Maybe the restaurant's name was a clue. But being ambushed by images of degraded cartoon sex while you pee is no joke

The restaurant's name is Flesh & Buns. With a name like that I suppose we should have known better, though being a restaurant that specialises in steamed hirata buns, you'd be forgiven for thinking it pertained merely to the food. The porny-sounding restaurant is the teenage sister of an even pornier-sounding place in Soho called Bone Daddies.

It is the "hot new place", in a year of hot new places, of restaurants that twin things with other things, of champagne and hotdogs, and burgers with lobsters. Restaurants created for people who pretend their love of sharing food extends past Instagram.

Flesh & Buns had been enthusiastically reviewed in the Evening Standard, although less so by the Sunday Times, wherein AA Gill described it as horrible and depressing, its name a "single entendre", its menu a "mess".

And yet there we were for a Christmas do, and though the din was thick and heavy and the food was slow coming – which meant my buns were cold before they were filled – I was having a good time with my friends. Until I saw the cartoon porn, that was.

I sat on the toilet, as you do. And as I sat there in my paper cracker crown, I happened to look up and focus on the wall, and when I did I saw (and there's no delicate way of putting this) a picture of a large-breasted naked woman being penetrated by an octopus.

Being a sporadic reader of Fortean Times, I was aware of Hentai tentacle porn, sometimes called "tentacle rape" – apparently developed to bypass Japanese censorship laws forbidding the depiction of the penis, with examples dating back to the 19th century. But, unlike the stuff in the current British Museum exhibition entitled Shunga: sex and pleasure in Japanese art, this particular octopus, purple and corpulent and priapic as it was, was coated in a sheen of milky bodily fluids. It was hideous and disturbing and hilarious, and I laughed my head off.

But then I saw the rest. Because, in a gruesome expression of hipster irony, the whole toilet had been papered in Japanese manga porn. Sans octopus, the rest of it though. It was just women. Or girls. Because these cartoon sex dolls look pre-pubescent but for their humungous breasts.

Girls with huge eyes being bent over and "boned". Girls squeezing their breasts so hard it makes you wince. Girls crying. Girls with cartoon speech bubbles saying: "You've been holding back so long so be sure to let all of it out inside me." A friend told me that the other toilet was schoolgirl-themed, just to take the creepy to another level. I didn't stick around to find out.

It took me by surprise that, living as I do in a world saturated with sexualised images of women, cartoon representations would make me feel angry. But I did feel angry.

Perhaps it's because the ladies' loos are supposed to be "our" space, a private sphere where men and their junk, both literal and metaphorical, are not invited. I had not consented to look at these pictures. It felt as though they were saying: look what we can do with you, if we choose. Here it is, blown up and in your face, this degraded cartoon sexuality. Furthermore you will look at it, and you will like it, because we're all cool with this now.

Except, obviously, the meta-wallpaper wasn't really saying that. Cool doesn't make statements. "Hipster sexism", as it's been dubbed by various media outlets, thrives on irony, on that knowing repetition of age-old cliches, spoken in a drawling tone dripping with nonchalance and clove-flavoured fags. Hipster sexism, the post-post-feminism of Terry Richardson and American Apparel and Robin Thicke with his "big dick" that will "tear your ass in two": sex in sweatbands, with added spunk and sarcasm.

It's tongue in cheek, the manager said. (But whose tongue in whose cheek?)

I assume that around 50% of the restaurant's customers are women, and that almost all of them will have nipped to the loo at some point, so I'm wondering just how many of us have found ourselves confronted with the wall-to-wall surprise filth. Of course, some perhaps couldn't care less about the cartoon porn, while some might care much, much more.

Not that what any of us feel really matters, because it's all so achingly ironic and edgy, the sweaty, glorified street food and the rock'n'roll macho misogyny.

I am so, so sick of it. And you can call me humourless or Victorian or both, but I don't care. I want my hypothetical daughters to be able to eat out and shop and live in peace, without the unsolicited company of violently penetrated vaginas, and that includes the two-dimensional ones.

Like I said, the name should have been a clue. Flesh & Buns, I thought: that's what we are now, still, in 2013. Flesh and buns, and meat and fat; or cuts on a menu, birds, with "small breasts and huge thighs", sold at a premium by men to be consumed by men and by extension therefore, all of us, all the time.

Flesh and buns and meat and blood and bone, masticated and masturbated and washed down with bourbon.

The food was rubbish, by the way. But at least they don't serve octopus.

'It's ages since I've stared at a menu for so long without finding something I want to eat. But I forgive everything because of the wine list'

There are so many extraordinary things about this restaurant that I'm not quite sure where to start. Let's go with the obvious, then: the 1927 Rex Whistler murals that give this corner of Tate Britain its name, enveloping the low-ceilinged room so it's a bit like walking into an immersive fairground ride, one designed for flappers and fops.

It really is quite something: you feel almost as though you're part of The Expedition In Pursuit Of Rare Meats. Painstaking restoration has peeled off years' worth of MPs' cigar smoke to reveal their full sylvan beauty. We're transfixed. Which is just as well, because it gives us something to do while being completely overlooked by the staff.

Ah, yes, the service: another remarkable feature of this relaunched curio. We're talking staggering doziness. I'm abandoned and ignored at the front desk behind increasingly enraged tourists. I try to take matters into my own hands by simply walking in, but am escorted straight back out again, despite the fact that a) I've booked and b) the pal is already sitting at our table. There's clearly something totemic about the computer terminal in the centre of the room, because it draws staff like moths to flames. We try to detain a small chap with an improbable coiffure to ask a few questions, but he's jittery with the need to get back to it. Oh computer. Mighty computer.

Then there's the menu: it's ages since I've stared at one for so long without finding something I want to eat. Compiled by the Tate's in-house catering arm in conjunction with a food historian, it's more lesson than indulgence. What, we ask, is Trafalgar trout? "It's, er, trout. With broth. And kale," comes the reply. Way to sell it to us, baby. And kale: how very 1930s.

We resist the blandishments of the trout. But, with the exception of a (tiny) crab starter that features glorious shellfish with delicate, lightly pickled cucumber and the freshness of sorrel, the rest of what we eat is equally austere. Minuscule carrots, again with a touch of acidity, are almost raw and served with mandolined discs of radish. This isn't lunch, it's the 5:2 diet. Sea bream, overcooked, comes with hair-shirty nutmegged spinach. There's pheasant, tough and grey, with an actual porridge of oats and parsley. Some things are history for a reason. Like whooping cough.

But I forgive everything because the wine list– long a whispered, greedy little secret among the capital's bibulous – should be preserved for the nation in the galleries above. This is the most seductive of the extraordinary things: 50-odd pages, curated – and I think it's fair to use that maligned word here – by Hamish Anderson, the Tate's wine adviser. There are suggested wine pairings with each course; a good way, we reckon, to give it a workout without resorting to stratospheric sums.

Trying to get information from the sommelier about the pairings is tricky. ("What comes with the bream?" "Roast potatoes.") But everything he brings is a joy, ranging from merely delicious – an almost savoury Passagem from Portugal – to revelatory: Pfaffl Wein 2, a supple Austrian pinot noir full of frisky cherry fruit. With a Sussex pond pudding (half a lemon baked in a suet crust, so sticky juice pools out when you cut into it), we're given a healthy swig of Christmas cake-y Rutherglen muscat. There are rumours of under-the-counter swag, but trying to access that would probably have brought the sommelier out in hives. The bill for this boozy wallow is much lighter than I expect. File under London: scenes you seldom see.

I can think of little nicer than sinking into a table here at lunchtime to pay homage to that wine list, pouring out into the Millbank dusk, properly toasted, several hours later. National treasure? Even with the Keystone coppery of the staff and eccentricity of the menu, I'd say so. And the gallery's not bad, either.

• Rex Whistler Restaurant, Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1, 020-7887 8825. Open lunch, all week, noon-3pm; dinner, first Fri of every other month, 6-9.30pm. Three-course lunch, £27 a head, plus drinks and service.
Food 5/10
Atmosphere 8/10
Value for money 8/10 (mostly for the wine)

Follow Marina on Twitter.

Buried deep in London's Royal Academy is one of the gallery's best-kept secrets – the cooking of Ivan Simeoli

Royal Academy of Arts, Piccadilly, London W1 (020 7300 5920). Meal for two: £120

Recently a new restaurant called Steam and Rye, which serves an on-trend menu of American barbecue, hamburgers and worrying deep-fried pickles, announced it would be running a 50% off night for women only. Except they didn't call them women. They called them "fillies", beneath a cartoon of a woman with large breasts – she was pictured wearing only a bra – reclining in a martini glass. I checked my watch to see whether it was suddenly 1957. Nope, still 2013.

If this joint were in one of those southern US states where an equal opportunities policy means beating up all minorities with equal vigour it might have been understandable. But it's not. Steam and Rye is in the City of London. It has big-name backers. (Including actress and calendar model Kelly Brook– go figure.) I'm minded to turn up wearing only a bra, recline in a giant martini glass and demand my 50%. Some people may need post-traumatic stress counselling after witnessing that, but I believe it's a price worth paying to make a point. (The point being that gender-based discounts amount to unlawful discrimination.)

The restaurant sector has not always had the cleanest of records when it comes to patronising women. The last time I went to the otherwise lovely Le Gavroche a few years ago it was still giving the "laydees" menus without prices, because obviously having ovaries meant you couldn't possibly be settling the bill. At the far thinner end of the wedge there's the business of serving women first. This, I recognise, is tricky. Some people still like it. They see it as an old-fashioned but rather charming form of good manners.

And some, like the women with me at dinner at the Keeper's House of the Royal Academy, see it as a cue for eye-rolling so vigorous you can hear the balls rasping against their skull sockets. What matters is how the front of house staff deals with it when told to stop. The staff here dealt with it brilliantly. They acknowledged the request, altered their service, and just moved on. Throughout they were engaged without being stalkerish, funny without being intrusive. They were really good at bringing us things to eat and checking we were OK while eating them. After some weird, uneasy service recently it was a blessed relief.

Then again it's an Oliver Peyton restaurant, and that sort of professionalism does come with the territory. As a restaurateur, Irish-born Peyton is a very safe pair of hands. We know this because many of London's most significant institutions have consigned their dining rooms to his grasp. From the Admiralty at Somerset House in 2000 through the restaurant in St James's Park in 2004 to the dining rooms of the National Gallery, the Wellcome Collection, the ICA, the Royal Academy and many more besides, if it's a London landmark or stuffed full of pretty things, Peyton has probably fed people there. He has the immigrant's intense love of his adopted city. He has made London a better place than it was when he arrived.

I have reviewed many of his restaurants and they usually do the job. There's nothing overtly showy about them. It's all understated good taste. It's bourgeois, ingredient-led food that sits comfortably alongside a diet of high culture without attracting too much attention to itself. They are the Penguin Classics of restaurants. Which is where the Keeper's House, a newly renovated townhouse off the Royal Academy courtyard, differs. There is some very clever, very modern cooking here. The problem is it may all just be a little too clever for its own good.

The restaurant at the Keeper's House is the sort of thing a clattering, showy city like London needs: a room that's tucked away from view. The building is meant as a kind of club house for Royal Academicians and friends of the RA. From 4pm, however, the two-roomed basement restaurant opens to the public, if you can find it (through the arch off Piccadilly, head to the top right-hand corner). You can easily hide here. That said, it feels uncomfortably like a stage set, the curving green baize walls, hung with lumps of carved stone, appearing oddly temporary as if, were it all to go wrong, the whole restaurant could literally fold, like a piece of flat-pack furniture.

