Gilles Pudlowski leaks details of three-star restaurants and says guide had lost the plot

Few events are more keenly awaited in France than the release of the annual Michelin restaurant guide, when French chefs and their customers find out who has found favour with the oracle of gastronomy.

This year is no exception. But one week before the red guide is due to announce its coveted three-star awards for 2014, a leading French food critic has leaked its decisions and attacked its directors for the "bizarre" choices that favour young chefs.

In a short but pithy column in the weekly magazine Le Point on Monday, Gilles Pudlowski bemoaned the days of the Michelin directors "whose competence was uncontested". Ever since the brief tenure of Briton Derek Brown, who was appointed in 2001, the guide had "lost the plot", Pudlowski wrote.

The Michelin restaurant guides are now run by an American international director, Michael Ellis, and his German deputy, Juliane Casper. Ellis has said he wants to recognise young chefs. "There's nothing wrong with that," said Pudlowski. "But is that any reason to forget to crown the unchallengeable chefs?"

Pudlowski told the Guardian that his phone had not stopped ringing since he divulged in his column that the newest three-star restaurant outside Paris to enter the 2014 guide would be l'Assiette Champenoise, in Reims. Its chef, Arnaud Lallement, 39, offers dishes such as black pork with bacon, foie gras and potatoes. Pudlowski said Lallement's rival of the same age in the city, Philippe Mille at Les Creyères, would have been a worthier choice.

In Paris, according to Pudlowski, Alain Ducasse at Le Meurice is to retain the three stars he was awarded at the Plaza-Athénée, which is currently closed.

Pudlowski, who publishes his own restaurant reviews in the Guides Pudlo, also criticised the Michelin guide's failure to sanction chefs by removing stars.

"Can't they find any French people to run this guide?" Pudlowski fumed. He pointed out that the top management decided on the stars, not the French restaurant inspectors.

Ellis, who previously held a senior post in the Michelin tyre division, took over the restaurant guides covering more than 20 countries in 2012. The French guide is usually issued in March, but this year the release has been brought forward by a week. Ellis could not be reached for comment on Monday.

Peruvian food is here to stay, with ceviche hitting supermarkets and restaurants serving new Andean dishes. G2's food editor goes on a tasting tour to the mountainous heart of the cuisine

Recipe: how to make quinoa croquettes
Recipe: how to make aji de gallina
Recipe: how to make pumpkin and sweet potato doughnuts

Outside a converted garage in a residential street in Lima, I'm feeling queasy from a combination of travel sickness and pure greed – I've eaten non-stop since arriving in Peru. Said garage is now a makeshift restaurant run by Javier Wong, the city's legendary master of ceviche, and one of the best places in Peru to have the dish. He stands tall and intimidating – a Don Ceviche, if you will – in flat cap and shades, knife brandished over the flounder that will become our lunch. The ceviche – the freshest fish "cooked" in a "tiger's milk" of citrus, chilli, black pepper and onions – helps with the nausea. Luckily I emerge, not healed, but back from the brink: it wouldn't do to be sick in one of the world's culinary capitals.

The march of Peruvian food has been unstoppable since 2011, when uber-chef Ferran Adrià decided that the country held the key to the future of gastronomy. At the end of last year, there was another boost with superchef Alain Ducasse declaring: "Peru will become one of the leading actors on the global culinary scene." Around the same time, the Culinary Institute of America named 2014 the year of Peruvian cuisine, and analysts predicted a Latin American food revolution – (bolstered by sporting events in Brazil), with Peru at the forefront. The World's 50 Best Restaurants launched a Latin American section late last year in Lima (Peruvian chef Gastón Acurio won top place with Astrid-y-Gastón).

Nobu Matsuhisa made waves with Japanese-Peruvian cooking in London in the 90s, but the past couple of years have seen that crush develop into a full-blown affair. A smattering of London restaurants – Lima, Coya, Ceviche – opened to real acclaim in 2012. The latter went on a national pop-up restaurant tour last year: sashimi-like tiraditos, comforting causas (potato cakes) and anticuchos (marinated meat skewers) sold out from Padstow to Loch Fyne. Ceviche has become so popular, it is set to land on British supermarket shelves this year, with Waitrose predicting it will be the next sushi.

And, as Ceviche's founder Martin Morales tells me, there is more to come. The Lima-born entrepreneur is something of a Peruvian ambassador: earlier this year he opened a second restaurant, Andina, in east London. He is the reason I was standing outside Wong's place feeling faint. He had taken me on a mammoth eating tour of picanterias (humble, family-run restaurants) in the Andean city of Arequipa.

"Andean food is the source of all Peruvian cuisine," he says, listing the abundant healthy ingredients at its heart: amaranth (the nutrient-packed grain); maca (a root commonly sold in powdered form as a health supplement); corn and maize; beans; sacha inchi (mountain nuts) … He hasn't even mentioned quinoa: known to the Incas as "mothergrain", it was once valued as much as gold (and still is in parts of Islington).

