips are quite simply addictive. Around £12.50 a head including drink and service (honestburgers.co.uk)

■ For those who spend a little too much time thinking about their dinner, Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh has launched a masters degree in gastronomy. It will study the world of food "from Michelin-starred restaurants to soup kitchens, community allotments to large scale agri-business". More info at qmu.ac.uk

■ Papa John's has gone all seasonal. Say hello to the Christmas pizza: turkey, sage and onion meatballs, pork sausage, bacon and a topping of "cranberry drizzle". Just how many types of wrong can you get on one disc of dough?

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

A journalist secretly filmed a meal in the city of Civitavecchia including a salad dressed with flakes of dried dolphin

Prosecutors in the city of Civitavecchia are investigating claims that illicit dolphin meat is being served to customers in restaurants just north of the Italian capital.

A journalist from Silvio Berlusconi's Italia Uno channel secretly filmed a meal at which the centrepiece was a salad dressed with thinly sliced flakes of dried dolphin fillet. The owner of the restaurant was shown warning him: "You didn't eat this in my place, right?"

Ciro Lungo, head of the protected species unit of Italy's environmental police, the Corpo Forestale dello Stato, told the Guardian on Monday: "I can confirm an investigation into this matter is in progress."

Lungo said that before seeing the television report, he had dismissed as fantasy rumours of dolphin meat being served up in Italy. But, he said, the high prices cited by those who were filmed implied "substantial demand" for the dark-coloured, dried meat.

The bill paid by Italia Uno's undercover team came to 100 euros a head without wine. A wholesaler who was also secretly filmed claimed the price per kilo in Rome itself ranged as high as 900 euros.

He said dolphin meat was available in some restaurants in the capital, but was "certainly not written on the menu". The best way to eat it, he recommended, was with "fresh onions, celery and tomato".

Italia Uno's report showed that clients who wanted dried dolphin fillet asked for it by a code name: the English word "black". Independent laboratory tests carried out on the meat the journalist bought in the restaurant and from the wholesaler confirmed it was from dolphins.

Fishermen told the TV team that the meat normally came from dolphins caught in nets intended for other species. The majority were already dead when pulled from the water.

But, said one of the fishermen, "if they aren't dead, they club [them] on the head". Asked whether dolphins were sometimes caught deliberately, one said they were: "If they know that dolphins are there, you (sic) cast the nets there."

Italian fishermen who catch dolphins are meant to hand over the carcasses to the coast guard. But according to the restaurant owner who catered for Italia Uno's investigator, there is a way round the rules.

"They cut off the head. They cut off the fins and everything," he said. "And if they're stopped, they say it's a shark."

Dolphins are particularly vulnerable to driftnets, which were banned in the Mediterranean in 2002. A spokesperson for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said: "They're completely illegal. But cases regularly come to light of their use on Italian fishing boats."