Perhaps it's meant to make you focus on chef Ivan Simeoli's food, which has a rugged structural quality. It's all haute peasant, if the peasants were haute enough to afford a £10 starter and a £20 main. It begins with the offer of "foraged" red currant and prosecco and from there disappears deep into the hedgerows, a delightful pose given the nearest field is the condom-strewn Green Park and nobody should eat anything foraged from there. You can imagine arty types nodding sagely over each plateful and pondering meaning. Clay-baked potatoes arrive looking like buff globes of Henry Moore masonry. There are splodges of truffle cream and bits of artichoke both deep-fried and roasted. It's lots of earthy, desolate things shaking hands. A mushroom broth with chestnuts and bits of pickled turnip is brown – very, very brown. There is an intense depth of flavour. And lots of brownness. Cured mackerel with pickled fennel is a little brighter, but again, it is to be admired rather than swooned over.

Mains are various riffs on protein with bitter brassicas. There are outbreaks of black cabbage and chard and garlic leaves. There are dark-skinned heritage carrots instead of carrots from the local housing estate. Glazed pumpkin with the lamb offers a rare burst of colour. All the key players, the fillets of brill or bass, the roast lamb, are very well cooked indeed. Saucing is powerful without being over-reduced. It's all knife-edge poised. But we end up craving something a little sticky and, well, less good for us. These dishes feel knowingly like a northern European winter, all twilight and pungent green herbs. It's an episode of Borgen fashioned from food. My suspicion is that, come the spring, the menu will, like the rest of Peyton's places, head towards something less self-absorbed and more French rustic.

Desserts offer relief: a very good chocolate caramel concoction, a soothingly light, frothy rice pudding flavoured with clementine, a splodge of buttermilk pudding with dribbles of honey. The wine list doesn't try to mug you on the way in or out. Even so, the bill mounts. If only they would offer 50% off for those of us with, say, testicles. Is it really too much to ask?

Jay's news bites

■ For impressive dishes from a restaurant attached to a public venue, try the Bristol Lido. Swimming catering was never like this when I was a kid; they don't even serve Bovril. Instead enjoy food from the wood-fired oven, on a menu which takes inspiration from southern Europe. Lunch might include scallops with herb and garlic butter, honey and bay-roasted chicken with date and almond stuffing, or roast bass with winter tabbouleh (lidobristol.com).

■ Think your Christmas is going to be extra special? Here's the service for you: a London sculptor will use 3D printer technology to scan and then miniaturise the carcass of your turkey before casting it in solid silver as a ring. Yours for £650 – because you're worth it (scrapbook jewellery.com).

■ The Well Hung Meat Company is offering a "thrifty box" for those dealing with the financial excesses of Christmas: a selection of slower cooking, cheaper cuts, including a 1.5kg piece of hogget (12- to 18-month-old lamb) and a braising beef joint. "Thrifty" is relative. It's still £50 (wellhungmeat.com).

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

There's more to Danish cuisine than Noma. Out in the north Atlantic, Michael Booth finds a new Nordic frontier as Faroe Islands chefs raise traditional foods to new levels of pleasure

The weather looks as changeable as a toddler's tantrums. Thank god we're not in a helicopter, I think to myself as the plane banks on its final approach and a cluster of snow-covered island-mountains erupting from the sea loom through the storm clouds.

This Nordic Hawaii is the Faroe Islands. Forget Copenhagen, or even Reykjavik, I'd heard this cluster of 18 rocky islands in the middle of the north Atlantic, inhabited by 50,000 descendants of Norse renegades, is the new frontier in the new Nordic food movement. A place where a tiny band of determined pioneers, led by one visionary chef, is developing a radical, contemporary cuisine from the most meagre culinary heritage.

An hour or so after landing, it seems I spoke too soon about the helicopter: it is the only way to reach the island of Stóra Dímun, home to a couple of hundred sheep and the Petersen family's farm, my first destination in a three-day tour of the islands' nascent food scene. First challenge is to reach the helicopter which is idling on what is, essentially, an ice rink. With my arms occupied by luggage and a woolly hat, I am at the mercy of both natural and man-made gales. For every step forward I slide two back. In the end, a fellow passenger comes to my rescue and drags me backwards on my heels like a shop dummy.

I assume he is a birdwatcher, like so many visitors to the Faroes, but the duffle-coated samaritan turns out to be John Gynther from the experimental cheese division (really) of a Danish dairy products company, on his way to check on the progress of some cheeses.

"The humidity here is perfect for maturing cheeses, but nobody has tried it before," he tells me. "If it's successful, I hope some of the best restaurants in the world will give it to their guests. It'll be the true taste of the north Atlantic, expressed in a cheese."

Arriving safely at the Petersen's farm, I hear a little about their lives. Their forefathers have farmed sheep here for over 200 years. That little black tar cottage over there is the children's schoolhouse; a teacher arrives every Monday and stays in the attic. And those chocolate dots inching across the sheer hillside are their sheep, whose coats have evolved a yeti-like shagginess over the centuries.

Jógva Jón Petersen shows us into the hjallur, a wooden shed with vented walls where the sheep carcasses are hung by their feet to dry in the wind, flayed like some macabre art installation. This is the Faroe's famous ræst mutton, he explains, semi-dried and fermented in the sea air. Dangling alongside is Gynther's cheese, which we taste in Jógva's low-ceilinged kitchen as his kids bring to the table their treasured toys and, at one point, a pet rabbit. The cheese is good, resembling a bitter manchego. The ræst is chewy like thick-cut pata negra ham, with a strong flavour only just the right side of "sheepy" for me.

That evening, in the islands' capital, Tórshavn, we eat in what appears to be a Hobbit dwelling but is actually a cosy, turf-roofed cottage housing a restaurant, Áarstova (dinner from about £55). We dip our heads to enter and are confronted with another dried sheep carcass flayed on a fancy, turned-wood stand. They're not squeamish, the Faroese – as evidenced by the annual summer pilot whale slaughter, the grindadráp, which apparently has something of a family festival air (though obviously not for the whales, which are slaughtered despite being so riddled with mercury that since 2008 the island's medical officers have recommended they are no longer considered fit for human consumption).

We are presented with a dør schnapps. This is my new favourite Faroese tradition: when arriving at a party or, sometimes, a restaurant, guests are presented with a glass of schnapps, refilled communion wine-style for new arrivals. We sit alongside a man called Mortan, who is one of life's enthusiasts. He insists we try some ræst mutton paired with amontillado sherry, and there is an unexpected repartee between the wine's oaky notes and the rich mutton. The geographical connection is not all that tenuous either, Mortan points out, given that for centuries the Faroese exported salt cod to Spain.

The talk turns to the islands' long-mooted independence from Denmark and the oil that many believe lurks offshore and could lift the Faroes' economy – which as far as I can make out is kept afloat by the Sarah Lund sweaters, made here by Gudrun and Gudrun, a company founded and run by two Faroese women, and sold in a shop on the harbourfront. As the schnapps bottles are drained, the tables are cleared for traditional dancing … national dress optional.

The next morning the Faroes fling another of their elemental challenges at us. We are to rendezvous at sea with the island's most highly prized catch: langoustines. From my room in the surprisingly hip Hotel Føroyar on the hillside above the capital, the sea looks more white than blue and I prepare to disgrace myself with all manner of uncontrollable bodily eructations as our boat heaves and plunges out into the fjord. A harrowing hour or so later, we come within hollering distance of our fisherman. He is bucking like a bronco in his bathtub boat, yet manages to toss us a live langoustine the length of my forearm. One of our party rips its plump, still-twitching tail from its body, and passes it to me to suck its ocean-sweet flesh. For a moment I forget the motion of the boat.

The langoustines make an appearance that evening, cooked this time, during a meal that evokes the food traditions we have seen over the past two days, yet also referencing the avant-garde kitchens of Denmark and Spain. Already on the table when we arrive, for example, is a large, dried cod's spine – a memorable piece of gastronomic melodrama that serves as a rack for crispy fried cod skins.

The foraged herbs, driftwood plates and powdered seaweeds are all recognisable New Nordic themes but I haven't eaten like this anywhere else in the world: this is food born from a survival imperative, refined for pure pleasure. We're at Restaurant Koks (from £50 for four courses), a name unfortunate to English ears, though the word is Faroese for flirt or fusspot. All the produce, bar the odd dash of white wine or vanilla, is harvested, caught, shot or cultivated on or around the islands.

"My cuisine is a mirror of the nature of the Faroes," chef Leif Sørensen tells me after the meal.

I first met Sørensen when he gave a talk at the MAD food festival in Copenhagen in 2012 that left the audience awed by his myriad, self-imposed challenges. Sørensen, a serious man of few, but well chosen, words, explained how he had returned to the Faroes after working in Michelin-starred kitchens in Copenhagen, wanting to discover what his home islands had to offer. On this evening it included the most blueberry-ish blueberries I'd ever ever tasted; sweet, soft deep-sea mussels; wild angelica; and a parade of dried shrimps whose super-intense flavour haunts me (in a good way) to this day.

"I kind of had to live up to my own manifesto," Leif told me, referring to 2004's now famous New Nordic Manifesto, of which he was a signatory. "The ambition was to do something different, to make it possible to eat a little better food here, to try to change the restaurant environment. It was difficult to get raw materials because they weren't allowed to sell the lamb or fish to restaurants. It was hopeless. I started to go out and collect plants, and that was the beginning."

There was virtually no restaurant culture on the Faroes before Leif started Koks five years ago: it was illegal to serve alcohol in restaurants until 1992. But, slowly, new places are emerging in its wake, such as sushi restaurant Etika (from about £25), which uses only locally caught fish, and the restaurant at the Hotel Hafnia (three courses £50).

There's a new artisanal brewery, Okkara, and an increasing number of food events. For example, at the Faroe Bank Cod dinner at Áarstova every March, the Faroese Fisheries Laboratory's research annual catch of this otherwise protected species is cooked and served. By all accounts (OK, mainly Mortan's), it is the finest cod in the world.

The locals were sceptical about Koks at first. Some were aghast that their subsistence ingredients, such as ræst and puffin, were being served for foreign visitors. But Faroese now make up around half of Koks' guests, the rest coming mainly from Scandinavia, but also growing numbers from as far afield as Japan and Brazil.

Yet, as Leif tells me wearily, the challenges of running an avant garde restaurant on the fringes of the Arctic remain borderline insurmountable, and aren't limited to produce supply chains. "My staff can earn twice as much catching fish as they can cooking it," he sighs, looking more exhausted than any man I have ever seen.

Frankly, the Faroes are exhausting. But they are also exhilarating. I hear they appear through the mists from time to time, like Brigadoon. Next time they do, you should go.

• The trip was provided by the Faroe Islands tourist board (visitfaroeislands.com) and Hotel Føroyar (+298 31 75 00, hotelforoyar.fo, doubles from £205). Atlantic Airways (atlantic.fo) flies to Vágar, twice weekly from Gatwick, from £250 return

Michael Booth's book, The Almost Nearly Perfect People: The Truth About the Nordic Miracle, will be published on 6 February by Jonathan Cape, price £12.99. To buy a copy for £10.39 with free UK p&p call 0330 333 6846 or visit guardianbookshop.co.uk

'This is food that hugs you and puts a woolly scarf around your neck'

In the frenzied search for the newest, the wildest, the farthest-out culinary rushes, it's easy to forget simple pleasures. The mashed potato that's served at this deceptively low-key newcomer is one of the simplest. It's also one of the most voluptuous: I've been dreaming about it ever since, waking up with the kind of sigh of longing I once reserved for dark-haired, tattooed rock gods.