This is another reason Peruvian food will keep gaining traction: its wholefood credentials couldn't come at a better time. Food lovers are more health-conscious than ever (witness the sprouting of restaurants such as Bruno Loubet's Grain Store in London and chains such as Leon), although never at the cost of flavour. And does Peru have flavours – with ingredients sourced from the Pacific coast, the Andes and the Amazon, even the familiar come in mindboggling forms: thousands of potatoes, hundreds of chillies, a huge variety of corn. There is lucuma, an Andean valley fruit with distinctive notes of caramel (variously compared to cashew, maple and sweet potato). Or huacatay, a Peruvian black mint that tastes a bit like aniseed and features in pungent salsa alongside crisp chicharrones (it's reassuring how many cuisines feature pork crackling). Typically, this is all washed down with jugs of vibrant purple chicha de jora, a refreshing corn beer.

At Andina, Morales has created new interpretations of traditional dishes, using local and Peruvian ingredients. The butter-fried cow's udder we ate in Arequipa hasn't made his London menu – yet, but his take on chupe de camarones (a chowder-like soup crammed with shrimp, Andean yellow potatoes and chilli) has (his from an ancient recipe using black quinoa). Likewise the creamy, nutty aji de gallina– think Peruvian korma with punch; picarones (pumpkin doughnuts, served at Andina with purple corn syrup); and ridiculously moreish quinoa croquettes.

Back in Arequipa, we are on our final picanteria of the day, a special little place named after its La Lucila. Sadly, we have arrived on the first anniversary of her death. There is a timelessness to the kitchen, unchanged in a century – the cooks work over open fires, lit by shafts of light from above; fast-breeding guinea pigs (cuy) squeak below the floorboards, awaiting their turn for the hot oil. We tried some: deep-fried, crisp skin; rabbit-like texture and flavour.

It is easy to understand the picanteria's inspiring appeal. Still, it seems, cuy won't be on the menu at Andina any time soon. People are happy to queue for quinoa burgers and avocado smoothies in Shoreditch, but guinea pig might be a step too far.

• Journey Latin America arranged flights, transfers and accommodation on the Peru trip.

'It's hard to know where to start with Sirena's oddities… The food is not in any way awful, just not really of this century'

Doubtless there are many people, both in and out of the biz, glued to BBC2's riveting consultancy show The Restaurant Man, thinking, "I could do that." Like restaurant reviewing itself, everyone thinks it's easy, a doddle, a skoosh. Not me, though. I'm more likely to be hit with the sobering reflection that the more restaurants I go to, the less I know.

Take Sirena's in Vauxhall. If you approached me with a blueprint for the place, I'd laugh like a drain, cross my exquisitely-linened knees and tell you that such a ludicrous concept has no business existing, let alone in the ravening maw that is London's city centre restaurant scene. But exist it does. And, what's more, every lunchtime of its life since 1991, it has been packed to its peculiar rafters.

It's hard to know where to start with Sirena's oddities. There's its location, on a side street off an unlovely stretch of the Thames, in the basement of a serviced office building that, with its soaring gothic red-brick, looks more like the setting for a school of correction. Down the stairs, metal banisters daubed red, white and green, walls plastered with curling posters of Amalfi, to a scene that looks like pastiche: hectic murals, gingham oilcloths, "classical" busts, more posters of Amalfi… Two twinkly chaps of untender years work the room, one bellowing in Italian, the other singing away in a pleasing baritone: Silvano and Walter (pronounced "Vaaltair"). Can it be for real? Oh yes.

After being given a menu that looks as though it came from any Dino's circa 1977, we're told about the specials. As consultant, I'd insist they were written daily on a blackboard. In Walter and Silvano World, the actual dishes are prepared just before service and displayed proudly to you by the chaps themselves. So we get an eyeful of gently petrifying penne alla salsiccia, slowly ossifying Parma ham and goat's cheese salad, a spaghetti ai frutti di mare that has taken to clinging on to its large bowl for dear life. Could we have half portions as starters? "Signorina" – the joy of that "signorina" – "you can have anything you like."

Everything has a taste of tempo perduto. The food is not in any way awful, just not really of this century. I suspect the application of a lot of tomato puree. We have both sausage and seafood pastas: they are al dente, garlicky and whoosh me back to being a small child. Pizza bread is an almost-margherita, thin, toasty base with puffy cornicione – not bad at all. It's during the main courses that the Proustian thing really kicks in: my pollo alla Milanese is as thin as the apocryphal breadcrumbed beer mat that Keith Floyd served an annoying customer, and with probably about as much flavour. Our sides – saute potatoes and peas, of course – come in a sectioned metal dish. My plate, with its orange chicken, bright green peas and vivid slab of lemon, is as comical as a child's painting. It almost reduces me to tears. Honesty demands I mention veal in lemon, a dish that almost reduces me to tears for other reasons: it tastes as though it has bathed in Cif.