The slightly smoky flesh of baked potatoes is scooped out and passed through a ricer until entirely smooth, then whipped with what tastes like appalling amounts of good butter. I'm guessing here: it could, of course, be made using that molecular process whereby butter isn't used at all and it's all diastatic malt powder, but somehow I doubt it. It's not a poncey purée or ambitious aligot; it's just mash, as dense and stiff as the stuff they'd serve at school dinners, if school dinners were catered by a deity. The humble spud is allowed to shine, to show that it's every bit as sexy as the gussied-up parvenus.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. This handsome restaurant is a collaboration between Angela Hartnett, her partner Neil Borthwick and the chaps behind true Brit mini-chain, Canteen. You enter via a bar with a subfusc, almost Edward Hopper-ish quality, where the cocktails are justifiably billed as "sharpeners" – my Dr Henderson The Younger, spiky with the recherché flavours of Punt e Mes and Fernet Branca, is about as sharp as it gets. The room then spreads out dramatically: bustling open kitchen; vast skylight offering a moody vista of blank-eyed buildings and fire escapes; low, sludge-green banquettes; and mid-century-modern lamps. Design is studiedly undesigny: only the beautiful, jewel-coloured endpaper pattern on the menu gives a hint as to the seriousness of intent. That, and the acquisition for the launch of FOH boss Thomas Blythe, one of the capital's most accomplished workers of a room.

I've been a couple of times now, and each time the menu is different, but intensely seasonal. There might be quail, juicy and with a seductive whiff of bonfire from the grill, with a scattering of toasted hazelnuts and a wibbly square of foie gras: the culinary equivalent of storming through rustling golden leaves, but without the nasty surprises. Borthwick is fond of gentle pickling: a truffle-soft tranche of mackerel, for instance, is given real glamour by its fennel, orange and horseradish sidekicks. I've eaten from the sensibly-priced lunch menu, too (£18 for two courses, £22 for three): wood pigeon, its innate earthiness blasted up a few notches with sticky beetroot and more hazelnuts; rosy collops of lamb neck, nutty barley and a soothing onion purée. This is food that hugs you and puts a woolly scarf around your neck.

If I were to try to find a word to sum up Merchants Tavern, it would be confidence. The confidence to accessorise a generous hunk of pork belly with little more than roast cauliflower and savoy cabbage, sophistication coming from an almost throwaway blob of the most intense, bitter grapefruit purée. The confidence to put a cheese and ham toastie on the bar menu at the same time as pig's head "kremeski" (sic) with tarragon mayonnaise. (But oh my what a toastie: ripe, fruity, brine-washed ogleshield oozing like raclette all over glorious sourdough.) The confidence to let vegetables shine, perhaps a hangover from Borthwick's time spent with Michel Bras, the French guru of veg, but with none of the tortured grandstanding that can come with this kind of CV. To serve pork neck as a meal for two, with what looks like a bubbling vat of toasty cauliflower cheese but, confusingly, is girolles persillade, is a piece of theatre that draws envious stares from every other diner in the room. And, of course, to dish up a small saucepan of bloody good mash when everyone else is doing triple-fried chips rammed into flowerpots. This is a restaurant with the chops not to have to try too hard. Sheer class.

• Merchants Tavern 36 Charlotte Road, London EC2, 020-7060 5335. Open lunch, Tues-Sun, noon-3pm (4pm Sun); dinner, Tues-Sat, 6-11pm. About £40 a head plus drinks and service.
Food 7/10
Atmosphere 8/10
Value for money 7/10

Follow Marina on Twitter.

Hunks of meat usually put Jay in a very good mood. But at the Foxlow even he discovers there is a limit…

I am as big a fan of fat, salt and sugar as the next overindulged urban male, but even I have my limit. I think the menu at Foxlow may have located it. And then laughed in its face. Imagine a Thunderbirds-style dial with the arrow puttering in the red zone to dramatic music full of blaring horns and staccato strings. That's where I was by the end of lunch.

Part of Foxlow's challenge is its antecedents. It is the newest sibling of the impressive Hawksmoor steakhouse group, against which it will always be compared. The Hawksmoor team have worked out how to shape a steakhouse that doesn't ape its American cousins. It's seared dead cow with a British accent, and a supporting cast to match. And it is unapologetic about the cost, which is as it should be when dealing with the very best meat and fish. But then they also deliver both on service – the bed-haired, fully inked staff are anything but casual about their job – and room. Hawksmoor has executed some of the best restaurant interior-design jobs of the past few years, cornering the market in reconditioned parquet and wood panelling.

Foxlow is billed as a "neighbourhood" restaurant, but as it's located in Clerkenwell – a neighbourhood for City University students who can't afford to eat here – I think they mean it isn't as flash than the others. And yes, it is less expensive. But at an easy £55 a head it certainly isn't cheap.

Again, they've done a serious job on the decor. It has been coated in acres of distressed creamware tiling and slatboard painted that shade of off-white gloss your grandma used to favour for the bathroom. It looks like a cross between an old French station café and a New England seafood shack. If all else fails they could sell it on as an abattoir.

While they do offer some of the same beef cuts from the Ginger Pig as at other outposts, here the menu divides up around titles such as "slow smoked" and "charcoal grilled". There's also a salad bar pace Garfunkel's, though it's only for show. You may walk past it; you may not touch. The result feels muddled and uncertain, as if it's self-consciously trying to be distinctive.

From the snacks, the anchovy and goat's butter crisps bring a trio of crackers piled with meaty, salted anchovy fillets topped with crisp rings of raw onion. They are a small hit of salt and dairy fat and, at the start of a meal, welcome for that. But then we didn't know what was to come. Alongside them, machine-sliced Tamworth "jamon" merely serves to remind you just how good real Spanish ham is, and how good this British knock-off isn't. It's served too cold, lacks depth of flavour, and has a compressed, plasticky feel, as if it has been pre-cut and laid out on cellophane sheets. The four slices cost £5.50.

From the starters, crispy five-pepper squid is indeed crisp, but much more salt than pepper. Brixham crab with devilled mayonnaise for £9 is a head scratcher. It's good fresh crab but not very much of it, that fact obscured by the amount of foliage – Cos lettuce leaves – it is scattered across. The devilled mayonnaise has about as much kick as me on the sofa at home, half a bottle down, by the time Newsnight comes on. And what's with serving a cold starter on over-warmed plates?

From the slow-smoked section, the eight-hour bacon rib with maple and chilli does the thing. It is a big strip of smoked pig that is falling away from the bone it calls home. Given my love of pork it was always bound to make me happy, at least at the start. There is not much chilli, but there is loads of salt and sugar and fat. And not much else. Literally. You pay £16 and get a big empty plate with a slab of meat lying across it. It has not been plated. It's been abandoned. That means the £3.50-£4.50 charged for sides becomes an unavoidable cost. So we get broccoli with chilli and anchovy. There's a massive blast of salty fish, and again not much chilli to cut through it. The beef-dripping potatoes are properly crisp. The capers are salty.

Look, at least we didn't order the skin-on fries with bacon salt. Or the sausage-stuffed onion. Even so, by this point I imagined my entire cardiovascular system had called a flash meeting in my bowel to discuss strike action over unreasonable employment practices. We ordered fish. That would be good for us, wouldn't it? Not if it's the house-cured salmon. No quibbles with the cooking. The skin is crisp, the flesh boasting a little pinky pearlescence at the heart of each flake as you prise it apart. But again it's a big hit of salt and sweet. And it, too, sits alone on the plate, marooned by acres of white porcelain. The only relief comes from a side-dish portion of the baked beetroot and hazelnut concoction from the salad bar. It is soft and sweet in a good way.

I studied the menu afterwards. I wanted to check whether this overload was down to an ordering cock-up on my part, but I'm not convinced it was. This place serves big fatty rillettes and pork ribs, beef short rib with salty kimchi, and anchovy and chilli butter. There's no doubting the quality of the ingredients or the execution in the kitchen or the general professionalism. One or two plates like this would hit the spot. It's about the cumulative effect.

Which carries on into dessert. There are sundaes made with their own version of soft-serve ice cream. We avoid the bourbon caramel, the peanut butter and jelly, and the chocolate and popcorn because they sound like too much sugar. Instead we get the cherry ripple, which is a bit of fruit bombarded by a lot of syrup. The banoffee split (look, we did steer clear of the peanutella and sweet toast) is a heap of cream, toffee syrup, biscuit, bananas and caramelised things. At which point I imagined my pancreas declaring itself an allied trade of the cardiovascular system and joining the strike meeting down in my bowel. I suspect that, were I completely sloshed, all of this would be fabulous. It would be great. I'd welcome every last speck of salt, fat and sugar. Sadly, that's not a great recommendation for what's trying to be a grown-up restaurant.

Where to stay, eat and visit on a trip to Rye – a favourite with Melburnians with its small but pretty beach, and nearby world-class wineries

'The weaselly, underpowered guacamole is not a patch on what I knock up for an al-desko lunch'

Mayfair has become so weird and foreign, I've taken to pretty much avoiding it. If I want weird and foreign, I'll go abroad. Apart from anything else, I'm scared of the natives: its restaurant population, with few exceptions, is savage, ready to scalp you at the first sign of weakness. Order a side dish and see.

So what am I doing wandering up and down Cork Street, unable to find my destination because it's too superior for a sign, and marvelling at the galleries where you need a mink onesie just to survive the frost from opening the door? I've been lured by the promise of upscale Mexican food, something hard to get in the UK, whatever the current rash of burrito joints would have you believe. At Peyote, the menu has been created "in consultation" – how I love that fudgiest of phrases – with Eduardo García of Mexico City's celebrated Maximo Bistrot. Mexican food done well is a riot of tastebud-frotting flavours, a cuisine to horn up the most jaded palate. So, yes, I'll travel.

Past the thick velvet curtain is the least ergonomic room I've graced in a while. You need to be Mayfair-thin to negotiate the tables without getting your arse in someone's arroz. There's a downstairs room complete with taco counter, but we're not offered this option. I appreciate that our fellow diners – lots of American accents, very hedge-fundy – don't give a monkey's about the odd quid here and there (you should see the wine list), but when I'm offered guacamole and chips while waiting for the pal, I don't anticipate £7.50 for the guac – a weaselly, underpowered version dandruffed with bland queso fresco, and not a patch on what I knock up for an al-desko lunch. Plus dips at a further four quid: árbol, salsa verde cruda, all riffs on different chillis and tomatillos. Only salsa de molcajete has any personality.

Our food comes, as is fashionable, at the whim of the kitchen. But these aren't courses anyway, they're canapés. Tacos the size of communion wafers, topped with teaspoons of this and that: pork pibil, sludgy and slow-cooked with a backnote of orange and chilli; a morsel of soft-shell crab, cleanly fried, with heavenly cebollas curtidas – crisp, pink pickled onions – on top. Nice enough, but at £12 for three, I'd prefer wow. Never mind "better in Mexico"; at defiantly unswanky street food event Hawker House, I've had tacos from Breddo's that made these taste like damp cardboard.

Quesadilla of hongos (mushrooms with gooey cheese) are as bland as rusks and tiny as the tacos. Laminado of yellowtail, aka tarted-up sashimi, Nobu-style, features creamily beauteous fish, slut-shamed by its microherb and truffle oil dressing. Then tostadas of cactus: coppery-tasting, tinned-textured, teeny-weeny. Top marks, though, for masa dough that tastes homemade.

Peyote makes a bit of a thing about its cocktails, but they're as underpowered as the guacamole. The gorgeous velvet margarita, laced with avocado and topped with a purple pansy, transports the pal to poolside drinking at cheap hotels. Only two things leave an impression of loveliness: blowsy sugar-and-cinnamon churros with a pungent chocolate sauce, and the honeyed Mexican wine, LA Cetto chenin blanc, recommended as an accompaniment.

For Peyote – how odd to call it after a hallucinogenic drug – Arjun Waney, the restaurateur behind Roka, Zuma and La Petite Maison, has teamed up with brand consultant Tarun Mahrotri. Perhaps, then, this restaurant is less about passion than about brainstorming. What hasn't Mayfair got? A posh Mexican! Maybe that's unfair: perhaps it's because Waney's neighbouring Coya is coining it, so Latin America is where it's at. Whatever, he's clearly smoking hot at giving rich people what they want: hardly any food for huge wads of cash. Love the lampshades made from plastic bottles by war-displaced artisans in Colombia, though. They go really well with the wall of lockers for personal bottles of rare tequila.

• Peyote 13 Cork Street, London W1, 020-7409 1300. Open lunch, Mon-Fri, noon-2.30pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 6-10.30pm. About £65 a head, with drinks and service.
Food 4/10
Atmosphere 5/10
Value for money 3/10

Follow Marina on Twitter.

Locating the entrance to Cardiff's Purple Poppadom isn't easy, but it's worth it for food that's always a winner

185a Cowbridge Road East, Cardiff (029 2022 0026). Meal for two: £100

I have seen less promising locations for ambitious restaurants, but not many. The first thing I spot is not the doorway to Cardiff's Purple Poppadom, in the endearingly scuffed Canton district of the city, but the shuttered entrance to Sizzle and Grill, which describes itself as the British "Home of Man v Food". This ain't selling it to me. Man v Food is a foul American TV show in which a bloke called Adam Richman wanders about the US eating burgers the size of his head and saying "Wow" a lot, as if it were insightful. Which, in his case it just may be, his vocabulary not getting far beyond that.

Sizzle and Grill, which has a terrifying number of menus, likes to celebrate the show. Hence one of those menus includes challenges like the 69oz mixed grill for £34.95. (Eat it all within one hour and you get it for free.) There's the Baby Burger, so called because it weighs as much as one, and the Wing King Challenge, which involves eating 75 in 30 minutes. Look, I'm all for greed, but I do think it's much like masturbation. It's not something for public consumption and you shouldn't be able to win prizes for it, however much enthusiasm you display.

The point being that Sizzle and Grill – Oi! Stop Googling it! – is a distraction. Ignore it. Move on. Nothing to see here. It just happens to be located beneath chef Anand George's Indian restaurant. Through the discreet doorway, up the stairs and you are in a wide space with clean, blond-wood panelling and a few bursts of saturated colour on the walls which, despite their brightness, somehow don't make you want to recoil. It's a smart space for what George describes as his "Nouvelle" Indian food. That word, and some of the menu language, is, I grant you, very worrying.

The menu changes with the seasons. The current winter offering contains things like Lapin à Deux, presumably because "rabbit two ways" just isn't trying hard enough. There's Oxtail Odyssey Duo and Scallops Chou-Fleur – which does sound prettier than cauliflower, but is still a bit silly. Try to ignore all this. Take it merely as a statement of intent; that he has ambitions to do more than just serve dun-coloured stews or be constrained by standard repertoire. The language may be on the pretentious side. The cooking really isn't.

A few weeks back, in a review of the marvellous but pricey Mayfair Indian restaurant Gymkhana, I argued that just because food from that part of the world was often sold very cheaply, that didn't mean it all had to be. If French, Italian and Japanese cooking can be expensive so can food from the Indian subcontinent, as long as the quality justifies the cost. Online, an enormous number of people spat out their dummies.

They didn't come up with a counterargument so much as bang the keyboards with their fists. They merely said food from there should be cheap (while also often saying all restaurant food should be cheap). It's hard to argue with people who are trying to win medals at missing the point, so I won't bother – save to say the Purple Poppadom, while not Gymkhana-expensive, also isn't cheap compared to your usual high-street curry house. Then again it isn't a high-street curry house. Starters are around £7, with mains in the teens. If you don't like this, the solution is simple: don't go.

George likes serving his food in partworks. So a crab starter brings a perfectly fried soft-shell crab in the middle of the plate, with a batter carefully hinged between salt and spice. There is a crisp crab croquette and then, at the other end of the plate, a warm tian of crab and sweetcorn, with a gentle heat of both temperature and spice that gives the whole thing a sweet, funky glow.

A non-meat assemblage, influenced by the street food of Mumbai, has a crisp domed puri backfilled with yogurt and chutney to be popped into the mouth in one go so the sauce doesn't dribble down your chin when you bite in. Alongside it is a warm potato cake on a disc of spiced chickpeas and a salad of puffed rice with a sharp tamarind dressing.

Best of all is a pokey duck stew, apparently after a Syrian recipe: a shadow-dark meaty, savoury something, surrounded by a cooling and blindingly white coconut cream sauce with soft rice dumplings. This is food that conversation stops over.

The problem with serving things in threes is that inevitably one becomes the star. So it is with a main course of venison. A punchy curry sealed in a pot by a golden puff pastry top and a venison burger are completely overshadowed by a marinated piece of haunch roasted in the tandoor. The best roasting makes meat taste more of itself. That's what happens here. An Anglo-Indian pork roast brings thick slices of long-cooked pork belly with more of an assumed Asian accent than a real Indian kick. But it was still pork belly and I'm never going to kick a bit of that out of bed.

Of the more basic stews the best is of chicken, cooked on the bone, with burnt garlic. There is nothing acrid here – just a soft, warm pungency. By comparison, a Kashmiri rogan josh of lamb is a little one-note. A yellow dal tadka, thick with garlic and cumin, is a deep, warming lubricant that keeps everything else moving.

Indian desserts tend, for the most part, to be a victory of sugar syrup over good taste. They don't so much drizzle the stuff as hose plates down with it. Here they attempt something else. The sweet, crisp samosa, with a filling of almost liquefied dark chocolate, may not be original but it's bloody good. A crème brûlée flavoured with rose petals surprises me for being light and fragrant rather than tasting like the perfume counter at Debenhams.

From a list that stays almost entirely the right side of £30 we drink an Indian sauvignon blanc from Sula Vineyards, mostly because we can – few places offer Indian wines. It's light and bright, with soft edges, and does the job very nicely indeed. We finish almost everything. No sirens sound. We do not win prizes. This is because we ordered what we wanted to eat, dinner not being a competition. Clearly, when choosing where to go for dinner, we went through the right Cardiff doorway.

Jay's news bites

■ Vineet Bhatia was one of the first chefs from India working in Britain – at Zaika in Kensington - to demonstrate that his homeland's food could be much more than just brown stews. Now he's cooking at Rasoi Vineet Bhatia, located in a smart Chelsea townhouse. Go there for his glorious home-smoked tandoor salmon and for the original chocolate samosa. It isn't cheap, but it is good (rasoi-uk.com).
■ If there's one thing New York knows how to do, it's burgers and lobsters. So let's celebrate the self-confidence of the Goodman steakhouse group, which is to open a branch of its Burger & Lobster chain in Manhattan.
In London the five-strong chain serves either a burger or a lobster, charging £20 for the over-priced burger or the underpriced lobster. In New York it
will be a snip at $20 (burgerandlobster.com).
■ Great Scotland Yard, the original home of the Metropolitan Police, is to be turned into a five-star hotel. The private dining rooms will be in the cells and interrogation units used for prisoners during the First and Second World Wars.

Plus some choice sources for quality food and drink

• How to start your own supper club

Sheffield Supper Club

Sheffield's first supper club is hosted by the fusion chef and food-lover Komal Khan. Expect traditional Pakistani home cooking in big pans, served al fresco if the weather is behaving itself. £22 a head, with a maximum of 10 diners.sheffieldsupperclub.blogspot.co.uk

The Spice Club Manchester

Manchester's best underground dining experience is run by mother and daughter team Anita and Monica Sawney. They serve beautiful north Indian cuisine in their cosy flat, using fresh, locally sourced ingredients. They also host cookery classes for anyone looking to pick up their skills. Around £35. spiceclubmanchester.com

Moel Faban Supper Club

The food writer and chef Denise Baker-McClearn runs this north Wales supper club on the last Saturday of the month. The dishes are wildly international -– think Burmese spiced fish – but the ingredients are usually local. Numbers are limited to eight. £25 for three courses with coffee. moelfabansuppers.com

Jelly & Gin

A driving force in Scottish guerrilla restaurants, Jelly and Gin's owner, Aoife Behan, has a suite of pop-up events in rotation, such as Burgher Burger, in which an established chef leaves their restaurant to cook burgers in a greasy spoon. Tickets for Burgher Burger cost £35, often including drinks such as craft beers. jellyandgin.com

The Camberwell Kitchen Supper Club

A gluten-free supper club held in the flat of the organiser, Rosie, and her boyfriend, Ant. Rosie has coeliac disease and is training to be a dietician, so expect nutritious, delicious gluten-free fare. Seating for 14 at one long table. £25 a head for a cocktail, nibbles and three courses. glutenfreerosie.com

Find a supper club

Visit supperclubfangroup.ning.com for a handy and thorough guide to your nearest supper clubs and underground restaurants, featuring listings from all over the UK, a direct booking link, plus an excellent foodie forum.

Winchester farmers' market

This is one of the UK's largest farmers' markets, with more than 80 producers. You'll be able to source anything you need, from organic watercress to water buffalo. The award-winning producers will be happy to talk menus and make recommendations. All produce is grown or reared within 10 miles of Hampshire. Held on the second and last Sunday of each month, 9am-2pm.

Middle Brook Street and the adjoining car park, Winchester, SO23 8DQ; 01420 588671; hampshirefarmersmarkets.co.uk

Pyne's of Somerset

Winner of the Butcher's Plus award at the 2012 Butcher's Shop of the Year awards, this family-run shop carries meat of the highest order: fully traceable beef hung for at least 21 days, free-range Creedy Carver chickens, even a whole hog for roasting if you're feeling ambitious.

Market Way, Junction 24, North Petherton, TA6 6DF; 01278 663050, pynethebutcher.co.uk

The Fine Cheese Company

This dairy mecca has more than 100 British and European artisan cheeses, as well as unpasteurised and vegetarian selections. They also sell the best range of cheese biscuits in the country, made by sister company Artisan Biscuits: herb-scented, spiced, tailor-made for specific cheeses – the kind of detail that will impress your guests. Mailorder available.

29 & 31 Walcot Street, Bath, BA1 5BN; 01225 448748, finecheese.co.uk

Fish for Thought

Not only is all their fish ethically sourced, but Cornish fishmongers Fish for Thought has won a slew of awards for its lobster, turbot, bream, scallops and many more. Deliveries of beautifully filleted and prepared fish can be ordered from its website.