Nothing about Sirena's is "right". They do heart-shaped pizzas on request and, almost as an afterthought, a range of hilariously cheap sandwiches; it doesn't open in the evenings; they even have a dessert trolley that's trundled diligently round each table. Are desserts homemade? Walter twinkles: "Of course." A fine tiramisu, certainly, but I'm not entirely sure about the others. I'm also not entirely sure I care. Should you commit the ultimate solecism of ordering a cappuccino post-lunch, they perform a shtick (not telling) that makes me squeal like a teen on a waltzer. It's a long time since I've left a restaurant beaming from ear to ear, but that's what we do, and it's not all down to the obligatory complimentary limoncello. Silvano and Walter: I take my know-nothing consultant's hat off to you, I really do.

• Sirena's Southbank House, Black Prince Road, London SE1, 020-7587 0683. Open Mon-Fri, 8am-4.30pm. About £16 a head for three courses, plus drinks and service.

Food 5/10
Atmosphere 9/10
Value for money 9/10

Follow Marina on Twitter.

A meal out in Belgium recently was characterised by white aprons, hushed diners and a very reasonable bill. How different to the racket that greets you in the UK – especially London

In Antwerp last weekend, I felt a little surge of grief for the Britain I grew up in. It happened in a restaurant facing the river Scheldt, close to the quays where the ships of Belgium's Red Star Line used to leave packed with emigrants for America at a time when Antwerp was perhaps the busiest port in continental Europe. The docks have moved downstream and the river is emptier now – though not nearly as empty as the Thames – but it wasn't the occasional barge or coaster ploughing upriver that reminded me of bygone Britain. It was the restaurant itself. Not the menu, not the male waiters in their white aprons, but the hush – the quiet reserve of 50 Belgian lunchers as they went about the business of ordering, eating and chatting. And also, it might be said, the price – less than £40 for two of us to share four courses plus bread, a beer, a little pitcher of wine, coffees and chocolates.

From this quiet perspective, Britain – particularly London, though not just London – looks febrile, decadent and expensive. The weekend before, as a birthday treat, we'd had dinner in a new and well-regarded London restaurant on an evening when the menu allowed no choice. The service was, I suppose, "passionate": waiters described every little dish lovingly as if to judges in a TV chef competition, culminating in a sweet that was said to be a blood orange cooked in three different ways (frying was one of them). The racket was tremendous, a hubbub of people shouting to be heard over other people shouting. Nobody looked to be older than 35. In London, anyone aged over 60 can cut a lonely figure in a restaurant or a bar – the larks' tongues and the noise are not for the likes of them. In Antwerp, on the other hand, middle-class and middle-aged-to-elderly people in forgettable clothes were the default model when it came to eaters and drinkers.

Britain used to be like this. Our restaurants were full of murmurers. People as a whole spoke more quietly then, but restaurants had their own special way of shutting you up. Upwardly-mobile customers were made nervous by waiters and the expertly positioned cutlery, and never quite lost the uneasy feeling that they were mountebanks or charlatans or parvenus, or whatever the word was, who had been given fleeting access to a superior way of life and might at any minute be betrayed by a false move with a fork. Once, in the 1960s, I went with a girl to stay for a weekend at a hotel on Islay that had a dining room as quiet as the grave. Dinner was spaghetti on toast, followed by fish and then steak. It was much better than it sounds, and I asked the waitress what kind of fish it had been. "Trout, sir," she said, and from far away across the room I heard a Glasgow matron telling her husband in an outraged stage whisper, "Imagine! They come to a hotel like this and don't know what a trout is!"

But by then restaurant manners were already changing. Curry houses, Chinese places, kebab shops, red-sauce Italians with giant pepper grinders: all made eating out a much less formal and inhibiting experience, as well as a more affordable one. Quietness was further eroded in the late 1980s when what Peregrine Worsthorne called "bourgeois triumphalism" sent its shock troops of big-drinking, big-spending City boys to restaurants still governed by waiters in morning dress and bow ties. Celebrity chefs added to the sense of theatrical machismo, and to the cacophony.

No, to remember the old British way of eating out – in terms of manners if not cooking – you need to cross the Channel and find a quiet restaurant in Belgium where you can have potato soup and cod, and not be told about the chef's three exciting ways with a blood orange, the waiter bending down to shout in your ear, while every other customer seems to be a lusty 30 years younger than you are, and richer than rich.

Like a lot of now-treasured architecture, Zurenborg nearly isn't there: city planners in the 1960s wanted to demolish the houses and turn the site over to office blocks. Similarly "progressive" instincts were an even bigger force in Britain at the time, and it was Nairn's opposition to them – and his championing of pleasing but ordinary-enough buildings that were often under threat – that turned him for a time into a hero for the many people who felt angry and unsettled by Britain's urban makeover. A documentary on the BBC this week by Kate Misrahi caught his troubled personality very well – the hurt eyes, the voice that always seemed about to crack with melancholy – as it slowly drowned in a sea of beer.

I knew him a little. He was kind about things I'd written, and once or twice I stopped at his table in our office local, the Blue Lion, where he looked as though he was being reborn as a 17-stone glass of Guinness. Bulky figure, black suit, white face. The face was flecked with sweat, while a plump fist gripped a pint that, in shape and colour, might almost have been a model of its drinker. There's no point wondering why he drank so much that he was dead at 52, or about the origins of his depression. What's more important is the way he could find interest and beauty in the apparently ordinary, and so vehemently protest its neglect or destruction – a church in Bolton, an arcade in Northampton or Newcastle. Sometimes he went too far or became too mystical: was it Bruges that Barnsley was compared to? Nonetheless, and especially to those of us who lived among the apparently ordinary, he made us sit up and see what was remarkable in our surroundings.

Meat eaters don't normally do salad, but Jay's world is turned upside down by a plate of the green stuff

7a Tetherdown, London N10 (020 8411 0051). Meal for two £40 (if you try hard)

I went to Muswell Hill in north London for salad. This was not easy. There was a tube strike, which made my home as remote from other places in the capital as from the coastal extremities. There was a thick, cold rain, blowing sideways, which laughed at our umbrellas. There was a long walk, down one of those suburban arteries where greasy water pools in the gutters and pavements are so narrow they feel like an afterthought.

I did all this for salad. But oh, what salad. I know in theory that salad can be a marvellous thing just as I know that, in theory, it can be sunny in Wales and sometimes Mrs Brown's Boys is funny. But understanding a theory is very different to experiencing it. Sure, I have a couple of salads I like to make. There is a combination of new potatoes with lots of salted anchovy, spring onions and a Dijon vinaigrette. There is a pepper salad which demands vast amounts of furious slicing until your arm aches and you start to fantasise about roasting lumps of pig.

But I have never thought of these as recipes, with underlying principles that demand knowledge and wit. I have always slipped them into the column headed "assemblage" or, even more dismissively, "augmented shopping". For me, making a salad has always been the thing you do after you've done the cooking. Then I dragged my sorry arse to Muswell Hill, met the salads made by Chris Kitch and understood that I was wrong.

Then again, Australian-born Kitch knows his way around a kitchen. After working for Gordon Ramsay on Royal Hospital Road he moved into grand hotels both here and abroad. At the Dorchester he had 200 cooks beneath him; at the Mayfair he ran the whole operation. Not that you would necessarily guess from his deli. It looks like a late addition; an extension to a house on a decidedly residential street. Milk crates pile up outside. Inside there are baby buggies. There are bare-brick walls and white walls.

But at the front there is the undulating curve of reconditioned butcher's blocks, one of which is used for the display at the front of the shop. That's the first clue. As an exercise in retail, in food as glitter-strewn cleavage, they really don't come much better. There is height and volume and colour and blush. You stand before it and sigh, for you know this food, this shameless, sensory largesse, will make you feel very good about yourself.

At lunchtime – it currently closes at 6pm and is unlicensed – there are a couple of main dishes. Today there is a whole salmon, roasted over Chinese tea. It is smoky and soft and properly seasoned, and does that miraculous thing of holding together until nudged with a fork. There is also a picture-pretty beef lasagne made with the salty hit of feta and the earthier funk of proper cheddar and cherry tomatoes. A portion of these with two salads is £12.50. Two salads alone are £6.50, three salads £8.50. Lunch here will not make you poor. Somehow we contrive to order everything. I tell my companion I am doing this for work purposes. We both know this is an excuse.

What defines these salads is the attention to detail. There is a mixture of three beans with roasted and shredded onions and peppers and something else which at first I identify as cumin. It isn't. It's cinnamon. Would you put cinnamon into a salad dressing? No, you wouldn't. And that's the point. Kitch does things to salads that you would never think of doing at home.

A potato salad, with sliced gherkins and caramelised onions, appears to have been made with grain mustard, but has uncommon depth of flavour. Kitch, who arrives in the deli with his two-year-old daughter slumped asleep on his shoulder, explains eagerly: there are three mustards. First he roasts the mustard seeds, and then he mixes that with Dijon and then… but by now I am lost in the pleasures of lunch.

Slices of ripe avocado are served skin-on, so they cannot turn to mush, with the crunch of fresh almonds. There is a brisk pick-me-up salad of apple, fennel and cranberries with quinoa which feels less like a middle-class affectation and more like a textural masterstroke. Even something as straightforward as beetroot has a vivid citrus zest. Kitch macerates and marinades. His descriptions make salads sound more like stews than raw things piled on stoneware. Is everything equally good? No. How could it be? There is a mess of whole green beans, and another of courgettes with more grain, both of which are a little too rigid to be quite as enjoyable as the others. But it's all relative.