Unit 1, Callywith Gate Business Park, Launceston Road, Bodmin, Cornwall PL31 2RQ; 01208 262202, martins-seafresh.co.uk

Worth Brothers Wines

This Staffordshire gem has more than 400 wines from around the world. Visit its cellars or buy online – there is a handy matching chart for a wide range of dishes.

The Cellars, Cathedral House, Beacon Street, Lichfield, Staffs, WS13 7AA; 01543 262051 worthbrothers.co.uk

'It's shamelessly derivative – a New York experience, apparently, but without the generosity that this implies'

I am not a total fool. I know that in the absence of conventional advertising, restaurant marketing is fuelled by freebies. For years this has been orchestrated by a small band of charming PRs, but then social meeja came along and put everyone in a tailspin. No longer could you simply invite a few key burgundy-nosed coves for a bibulous blowout, comfortable in the knowledge that an agreeable review would arrive in due course. Who were these upstart Yelpers, bloggers and Tweeters, all in as soon as the paint dried, all daring to have an opinion?

So marketing adapted and adopted. Press critics being too snooty to keel up for a free dinner, tables at previews and launches are now filled with a hungrier audience, and the ether is guaranteed to be all a-tremble the next day. But we're getting wise even to that now. We look at sudden rashes of yelping praise with eyebrows a-waggle. We know the game. You can't snow us, pals. Enter Richard Caring, a very clever chap.

Caring, the orange-and-titanium-tinted mogul behind some of the capital's hottest restaurants, is also behind Jackson + Rye. Ostensibly the owners are a former Gordon Ramsay Holdings executive chef and an ex-operations director at Hakkasan, but Caring is puppetmaster. And he's far too sussed to do anything as conventional as mere PR. Instead, he appears to employ personable young people with bulging files of influential contacts. The influentials are invited to convivial "friends'" dinners and sent off into the night full of expensive booze, untroubled by l'addition. No mere parvenus, their reach is wide, their opinions credible. For many reasons, I usually avoid the rush to be first to review. So it's weird to find myself in among this lot at dinner chez Jackson + Rye. Weird, and an education.

Me, I don't much like the place. (And that's discounting the fact that we can't have certain tables because "they're reserved for important people"; or, despite the well-stocked bar, we're not allowed dry martinis because "they're not on our list"; or that we don't get our wine until an hour after ordering it.) It's shamelessly derivative – a New York experience, apparently, but without the generosity that this implies: you should see the bean-counted portion sizes. Where's the ability to mix a killer cocktail? Or the effortless bonhomie and professionalism? Staff aren't just headless chickens, but wingless and footless, too. Beside NYC's hottest, this looks like a Wimpy.

Our food is bland and forgettable: from "truffle" popcorn lacking even a ghost of the alleged flavour, to shrimp with grits (a mushy southern US version of polenta), it's like invalid food; they've even managed to find insipid chillies. Fried chicken features flabby bird: more grease-bound chippy, batter thick as a MasterChef greengrocer, than evolved comfort food. It comes with "spicy coleslaw" that isn't. The fries – tepid, pallid, limp – would make McDonald's blush. A special of the day – hey, it's written on the paper tablecloth, just like they do in Brooklyn's Diner– of grilled swordfish with veg is a dull chore of a dish, to be chewed diligently like cud.

Music, a curious Smashie and Nicey playlist, is over-loud; tables are rammed together. This is Caring doing yoof, if that yoof looked like JP in Fresh Meat. A bill arrives, with 100% discount. When we question it, they look at us as though we're mad. It is, apparently, "a mistake"; we still have to insist they let us pay.

The pal says as we leave, "I didn't enjoy that at all." Me neither. I do like the American-style pancakey brunch, though; puddings – especially blowsy apple fritters and peanut butter cookies with milk ice-cream – are on the money; and the corporate identity and menu design is delicious. The rest, not so much: it has concept and roll-out written all over it. But what does it matter? Everyone else who was there raved about it online the next day: job done. Whatever I say, it's going to be a smash.

• Jackson + Rye 56 Wardour Street, London W1, 020-7437 8338. Open Mon-Fri 8am-11.30pm, Sat 9am-11.30pm, Sun 10am-11pm. About £35-£40 a head for three courses, drinks and service.

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

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Flesh & Buns serves high-class Asian junk food in a noisy London basement. It's a lot more fun than you'd think…

41 Earlham Street, London WC2 (020 7632 9500). Meal for two: £50 to £100

A few years ago the American publisher of one of my books assigned to me a publicist who delighted in the name Chastity Lovely. Naturally I assumed they were joking. That's not a name; it's a stridently conservative Hallmark greetings card message. But no, that was what she was called, one of those devotional and mellifluous names that only an African-American woman could carry with grace. She seemed nice enough when I heard from her, which wasn't often. Eventually I worked out why this was. Her emails were getting caught in my spam filter, marked off by the electronic equivalent of police tape tagging them as filthy. The poor woman had been named in a more innocent age, before "adult material" filters had been thought of. Poor lovely Chastity.

Flesh & Buns, whose emails are probably gumming up a spam filter near you right now, was not named in a more innocent age. It sounds like a website full of smoothly oiled buttocks. Of this, I am sure they are aware, for nothing about the place is unconscious. They know precisely what they are doing. Just as at this team's first restaurant, the Soho ramen shop Bone Daddies, where they simmer pig bits for hours to make their stocks, they want you to think they are a bit dirty and a bit rough around the edges and a bit obsessive. In fairness, I think they are all of these things.

The buns of the title are the soft, pillowy rice-flour buns appropriated from the Chinese repertoire by David Chang in New York, who stuffed them with seared slices of pork belly and Korean sauce. They were then lovingly ripped off in London by Yum Bun, and have now become the focus of the menu here, alongside a list of Japanese-influenced snacks and small plates and a little straight-up sashimi and sushi.

The biggest mistake would be to judge it as a Japanese restaurant. Take an expert on Japanese food here and they would probably spend the whole evening trying to ram their chopsticks up their nostrils in an attempt to end it all while bellowing "Sacrilege!" It is not a Japanese restaurant. It is a defiantly London restaurant with a cartoonish menu of Asian food, which riffs on all the salty and sweet things we tend to love from those traditions.

Certainly, there are lots of people who would hate the place. It lurks in a basement space and is so noisy the background hum sounds like amplified tinnitus. The room is dominated by one long, high, communal table which is just a little too wide to make the joyful lunge and parry of friendly chatter easy. As the camp soldier replied when asked about his experience in the trenches during the First World War, "Darling, the people! And the noise!" There is a lot of both. But take a seat. Carve out a little space left and right with your elbows. Acclimatise to it all. There is fun to be had.

Their "chips and dips" is basically high-class junk food: undulating sheets of deep-fried cracker with sparky avocado and chillified tomato dips. A bag of these, a Parker Knoll and a box set and I'd be happy. They like their deep-frying here. A soft-shell crab, increasingly becoming the hippest of crustaceans, is expertly despatched and served with a jalapeño mayo; deep-fried squid is more than serviceable. "Crispy rice" is a dish description that makes certain self-appointed guardians of our food culture very cross indeed. Apparently the "y" on crisp is redundant, or as the otherwise heroic Matthew Fort said: "Crispy is an abject contemporary aberration." Which is the sort of cant that makes me want to bellow "CRISPY!" at them until they flinch.

I think "crispy" illuminates a certain infantilised quality. Grown-up food is crisp. Children's food is crispy. Here, cylinders of rice, seared to crispy, are topped with a soothing tartar of yellowtail. The rice in a spicy tuna roll may be a little dry, in a way that would make sushi aficionados scowl, but by now I am into the swing of things, lost in the noise and the brashness of it all, and the bursts of flame from the grill in the open kitchen at my elbow.

I have eaten a number of versions of Korean chicken wings over the past year or so, Korea being the new Belgium, or Peru or Azerbaijan or whichever country it is that we're supposed to be fetishising now. They've all been an uncomfortable halfway house between something fried and something splattered with chilli sauce. These do both bits with proper enthusiasm: a serious crisp batter – I'd almost call it crispy – and a drenching with a reduced chilli glaze. Please put those on the arm of the Parker Knoll alongside the chips and dips. And some kitchen roll.

And so to the flesh and buns. I first came across buns like these in the early 80s when certain London Chinese restaurants started to use them instead of pancakes with crispy (!) duck. The contrast of crunch and soft was always beguiling. Here it all is again. They avoid the Chang/ Yum Bun style of seared pork belly slices for something braised that can be forked apart. It feels like a conscious attempt to be different and, while still pleasing, is not quite as good as the Chang version.

To my surprise a tranche of grilled sea bass with salty crisp skin alongside leaves of pungent kimchi – Korean fermented cabbage – is a killer combination. While the bill here can mount up, just one of these plates, priced in the mid-teens, would leave you feeling well fed, the buns seeming to inflate the moment you swallow.

We finish with something appropriately flash and silly, but enjoyable for all that: slabs of marshmallow on sticks to be toasted over burning rocks, as if it were a religious rite, and then sandwiched between two biscuits. The prep is more fun than the eat – is that a noun? – but I'm not complaining. Flesh & Buns is a rowdy, shameless, in-yer-face romp. If it were a movie, the trailer would have a deep-throated bombastic voiceover and you'd know what you were getting and decide accordingly whether it was for you. Me, I've always been a sucker for that stuff. Incidentally, in the interests of research I did a Google images search under the words "flesh" and "buns". All I got were photos of their food. And a picture of Anthea Turner. I was appalled.

Jay's news bites

■ For a more straight-up taste of Japan, visit Yuzu in Manchester. They won't serve nigiri sushi because, refreshingly, the chef says he's not trained to make it. There's an awful lot to enjoy here, from silkily cased gyoza (dumplings) through great sashimi and greaseless tempura to the occasional whole grilled fish. It's some of the better Japanese food to be found outside London (yuzumanchester.co.uk).

■ Woo hoo! London is going to get its first "paleo" restaurant after chef-founder Holly Redman raised the £30,000 she needs via a Kickstarter campaign. Whether this is a good thing or not remains to be seen. In Redman's definition, gluten-free "Paleolithic diets mimic the types and quantities of foods our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate: meat, seafood, nuts, seeds, eggs and plenty of fresh fruits and veggies." And there was me thinking it would all be lumps of bone-in-flesh (kickstarter.com).

■ This just in: most people think food at Britain's sporting venues is absolute pants. According to a YouGov poll 60% expect it to be unhealthy. But 40% think this is all part of the experience (yougov.co.uk/news/2013/12/19/stadium-food-bottom-league-sports-fans/).

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

Chef Mark Sargeant says that the recession has forced restaurants to abandon pretention and flummery in favour of getting the basics right. And that can only be a good thing

It may be too soon to announce of the death of that awful phrase, "fine dining". There will always be some grossly entitled, permatanned buffoons who feel more important because a teenager has ferreted about in their lap to put a napkin there, or because a glossy Frenchman has topped up their wine every time they took a sip. But the claim by chef Mark Sargeant that the recession may have been "one of the best things to happen to the dining scene in the UK" because it forced the restaurant industry to look at the way it serves people, makes an awful lot of sense.

Only last week Marcus Wareing announced he was ripping up his two-Michelin-starred dining room at the Berkeley hotel to create something more brasserie than waiter-frottage friendly. He wants service to be less French, and more high-end American. Starched tablecloths are disappearing – gone already from the dining rooms of Tom Aikens and Simon Rogan – along with the straitjacket of bowtie and DJ.