A portion of their breads brings one made with the malt and bitterness of Guinness and the stink of blue cheese. There is another with fennel seeds, lemon and jasmine which tastes promisingly of spring.

And then on to the cakes which pout at you from the butcher's block. For the sake of balance, both an apple cake and a pear cake are a little dry. I have to find something to niggle at. The same cannot be said for coffee and caramel with a little buttercream icing and a dribble of syrup. There is a chocolate gâteau with a ganache worthy of being licked straight off the plate. And then there is a flourless chocolate cake, which is all crisp shell and dark, dark squidge. We have eaten a lot. We find a way to finish it.

Finally, an understated touch of genius: we are brought a glass tumbler of hot water. Alongside is a wooden dish containing sliced oranges and lemons, thick wedges of fresh ginger and crushed stalks of lemongrass. There is a bowl of fennel seeds and a whole star anise and a saucer of honey. Oh, and a tea bag. You can refill the glass as many times as you like, all for £2.50. I pile in ginger and lemon and honey and a few other things and sit feeling warm and cared for.

It would be easy to mistake Chriskitch for a little neighbourhood deli. And, of course, it is that. But there is so much more going on here. Kitch hopes to get a licence and open a few evenings a week. There will be tasting menus. For now, come for the glorious salads. And if you're surprised to see me write that, it's nothing compared to how I'm feeling.

Jay's news bites

■ Over Christmas sales of turkey fell (by 0.2%) as did those of beef (2.1%) and lamb (5.1%). But sales of pork rose by 1.9%. The reason? The price of all meats has been rising, whereas pork prices have been relatively stable and some of them have even dropped. That, and the realisation that pork is simply the finest of meats, of course.

■ Lucky Bath: Michelin-starred chef Martin Blunos is returning with a restaurant at the County Hotel. He's promising a simpler menu of fish and seafood including lobster and chips (thecountyhotelbath.co.uk).

■ Much like Chris Kitch, Bob Parkinson is a top-flight chef – he worked at Terence Conran's gastro palace Bibendum in London's Fulham – with simpler ambitions. The result is Made by Bob, a deli-cum-restaurant in Cirencester with an eclectic menu of pan-Mediterranean comfort food. It's the place for the best Spanish hand-cut hams, a classic fish soup, or the more complex pleasures of smoked haddock brandade with a poached egg and mustard dressing. And killer cakes, too (foodmadebybob.com).

The London restaurant has long been known for its grouchy staff, but I never found it amusing. Rudeness ruins more than just lunch

Wong Kei in Wardour Street, famously the rudest restaurant in London, is being refurbished. It will reopen on 10 March. The menu is unchanged; the main renovation has been one of attitude. They are no longer intending to shout "Sit down with them!" or "Go upstairs!" at you the minute you arrive, as if you're some idiot stranger who has wandered into their bathroom while they're cleaning their teeth.

I never classed myself a "wonkee", and never bought the rudeness as authentic. People enjoyed it too much. It was too vaudeville. I suspected them of having a staff meeting at the start of each shift, to practise their "fuck-off" faces.

By contrast, a real argument with a waiter is a curious thing – the sense of outrage stays with you for ages. It turns the food to ash. It feels as personal as getting dumped. Almost always, the trigger point is money – did you tip enough, are you complaining about something that's actually fine, to scam them, are you pretending to think the wine is corked because all you wanted to do was have a taste that you didn't pay for? I've heard waiters chasing diners out with the money they'd left as a tip, angrily yelling: "You forgot your change!" (Who's in the right? It depends how much you left. 20p on a £60 bill, you deserve to be chased. 12 percent instead of 12.5, your server has an anger issue or too much chasing-energy).

None of that is pleasant – how often in life does someone call you tight, to your face? But it doesn't leave the same sour taste in the mouth as a false accusation. Say you've found something in your food, a spider or a hair or some gravel; rather than take it away, the very rudest waiters will accuse you of planting it. There is really no diplomatic way out of this. They have called you a thief. Plus they have spiders in their food. You have to storm out; if they call the police, so be it.

The rudest thing that ever happened to me was in Canteen, under the Royal Festival Hall. I'd booked a table, they had some electrical fault and had to turn me away; inside the restaurant were loads of other diners, apparently unaffected; I was just the final straw. It was a hot day and I was eight months pregnant. I had to wait because I was meeting someone. Could I have a glass of water? Unfortunately not, no. Maybe a little sit down? Not at this time. I felt like bloody Mary (Of "Mary and Joseph", not "a bloody mary").

I'm still fuming, six years later. That's the thing with authentic restaurant rudeness. It never leaves you, not after all the renovations in the world.

Like Ian Jack (Eating out in Britain..., 22 February) I love eating out but hate having to shout over my food and strain to hear conversation on my own table. How can we possibly solve the world's problems, exchange intimacies or enjoy a good joke or anecdote if we have to compete with constant high-decibel hilarity from other tables? We aren't always in celebration mode when we join friends to eat. Could restaurants that establish quiet areas be awarded Good Mood rosettes? Pressure for smoke-free areas, child-friendly dining, wheelchair access and special dietary requests produced results. What couldn't designers achieve with artfully handled soft furnishings, strategically positioned screens and acoustic panels.
Barbara Crowther
Leamington

• Ian Jack really doesn't need to go as far as Antwerp to experience pleasant, un-shouty restaurants. He simply needs to get out of London. Oh, and to remember not to confuse "London" with "Britain".
Katy Jennison
Witney, Oxfordshire

Tragus reports pre-tax loss of £36m despite small increase in sales as restaurant voucher promotions pulled in customers

The debt-laden owner of the Strada and Café Rouge chains almost doubled its losses last year as a restaurant voucher war took its toll.

Parent company Tragus made a pre-tax loss of £36m in the 53 weeks to 2 June 2013 despite a small increase in sales to £295m as promotions pulled in customers. That compared with the previous year's £18m loss. The restaurant chain, which is backed by private equity giant Blackstone, has a £325m debt pile.

In the wake of the recession, mid-market restaurants and pubs have been sucked in to tit-for-tat promotions to win a share of shrinking disposable incomes. Money-off deals are readily available on the internet with Strada currently offering 30% off food in some restaurants or a second main course for £1.25. Bella Italia, which is also owned by Tragus, is offering a second main course £2.50.

The company, which has 295 restaurants, said it had continued to invest both in new sites and refurbishing existing ones. "As a result of these investments and the group's increased focus on providing value offerings to its customers, group turnover increased by 3%," the company said in the directors' report.

Blackstone bought Tragus for £267m in 2006. The business refinanced in 2012 to avoid a potential breach of its banking covenants and at that time its owner pumped in £15m to reduce the debt burden. Tragus paid £2.2m to secure the new bank deal.

After the refinancing, longstanding chief executive Graham Turner left the business and was replaced with former Costa Coffee boss John Derkach. Despite the big annual loss the company still paid Blackstone a £414,000 fee.

'Spreading pig-fat-spiked butter over more pig is my new jam'

What makes the ideal restaurant? As with the perfect partner, the answer will be very different depending on whom you ask. Some might like to wallow in a series of one-night stands with joints that seduce with head-turning tasting menus, dizzying winelists, obsequious staff and acres of starched linen, the kind of sensual experience you'll hug to yourself over long wintry evenings. But for living happily ever after, give me a place I think I know intimately but that can still surprise me; that I can get tarted up for, but still feel happy slobbing about with in holey joggers; that offers the equivalent of a big bear hug. Now that's the real thing.

The small Salt Yard Group has never created a restaurant I haven't had the immediate hots for. OK, so maybe Dehesa is a bit cramped, but on a summer's day, sitting outside with the parade of Carnaby Street floating by, it turns into a beauty; and I would happily go to Opera Tavern every week of my life if I were allowed to neck at least three of its bijou Ibérico pork burgers (voted the finest in the land by, er, me). But with every new opening, I expect the allure to wear thin. Will the latest, Ember Yard, positioned dangerously near the badlands of Oxford Street, be the one that finally turns me off?

Of course, you'll know the answer from the scores at the top of the page (I will never not hate this bluntest of reviewing instruments). Yep, it's infatuation, bordering on full-blown crush. It looks wonderful, and manages to avoid every Soho boîte cliche, with not a bare brick or filament lightbulb in sight. Instead, they've crafted something I bet will look great in 10 years: dark grey walls with bold, textural oil paintings, hints of warming copper, twinkly antiqued lamps. It's that rarest of joints where the basement bar is almost more buzzy than the windowed ground floor; plus, I have severe pig's leg-shaped beer-tap envy.

The menu is corset-burstingly swoonworthy. It's not just the trademark Iberian tapas with a quick Italian fumble; this time, the smoky thumbrints of the Basque country's asadors are all over it. They've even installed a specially commissioned grill, a nod to legendary Extebarri. And here's the kicker – they list the single-species wood they use for grilling: it might be hazel, or silver birch, or staves from sherry barrels.

Almost every dish trails a wisp of fragrant smoke: fat little anchovies you can eat like lollipops; flatbread oozing smoked butter. The burger is smoked Basque beef, with sticky idiazabal cheese and frilly fried onion rings. There are ribs, falling off the bone, with a sticky quince glaze that makes my pupils dilate. Octopus is a sexy beast indeed, butch but tender, sweetened by a tangle of peperonata. (I'm pausing here for a brief, um, moment at the recollection of chips fried in Ibérico fat, all crisp, floury and dunked in chorizo ketchup.)