Then again these places had little choice. They are reacting to massive climactic change not from the top down, but the bottom up. The long recession created a whole new movement of casual popup restaurants, and pared-down environments run on a shoestring by young cooks and restaurateurs. Some of them have been "dirty food" joints like Meat Liquor or Pitt Cue; others, a little more sophisticated, like the Venetian-themed bistros of Russell Norman's Polpo group. But in all these places the focus has had to be on the food. Customers have still been happy to spend money, but they only want to see it on the plate.

That doesn't mean we no longer care about service. We now just want it done by human beings who don't sound like they are vomiting back a training manual. The hugely popular Hawksmoor steakhouse group, serves serious food at what can be serious prices. Their staff are exceptionally professional. They also happen to be bed-headed and inked, much like those at the Polpo group. In short, they look like many of their customers. This has to be a good thing.

It could all go too far, of course. God save us from the overly chummy waiter who hunkers down by your table – or worse still, tries to sit in your lap – to recite "my awesome specials list". Nobody really wants their waiter to be their friend. But less of the stupid flummery has to be a good thing.

Asian restaurants dominate the cheap eats scene in multi-cultural Sydney. Here's our pick of the best, plus a couple of Middle Eastern gems and a great new burger joint

Lao City Thai, Haymarket

The large number of students from Asia has revitalised the Sydney CBD (central business district) and created a market for affordable, authentic Asian food. Lao City Thai, on the western end of Chinatown, is packed with young Thais but is still relatively undiscovered by everyone else. Skip the bain marie and ask for the menu; beef salad (A$10.90) is tart and zesty with fresh mint, garlic chunks and thin slices of green apple, balanced perfectly with liberal squirts of fish sauce. Chilli chicken basil (A$10.90) packs a raging, spicy punch with bamboo strips adding an interesting woody after taste – make sure you sip the addictive sauce, the richness will leave your head spinning. Grilled chicken (A$10.90) will cool things down – simple, well-cooked chook that comes with a mild chilli sauce.
• Shop 10, 37 Ultimo Road, +61 2 9212 1080, Facebook page

Pho Tau Bay, Cabramatta

Thi Nhu Pham, whose pho (Vietnamese noodle broth) is regarded by critics and foodies as the best in Sydney, originally opened her restaurant in 1980 as Sunday pop-up in the garage of her family home, and relocated to the current location two years later. Beef bones and a dozen Asian spices are cooked for six hours to extract a profoundly complex broth, which sets Pho Tau Bay's Vietnamese dishes apart. There's chicken, fish or seafood options, but the beef pho(A$10, around £5) is by far the most popular. Order pho tai if you like your beef tender; thin slices of red beef arrive on top of your bowl ready to be dunked into boiling broth, or pick pho nam if you prefer your meat well cooked. Wash down with an intensely rich glass of Vietnamese ice coffee, made with condensed milk (A$3.50).
• 12/117 John Street, +61 2 9726 4583

El Jannah, Granville

From Granville train station, west Sydney, follow the aroma of charcoal-grilled chicken. Barbecue chicken is usually oily, with shiny, slippery skin but an El Jannah bird is dry, from the high heat that slightly burns the skin for a bitter smoky taste. Half chicken (A$5.90) will keep couples contented and whole chicken (A$10.90) will satisfy the whole clan. Flat bread and fluoro-coloured pickles come as sides, as well as toum – the famous Lebanese garlic white sauce with a moreish, nose-clearing intensity. The irregularly sized, super-crunchy falafels (A$5.50) are another crowd favourite and are particularly good with lashings of spicy tahini sauce.
• 6 South Street, +61 2 9637 0977, eljannah.com.au

Island Dreams Cafe, Lakemba

Mention Christmas Island and most Sydneysiders think of the asylum-seeker detention facility, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. Few know of Alimah Bilda's Island Dreams Cafe in south-west Sydney, the only restaurant in Australia that serves up food from Christmas and the Cocos Islands, which is influenced by Malaysian, Indonesian and Chinese cuisines. Satay sticks (six skewers A$10.50) are popular; the meat is marinated overnight in garlic, chilli, turmeric and lemongrass paste and cooked over charcoal. Everyone loves Alimah's lemon chilli chicken curry (A$9.50), the mildly spicy chicken falls off the bone and the curry is a perfect dip for their homemade roti. There's a decent selection of veggie fare, including moreish fried tofu in peanut sauce (A$8) and lightly spiced dhal curry (A$8). Alimah's lurid-coloured fish crackers (A$2) are sent over by relatives in Western Australia – grab some if they're on the counter, they sell out fast.
• 47-49 Haldon Street, +61 420 335 548, Facebook page

Chur Burger, Surry Hills

"Chur" is New Zealand slang for awesome and Kiwi chef Warren Turnbull's Chur Burger, barely a year old, has been an instant, runaway hit. All brioche-bun burgers are $10, which is a steal, according to the happy punters. The beefburger is tall and pretty; grilled beef, cheese, rich red tomato jam, a light mustard mayo and pickle, cut thinly length-wise. Pulled pork burger is so tall you'll need a knife and fork to cut through the mountain of tender pork, crunchy "red slaw", fennel mayo and runny barbecue sauce. Thick-cut, chilli-salt chips ($5) make the perfect side.
• 48 Albion Street, +61 2 9212 3602, churburger.com.au

Gumshara, Haymarket

Ramen so good and full of collagen that it keeps you looking youthful? Gumshara ramen is cooked in the Tonkotsu method, where huge quantities of pork bones are cooked for up to 12 hours until marrow and cartilage break down to yield Sydney's thickest, collagen-rich broth. On a busy day chef Mori Higashida goes through 200kg of bones. Sydney must be vain, because the queues for these Japanese noodles are legendary. Standard Tonkotsu ramen ($10.50) comes with tender pork slices and pickled bamboo; for extra protein add boiled egg with gooey yolk ($1.50) or spice it up with a fiery chilli bomb ball (A$2). Hakata ramen (A$10.50), with a lighter broth, is a tasty option, too.
• Shop 211, Habour Plaza, 25-29 Dixon St,+61 4 1025 3180

The Californian, Potts Point

KFC – Korean fried chicken, that is – is buttermilk fried with southern-US flour mix made up of 27 ingredients, including dried garlic, paprika and chilli butter, then rolled in "red dragon" sauce made with gochujang paste and vinegar. The Californian specialises in "US of Asian", a care-free, mix-and-match of western and Asian flavours. Crispy duck taco (A$5.50) comes with Chinese hoisin barbecue sauce and cucumber. Grilled watermelon with jalapeno and smoked salt (A$8) is an intriguing novelty that's riotously popular. Located underneath Kings Cross's iconic Coca-Cola sign, it's worth it just to gawk at the crowd – a mix of shady characters, hipsters and models.
• 1 Bayswater Road, +61 2 9357 7822

Duy Linh, Cabramatta

This Asian vegan establishment opened the same month as the 2000 Sydney Olympics and the menu, with almost 200 dishes, is a gold-medal performance, unmatched by any other vegetarian eatery in town. The value is jaw-dropping given most dishes are under A$13. For lunch, try their yum cha ($3.80) and mock-pork rice rolls ($4.30). Dinner favourites include Vietnamese fresh rolls (A$6.50 for four) and vegetarian canh chua (A$9.50), a flavoursome sweet soup that also has a sour kick thanks to tamarind and fresh pineapple. This is veggie nirvana.
• 10/117 John Street, +61 2 9727 9800

Chinese Noodle Restaurant, Haymarket

The recent influx of migrants from China has transformed the cheap-and-cheerful Chinese restaurants in Sydney – sweet-and-sour pork has been superseded by handmade noodles, dumplings and steamed buns. This tiny Chinatown eatery is a squeeze to get into but worth it for the zany decor: red-and-green plastic grapes suspend from the ceiling, while giant tapestries of European landscapes adorn the walls. The restaurant specialises in northern Chinese; lamb soup (A$8.90) overflows with thick handmade noodles, and a stir fry beef noodle dish (A$9.80) is slippery, spicy and satisfying. A dozen juicy steamed pork and chives dumplings are just A$8.90, or choose from seven different types of fried dumplings for A$8.90. Free bottomless Chinese tea nails the deal.
• Prince Centre, Thomas Street, +61 2 9281 9051

Al Dhiaffah Al Iraqi, Fairfield

The walls of Sydney's first and most popular Iraqi restaurant are almost entirely covered with faded posters of old Bagdad and the fridge is packed full of exotic soft drinks, the packaging in Arabic script. This place is a meat lover's heaven. The popular bread curry stew (A$15) is a belly-busting bowl, almost overflowing with hearty, tomato-based casserole, thick with chickpeas, torn pieces of flat bread and huge chunks of lamb on the bone. The mixed shish/skewers plate (A$15) includes tender barbecued beef, lamb and chicken pieces, marinated in Middle Eastern spices. They come with bright green and pink pickles, raw onion, still juicy grilled tomatoes and hot fluffy flat bread fresh from the kitchen.
• 13 The Crescent, +61 2 9755 0870

Thang Ngo (@thangngo) is a freelance food writer and author of video food blog, noodlies.com

Don't sneer at Nando's – it's a sign that the food on British high streets is better than its European equivalent

Being an utter food snob is a contrary business. Take the story of Christopher Poole, the chap who's attempting to eat in every one of the 1,000-plus branches of Nando's worldwide so he can win a lifetime's supply of, er, Nando's. That's all the peri-peri grilled chicken, chips and marinated olives a chap could wish for. Despite the competition having closed a while back, the company has said it will honour the commitment, which is not quite as generous an offer as it sounds. If he pulls it off the last thing Poole is ever likely to want to eat again is Nando's.

The food snob response to this is obvious: oh, how terribly dreary. Eating the same thing, meal after meal. Does this poor little man have no imagination or taste? The curious thing is that the very people who would indulge in such gold-medal winning bouts of sneering are also the ones who would venerate the culinary culture of the Dordogne or Burgundy; who would build a shrine to the books of Elizabeth David, complete with candles and incense, as if she were Jesus, Buddha and Vishnu rolled into one.

For this is one of the defining characteristics of the true British food snob: a conviction that our high street food culture is vulgar and awful, that it's a slurry pit of overwhelming choice underpinned by little in the way of values or conviction or tradition, which only encourages gastronomic deviants like the Christopher Pooles of this world. If only we ate more like the tasteful souls of France or Italy, honouring our history and our produce, we would be so very much happier and satisfied.

All of which is utter balls. Have you tried eating in the Dordogne for an extended period, of say, a week? God, but it saps the will. Compared to the options available in restaurants across small town France (or Italy or Spain), the menu at Nando's begins to look like mind-scrambling choice. It's fine on day one. You sit down and mutter excitedly about the escargot and salade Lyonnais, the confit du canard and the tarte aux pommes. Here's the real thing, in perfectly spelt French. On day two you choose the steak frites because you had the duck last night. On day three it's the duck confit again, because "they do get the skin crisp don't they, not like all those terribly ersatz versions you get in Islington". On day four you ask for the salad as a main and then, when they refuse, order the duck again with a whimper. On day five it's the steak. On day six you take one look at the menu and stab yourself in the eye with a fork BECAUSE YOU CAN'T TAKE THE SODDING TEDIUM ANY MORE. By day seven you would kill for some Nando's chicken.