And the detail: the chargrilled wedge of orange in a smoked negroni; crisp sage and salty burst of capers with rustling, fried chipirones. Cheese and charcuterie are expertly sourced and kept, and there's a typically sharp winelist. Sure, there are small flaws that stop it just short of perfection: a tendency to flavours so bullish they threaten to floor you (they appear to have sourced a Robocop–Terminator version of thyme); the group's continued devotion to the slate tile. Cocktails are a bit barking, especially one in which Pedro Ximénez, rum and gritty chocolate shavings fight with each other in a smoke-filled glass that looks like it should contain cotton wool balls. And the bill mounts up at speed.

But none of this is enough for me to go off the place. There is one dish – presa (a shoulder cut) of Ibérico pork, served rare but crusted with char, with blobs of butter laced with jamón – that is one of my dishes of this (or any other) year. Spreading pig-fat-spiked butter over more pig is my new jam. I've already been back for more. Ember Yard is smokin' hot – the very definition of a keeper.

• Ember Yard 60 Berwick Street, London W1, 020-7439 8057. Open all week, noon-midnight (10.30pm Sun). About £35-40 a head, including drinks and service.

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

Follow Marina on Twitter.

Among all the top knots and beanie hats, Jay feels out of place at Hoi Polloi. But then the delicious food arrives…

The Sunday evening of London fashion week in the low-lit, new Nordic fantasy that is Hoi Polloi, and the challenge is not to hate the place. Look at these people. The corrugated wood-panelled dining room is beard central. We're in the land of full-on bush. Half this room hasn't seen a razor since 2010. There are top knots, too. And beanie hats, worn inside in a warm centrally heated room. Many of them look like extras from Borgen.

Fashion gals totter about on shoes their feet will soon hate them for, wearing assemblages of flappy material which make me want to shout, "Look! Side boob!" But that would be unsophisticated and I don't want to be that, not here. My noble colleague, Marina O'Loughlin over on the Guardian, not long ago defined a whole category of expensive restaurants in London's West End as Mayfair Wankpits. Welcome then, to their cousin, the Shoreditch Tossfest. Beats thrum and we perch on furniture which in the Ikea catalogue would have names like Sven or Throstrum or Perineum. Except this is the real thing. It costs.

Hoi Polloi, as you are all aware, means "the people" – because you know stuff like that. To be more exact, it means the common people, or maybe even the rabble. Which makes the whole thing even more of a joke. The Ace Hotel group– there are others in New York, Los Angeles and Palm Springs – prides itself on attracting a crowd that is not at all ordinary. In truth they attract people who are very ordinary indeed, but wear a beanie hat or a beard to make them look edgy. Look, it's a business model and everyone needs one of those.

Certainly they know how to charge them for the pleasure. Pretty much every dish on the menu costs a couple of quid more than you think it should.

You walk through a florist's to reach the restaurant, which is irritating enough. When, instead of a menu, they hand me a 12-page newspaper "guest edited" by someone called "Princess Julia", I start patting myself down for a box of matches with which to torch the joint. The smell of burning beard would float over east London for weeks. It's an extraordinarily complicated document of full page menus – breakfast, brunch, daytime, overnight, all day, lunch and dinner – which cross over with each other inexorably.

Hoi Polloi is the kind of place that offers a shake containing "banana, soya beans, almond milk, date, tahini, lucuma, wildflower honey, soya bean flour, pink rock salt" at £5. For the sake of doubt you have to pay them the fiver rather than them paying you to take it off their hands, which would be so much more the thing. The cocktail list includes a "National Handbag" and a "Cod Eek". Nope. No idea. What's wrong with a whisky sour? It's all trying so damn hard.

But sometimes hate cannot spring eternal. Sometimes you get to the essentials, which in the case of a restaurant is the food, and everything changes. It's the Café Football scenario all over again. I can't claim the cooking is good enough to quite wrestle the entire proposition out of the realms of Shoreditch Tossfestery. But you can eat well here, if you manage not to think about the cost. This isn't a huge surprise; the restaurant is a collaboration with the team behind Bistrotheque, which through a series of ventures across hipster east London has built a reputation for robust, grounded cooking.

From the snacks list we choose pickled onion rings and at first the combination of vinegar-drenched onion inside and crisp battered oily shell out is just too rich. I feel my arteries begin to harden in protest. But dredged through its accompanying pot of salt-cod cream it makes sense. There is salt and sour and crunch and soothing dairy. It's a snack invented by someone who knows just how much you can get away with at the start of a meal when your audience is hungry.

From the offerings on toast there is a perfect dish for a Sunday supper: sautéed wild mushrooms on sour dough with, in the middle, a runny duck-egg yolk. What lifts it above the ordinary is an intense mushroom purée spread across the toast before being layered with the mushrooms. (The same trick turns up later in a side of broccoli with anchovy crumb across the top and a broccoli purée across the bottom.) A winter salad of salsify, Jerusalem artichokes and Berkswell cheese is a bunch of well-dressed, earthy things – the Ray Winstone of salads.