It's true that we have taken a little less care of our food traditions historically than other European countries. But to sneer at what we have instead would be a mistake. It's precisely because we have been careless with our traditions that we are so completely open to everybody else's. You can eat more vividly, more thrillingly and more globally in Britain than in any other country in Europe. Hell, you could even eat Nando's peri-peri chicken in a different place every day for almost a year. It may not be what you'd choose to do. But in the circumstances it may be something worth celebrating. Now, who ordered the chicken wing platter?

A French restaurateur in Islamabad has caused controversy by banning Pakistanis. But in Paris, seating customers based on their looks, ethnicity, wealth and fame is common practice

Last week, the French restaurateur Philippe Lafforgue hit the headlines for a controversial seating policy employed at his restaurant La Maison. Despite being situated in the heart of Islamabad, Pakistanis are forbidden from entering unless accompanied by a foreigner. It seems Lafforgue prefers to cater for the expat market. He claimed that he thought he had no choice, legally, because he was serving pork and alcohol.

You might wonder if Lafforgue has ever worked in a Parisian restaurant, where the ugly practice of profiling on looks, ethnicity, wealth and fame is all too common. Two former restaurant employees told Le Canard Enchaîné– an investigative and satirical weekly – that failure to comply with the house rules regarding where to sit better looking people would result in such reprimands as: "What are those ugly people doing at this table? Everyone can see them when they come in. It's bad for our image."

My own experience backs this up. Having once spent six months working in one of the rather chic Parisian establishments at the centre of this controversy, and having spoken to workers at several other restaurants, I have seen up close how it works. The insidious nature of this practice is actually much more orchestrated than is perhaps understood.

In my restaurant, there was an area referred to as the "VIP zone". It wasn't strictly for VIPs, but for those guests that were deemed to meet "a certain criteria". Located on the terrace in front of the restaurant, it was in essence used by the management to showcase how good-looking and famous the guests were to those passing by.

Those lucky enough to be seated in the VIP zone would often be fawned over by the better-looking waitresses (unsurprisingly, similar rules applied to the staff as the clients, and a short, average-looking waiter or waitress was hard to spot in the establishment). VIP visitors could even expect an informal visit from the manager to see how they were getting on. The food, too, would undergo additional attention before leaving the kitchen. But again, as with the guests, what mattered was how it looked.

Rarely would non-Europeans find their way into the VIP zone. Usually they would be shunted towards the edges of the restaurant. I once heard a forgotten table of Filipina girls complain: "No one is serving us! They're ignoring us because we're Asian." They were right.

For the Parisian hôtesse, there is a myriad of things to consider when screening potential customers and deciding where to seat them. Fame – the most sacred of all customer attributes – is supposed to trump looks, though some can slip through the net. The hôtesse can only rely on her often quite narrow Parisian instincts to select a suitable table for any customers that arrive without a booking.

Thus I found George Michael sitting in the corner once, to the alarm of the manager, and Cate Blanchett was given a secondary table as the hôtesse, only noticing the friend and children with her, promptly ushered them away from the VIP zone. She spent the rest of the time hoping they'd finish eating before the manager arrived and discovered her mistake.

I recently discussed this seating practice with a friend and Parisian restaurant manager, who seemed unable to see why this was surprising. She kept waiting for the controversial aspect of the story. Her response was simple: "I don't see where the news is. Everyone knows this happens. It's Paris. Why do you think CVs without a photo never get looked at? It's all about how you look."

Creating the illusion of exclusivity is what these restaurants do; it permits them to charge more for the often quite average food and drink. And though most of us wouldn't meet the criteria to be seated in the exclusive areas, our presence is still important. After all, it's the "normal people" who help balance the books so that the farce can go on.

'If local buzz is to be believed, this will put the city firmly on the culinary map'

While researching the Gannet, I find a recent story about a Glasgow man winning an actual gannet-eating competition: small, pickled, baby gannets, or guga, to be knocked back with milk. I'm basically bleee-ing for ever. The same morning, in a chic city-centre hotel and to a soundtrack of Stand By Your Man, I eat breakfast of black pudding, haggis and slabs of square lorne sausage with the complexion of a dipsomaniac corpse. (The Arthouse, should you think I'm making it up, where in a nice piece of symmetry it turns out the Gannet's chef-owners teamed up.) And I think to myself: seriously, Glasgow, you have only yourself to blame.

Oh, put away your pitchforks. There's nobody with more genuine affection for this city than me. Sure, I left it years ago, but, well, you know, restaurants… So I'm excited to hear about a place that, if local buzz is to be believed, at last looks likely to put the place firmly on the culinary map, and it's neither couthy theme-park Scots, estimable curry house or another of the city's endless Italian trattorias. Praise be.

The style is a bit industrial 80s by way of Brooklyn five years ago. We've enough metal ducting to ventilate Ibrox, plus rough wood walls (a lethal threat to tights and skirts), raw sandstone, moody oil paintings, and textured wall-hangings that look like untreated tripe. It's all very 50 shades of greige.

The menu is short, tiptoeing around anything likely to alarm a conservative clientele; the most out-there item is a pig's head croquette, nicely sanitised and deep-fried. One pal is so astonished by the paucity of a tortellini starter that he becomes stuck on a loop, going, "Three! Three!" like a budgie with a speech impediment. They're very good – fine, taut pasta, woody and fragrant Jerusalem artichoke, a buttery smacker of crisped sage – but tepid. And there are only three of them. More generous is my Scotch egg, a rich duck's one, slow cooked into the texture of a Creme Egg, with a thin coating of good black pudding and then crunchy panko.

They love an egg here: an Arbroath smokie (a good, but very salty piece of fish) comes with a cloying cream sauce and poached egg, the pooling yolk adding to the cloy. A similarly creamy pheasant risotto is crowned with another poached egg, perhaps an emollient too far. There's rosy rump of superb lamb, rather thrown away on a worthy bed of kale and roots. The standout dish is "Boarders" (sic) pheasant breast, as pink and succulent as Turkish delight, with more Jerusalem artichokes, their skins dried and fried into something like a savoury eclair and filled with the suavest artichoke cream. This is gaspworthy. These guys can cook.

This strip of formerly grungy Finnieston has become, against the odds, a dining destination, bristling with the city's coolest: Crabshakk, the charming bar and restaurant, the revivified Kelvingrove Cafe and the just landed attractive nouveau-chippy, Old Salty's. It's all so much more encouraging than the city centre, with its proliferation of Jamie's Italians, Carluccio's and Patisserie Valeries. The Gannet, with its relaxed approach and ambitious cooking, fits right in. They make all the right noises. In-house butchery, smoking and charcuterie-making. There's the concentration on Scottish produce, which, at its finest – the vivid rare-breed beef or sweet, seductive seafood – is something to behold. Even their vegetarian choices show real thought, and staff are uniformly lovely.

Glasgow is given to the sardonic "Aye, right" when confronted by the Michelin-bothering style of fine dining (for this, I salute the city). The Gannet ups the culinary game without any of the attendant pretensions. Apart from anything else, the noisy and overbearing bar at the front sticks the head into any such poncey notions. But ground-breaking or game-changing? We're not quite there yet.

• The Gannet 1155 Argyle Street, Finnieston, Glasgow, 0141-2042081. Open Tues-Sat, noon-2.30pm, 5-9.45pm; Sun noon-9.30pm. About £28 a head for three courses, plus drinks and service.

Food 7/10
Atmosphere 6/10
Value for money 7/10

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Ziferblat, or 'clockface', is the brainchild of Ivan Mitin who has a chain of the cafes throughout Russia where customers are invited to drink free tea and coffee while paying for time

A football-themed restaurant could have been an own-goal, but at the end of the day… it's not the cliché you feared

Westfield Stratford City, London E20 (020 8702 2590). Meal for two: £90

I am to football much as bankers are to morals and politicians to principles. I know football exists. I understand the concepts, but I have no interest in it. None. I genuinely don't understand how people can invest their emotional wellbeing in the activities of 11 players they don't know. I never was one for the bellow and foetid armpit stench of tribalism. Still, each to their own, as I'm supposed to say.

Each being to their own, I should have had no reason to trouble myself with the activities of Ryan Giggs and Gary Neville, who once played together for Manchester United (thank you, Internet, for this. No, really. I didn't have a clue.) However, since they have opened a restaurant called Café Football they have become my concern. Why they couldn't just buy a pub, descend into alcoholism and be declared bankrupt like all other self-respecting ex-footballers I really don't know.

But here it is: a football-themed restaurant to which I must go, like a eunuch to a lap-dancing club. It occupies a big, echoey space in the Westfield shopping centre at Stratford in east London. Somewhere, another tedious essay is doubtless being written about the deathly commercialisation of the game and how this enterprise represents all that's wrong with the multi-billion-dollar business that it has become.

It's true that there's lots to make you jab a fork into the back of your hand. The "gent's convenience"-style white-tiled walls are splattered with legends like "Hustle and heart set us apart" or "Hit the sweet spot" or "At the end of the day". At the end of the day, what exactly? Video screens play gobbets of action on a loop, and everything – chairs, crockery – is branded with faux team shields. The menu is littered with dish names that make me conclude the guilty should be punished. There are burgers called The Boss and Hometeam. There's a section of Fans' Favourites including Karren Brady's Match Day Classic – pie, mash and liquor, chilli vinegar for £13.95 – or Kirsty Gallacher's Terrace Winter Warmer – chilli with steamed rice and soured cream. The wine list is arranged in teams with 11 reds and whites aside, from all points including Brazil, Italy and Hungary. There's not a single English wine on either team. Much like an English Premiership team, then. Footballwise, that's all I have for you.

With the Starting Eleven Platter, all is as expected. The marinade on ribs has a brutal raw-tomato tang which makes me suck my lips. Breaded and deepfried un-jointed chicken wings are a hit of salt and fire outside, and damp sweaty meat within. But lurking here are signs of something other. There's the coarse-cut tartare sauce with their own rather appealing fish fingers. There's a dish of treacle vinegar, a kind of northern reboot of balsamic full of huge caramel flavours, for dipping bread into. And then there are the "treble pies". The flaky pastry is undercooked, but there's intent: proper pieces of long-braised beef in one, a nuanced level of spice in the curried chicken with the crunch of toasted almonds, a cheese and vegetable effort which is not all detritus and sludge but something with bite. I nod quietly over them. Not bad at all.

Unlike the rest of what I eat. It's shockingly good. For somewhere along the way, in this obviously cynical attempt to separate dribbling football fans from their cash, the crazy decision was made to serve nice food. What were they thinking? Head chef Brendan Fyldes, who formerly ran the kitchen at Richard Corrigan's Bentley's, has worked with consultant chef Michael Wignall, who holds two Michelin stars at Pennyhill Park, to build a menu full of ludicrous joys.

Nev's Noodle Pot is another one of those "kill me now" dish titles. What arrives is a ceramic faux Pot Noodle container full of proper roast chicken, egg noodles and shredded vegetables. Next to it is a glass teapot holding a stock which punches you in the face with umami, the one to be poured into the other. It's deep but clean flavoured. The lid to the teapot is a small bowl containing a julienne of ginger and spring onions. At which point you begin to wonder if this isn't a knowingly poncy parody of terrace food – a deliberate attempt to show up football food culture for what it is: an exercise in barrel scraping so determined you can almost see daylight through the bottom.

I order the sausage roll, a glorious thing that I want to adopt as my third child. It has glazed pastry sprinkled with fennel seeds. The filling is compressed pulled pork shoulder and black pudding, spun through with Dijon mustard. On the side is a heap of their own baked beans, the sweet, smokey mass held together by strands of more pulled pork. I order a side of their Bovril gravy, which shows commitment as I've always regarded Bovril as Marmite's degenerate sibling. This is a huge beefy jus, reduced so the flavour keeps echoing long after you've licked it away. Obviously £12.95 sounds like a lot for a sausage roll. And it is. But by God it's good.

Which is when the complicated thoughts occur. Snobbery may be unpleasant, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong. So: is this food wasted on the clientele it's being offered to? Do they actually want this? For example, the cheery staff tell me the sausage roll rarely gets ordered because it contains black pudding. Their loss. Clearly Giggs and Neville were damned either way. If they'd merely done a slightly improved version of junk food they'd have been accused of pandering to poor taste. By doing this they'll be accused of traducing a key part of working-class culture.

I finish with the chocolate turf, which looks like a slice of a 10-year-old boy's birthday cake complete with green pitch and white lines. The thin layers of pistachio sponge, and the ripe grown-up chocolate ganache would probably make the 10-year-old pout. No matter. There's an ice cream and sweet counter at the back. Will I ever return to Café Football? No, of course not. But it's reassuring to know that the spendy hordes, descending from Essex to show their support by eating, are likely to be fed well. I just hope they don't notice.

Jay's news bites

■ Theme restaurants are usually where superstars go to cash in and hope goes to die. Which makes it remarkable that the grand daddy of them all, The Hard Rock Café, still does the thing. The London branch is now the cornerstone of a 150-strong global chain. Sure, the queue can be long, but it's well managed. And the burger is a thing of wonder: serious-quality beef, a proper char, great cheese and bacon, and chips that rustle against each other (hardrock.com).

■ Four years ago McVitie's reduced the saturated-fat content of its classic digestives by 50%. They are now reversing the recipe and putting the fat back in, apparently because consumers claimed the new recipe was less "dunkable". A lower-fat alternative will still be available.

■ Sad news. The Mark Addy pub, recently listed in this column as an alternative to the glossy Manchester House, has closed its restaurant. Apparently renovation costs proved prohibitive. Chef and Mancs institution Rob Owen Brown will doubtless bounce back. Meanwhile, he's concentrating on events catering.

From fish and chips in Yorkshire to a blow-out at Le Gavroche, Jay Rayner picks food that offers the best value to suit any budget

In an age when it's possible to get a box of chips and three deep-fried wings from a chicken shop for 99p, it barely needs saying that cheap is not the same as good. It probably is worth saying, however, that cheap is also not always the same as good value. Of course, value can be in the eye of the beholder. It's all about what you regard as a good return for the money spent. And it's all about how much money you have to spend in the first place. If a best restaurant list is a cue for a row, a best value restaurant list is that same row squared.

So let me set the terms for this very personal, completely unranked list of great value eating opportunities. Some really are cheap. The pho at Cafe East in Surrey Quays, the roast meats at New Sum Ye in Birmingham, come in at less than a tenner.

Others cost much more but should still be classed as great value. To access them, however, you have to be flexible. If you want to experience Le Gavroche, you will have to skive off work and go there at lunchtime. Is it worth it for the full experience at a third of the cost? Yes. This applies to many big-ticket places. Most restaurants make their big money in the evenings, but need a bit of footfall during the day to keep the lights on. So do some research. Plan ahead. Save up. You may have other tips for great value eating opportunities in Britain; these are mine.

1: Magpie Cafe, Whitby, North Yorkshire: £12.50 a head

The menu at the whitewashed Magpie Cafe in Whitby is long. There are at least 32 starters, and the same number of mains. You can have most of the ingredients anyway you want them; there are even signs on the wall telling you which fishing boat landed the langoustine on offer that day. What's hilarious about all this is that all those people who queue out the door of the 70-year-old Magpie go there for one thing: fish and chips. Rightly so, because it's about as good as it gets. Even the small portion of golden battered cod and chips brings something the size of a Venetian gondola for £9.95. As they point out, these are Yorkshire portions.

14 Pier Road, Whitby, Yorkshire, YO21 3PU. 01947 602058; magpiecafe.co.uk

2: Cafe East, London: from £10 a head

Cafe East is a modest Vietnamese cafe in a grim Surrey Quays car park. Inside it's not much of a looker either: refectory tables, white walls. What matters is the menu of steaming bowls of bright, fragrant pho, the Vietnamese national dish, made with a beef tendon stock of uncommon depth, rice noodles, frondy, green herbs and lots of zing. This food feels good for you, and at £7.50 a bowl for that pho, won't require a mortgage.

100 Redriff Road, Surrey Quays Leisure Park, London SE16 7LH. No bookings. cafeeastpho.co.uk

3: Brasserie Zédel, London: from £15 a head

Look up as you stride into the cavernous basement space that is Brasserie Zédel, just off Piccadilly Circus, and you might assume they'd had King Midas in to do the painting and decorating. Certainly it doesn't look like the place for a bargain, but that's exactly what it is. Brasserie Zédel is a loving take on the classic Parisian brasserie from Jeremy King and Chris Corbin, the men behind the flashy Wolseley. But this is a volume operation which, doing more than 1,000 covers a day, manages to keep prices down for quality by-the-book French food. How about £2.25 for the pumpkin soup? Or £3.25 for the celeriac remoulade? Best of all is the three-course prix fixe at £11.75 for carrot crudites, followed by steak haché and chips with pepper sauce and a pear tart to finish. All that and the ceiling too. It's a gift to the capital.

20 Sherwood St, London W1F 7ED. 020-7734 4888; brasseriezedel.com

4: The Dogs, Edinburgh: £12 a head

The Dogs, located in a high-ceilinged Georgian townhouse on Edinburgh's Hanover Street, is the sort of place any city needs: a restaurant that manages to be a bit smart in the evenings and a bit elbows-on-the-table by day. Restaurateur Dave Ramsden knows the city, and caters exceptionally well for his flock, some of whom do not have deep pockets but want both quality and a place to linger. The day menu from 12 until 4 includes a big soup at £4.50, kedgeree at £6.45, and a chicken and tarragon pie at £6.95. If you decide to go mad and have dessert, try the semolina and winter berry pudding with meringue for £3.95.

110 Hanover St, Edinburgh EH2 1DR. 0131-220 1208; thedogsonline.co.uk

5: Michael Caines, Manchester; from £20 a head

Eat two-Michelin-starred chef Michael Caines' food at Gidleigh Park in Devon – the mothership where he made his name – and you won't see change from £100 a head. Which makes the lunchtime deal at the Manchester branch of the Abode hotel chain, where Caines runs the sleek restaurant, an absolute steal. It's £14.50 for two courses, or £19.50 for three, for food that never feels like the bargain basement option. The menu might include a perfectly made chicken terrine, with crisp chicken skin and a caesar salad, lamb breast with a tagine puree, grilled vegetables and couscous and a dark-chocolate and passion fruit fondant to finish. The non‑meat options – a spring salad of broccoli and artichokes, a lavender baked onion tart fine – are none too shabby either. They also offer a wine flight, which probably works out at even better value: a different glass with all three courses comes in at £32.50. It is cooking of the highest order and the lowest price.

Abode, 107 Piccadilly, Manchester M1 2DB. 0161-247 7744; abodemanchester.co.uk

6: Brixton Village Market, London: from £8 a head

With outposts of Wahaca and Brindisa arriving soon, the food scene in Brixton has become politicised of late. Then again it has always been thus. Brixton is a complex neighbourhood. The development of small, relatively cheap restaurants in the two covered markets – Brixton Village and Market Row – is simultaneously regarded as a great thing for the area and a blight, dragging in too many moneyed outsiders and ramping up rents.

Many claim it isn't what it once was. I'm not sure it was ever what they say it once was. Regardless, it remains home to some terrific good-value eating opportunities: try the fresh Beijing dumplings at Mama Lan's, at £4.50 a pop. There's Kaosarn's super spicy Bangkok-style noodle soup at £7.90, or a sizable portion of the addictive chilli chicken wings at The Joint, yours for £3.50. There's Honest Burger, which, although prices have increased, still delivers good value, and the original Franco Manca where their wood-fired tomato, mozzarella and basil pizza is just £5.90. There's Wings and Tings, Etta's Seafood, The Elephant … Go explore.

London SW9. brixtonmarket.net

7: Lido, Bristol: from £20 a head

The restaurant at Bristol's renovated Lido has a wood-fired oven and, boy, are they going to use it. Most ingredients on the Mediterranean-inspired menu spend a bit of time in there. General prices are not high for ingredients and cooking of this quality.

But there are also real bargains. The set menu at lunch and early evening offers two courses for £16 and three for £20 and doesn't stint on ingredients: it could include scallops, venison and hake. There's also a very appealing tapas menu with most dishes at between £3 and £6.50. All this plus you get to watch people exert themselves in the pool while you eat.

Oakfield Place, Clifton, Bristol BS8 2BJ. 0117-933 9530; lidobristol.com

8: Le Gavroche, London: £60 a head

No one would ever call Le Gavroche cheap. At night the cooking, served in the green and red dining room with every formal bell and whistle, can swiftly sprint past the £100 a head mark, for Michel Roux Jr classics such as the soufflé suisse or grilled dover sole on the bone with langoustines. But at lunchtime it harbours a secret: the all-inclusive "business lunch menu". This isn't merely three courses of grand French cooking – pork rillettes, followed by steak with red wine sauce or roasted guinea fowl with creamed polenta – but canapes, petits fours and half a bottle of both mineral water and wine. Given the size and depth of the Gavroche cellar, assembled by Michel's dad Albert, it is always very good wine. The price: £54 a head. Throw in a tip and it's £120 for two all in. No, not cheap, but extraordinary value for what you get, which really is the full Gavroche experience. Certainly it's worth taking the day off for.

43 Upper Brook Street, London W1K 7QR. 020-7408 0881; le-gavroche.co.uk (closed until 17 February)

9: New Sum Ye, Birmingham: £8 a head

Birmingham's Chinatown is small but perfectly formed. There are only three or four Cantonese cafes on the small precinct across from the Bullring but many agree the best is New Sum Ye. It's not a looker: think wipe-down tables, and blaring TV screens. There is a longer menu but the Cantonese roasts really are the point. Order up a plate of their three roast meats – lacquered duck, crisp skinned pork belly and bright red char sui – on a pillow of rice with a little bok choi and you'll be happy. And have change from a tenner.

New Sum Ye, Arcadian Centre, 70 Hurst St, Birmingham B5 4TD. 0121-622 1525

10: The Green Man and French Horn, London: £17.50 a head

The Green Man and French Horn on St Martin's Lane, part of the small group that includes Terroirs, Brawn and Soif, takes its inspiration from the Loire river, from the undulating Ardeche to the seafood at Saint Nazaire. Most of the dishes are well priced, but none more so than those on the pre-theatre menu, which actually runs from noon to 7pm. Two courses are £14.50 and three are £16.50. Start with artery-hardening rillettes with the crunch of cornichon. Follow that with coarse ground, shouty sausages on a bed of lentils, or a Breton galette of eggs and chanterelles. Finish with crepes with salted butter caramel. As with the whole group they take their wines seriously, and there's always an intriguing choice by the glass at great prices.

54 St Martin's Lane, London WC2N 4EA. 020-7836 2645; greenmanfrenchhorn.co