My companion, who doubles as my wife, asks to have the roast chicken. I mutter about it being a banal choice, but she pleads, mumbles about it being a Sunday night. I give way. Restaurant kitchens generally aren't good at roasting chickens. It's a domestic dish, better roasted whole and on the bone. But if you can ignore the £18 price tag – I can't, not quite – this is impressive. There's lots of crisp skin, and invigorating greens and whole cloves of garlic roasted unto mush and a deep, sticky chicken gravy.

A brick of lamb breast comes with its own dark crunchy skin. Usually it is served bound and tied. Here it just flops over a pile of lentils lubricated by another sticky jus and lots of mint. There are chips fried in dripping; you can taste the rendered cow in every bite.

We finish with an admirable trifle of pistachio cake, coconut and passion fruit which is a little too much custard and not quite enough fruit, but does the job. A chocolate stout cake has a little too much icing, but is encouraged off the plate by a splodge of foamy salted caramel sauce. Wine pricing is fierce, but this crowd doesn't seem to notice. I moan about them again and my wife says: "Look, I'm in a nicely lit wood-panelled room where they're playing songs from when I was a teenager. I rather like it."

I go to the loo and study myself in the mirror: beard, sideburns, hair like a mulberry bush. Who am I kidding? I'm the epitome of Shoreditch Tossfest. Except, of course, no beanie. Surely, that's my redeeming feature? I am beanie free. In the end, I suppose, it's a tribal thing. I just don't feel part of this restaurant's tribe. You might. Or you might enjoy the people-watching. Either way, only come with deep pockets. Watching these people costs.

Jay's news bites

■ Given the glorious Art Deco sweep of the renovated Midland Hotel in Morecambe, the food doesn't need to try too hard. There's always the view to compensate. In reality you could sit with your back to the window and still feel you'd got a good deal from a menu which bigs up its local joys – nutty brown Morecambe Bay shrimps and Goosnargh duck (englishlakes.co.uk)

■ The Clink, a new restaurant located inside Brixtonprison and offering training to inmates, has opened for business. It follows the successful launch of other restaurants at prisons in Cardiff and High Down, Surrey. The Clink is open for breakfast and lunch. Bookings must be made online at least 48 hours in advance and mobile phones are not allowed in the dining room (theclink restaurant.com)

■ Spare a thought for the residents of Bobtown, Pennsylvania, where a fracking well explosion burned for five days, killing one person. Their compensation from well-owners Chevron? A letter of apology and a voucher for a large pizza. Which is nice.

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

Mr Harry Authentic British Restaurant has proved a huge hit with locals – and with prawn cocktail, bangers and mash, fish and chips, and bread-and-butter pudding on the menu, who can blame them?

The people of China – or at least the 22 million of them who live in Shanghai – finally have a chance to get cultural payback for every time westerners have ordered dizzyingly inappropriate combinations of dishes in Chinese restaurants.

Last December, Londoner Harry Spencer opened what he claims to be China's first authentic English restaurant. It has seen scores of diners ordering dishes that don't strictly go together. "Quite a lot have insisted on combinations like prawn cocktail, bangers and mash, fish and chips and bread-and-butter pudding with custard all at the same time – and then eating it all together," says Spencer, 28.

Mr Harry Authentic British Restaurant, in a mall next to the city's main branch of Marks & Spencer, has been the Shanghai restaurant scene's surprise of the year, with customers – most of whom are Chinese – crowding in to try exotic specialities like full English breakfast, cottage pie, apple and rhubarb crumble, and cream teas.

More than 150 locals booked for Christmas Day, with turkeys almost flying out the kitchen as fast as Aberdonian chef Paul Mair – latterly chef de cuisine at the Duisdale House Hotel on the Isle of Skye – could roast them. And this culinary dark horse is about to start deliveries and takeaways.

"I'm very confident they'll have a significant impact on the business," says Spencer, speaking as he tries to explain mushy peas to a fashionably attired but baffled Shanghai lady who lunches.

"We get a lot of expats and tourists coming by – the DJ Goldie came two days running when he was in Shanghai – but it's the Chinese customers who have asked most about home deliveries. We even had a man proposing over Christmas lunch. He and his girlfriend had studied together in the UK

Part of the challenge for Spencer and Mair has been getting hold of British ingredients in China. They are having to make their own sausages, bacon and black pudding, and spent months tracking down an Icelandic fisherman who would ship cod to China.

Bills are on a par with western restaurants – a full English or fish and chips is £10, steak and chips, £17, a sausage bap, £5, a cream tea, £8. But there are plenty of superb Chinese restaurants in the vicinity where you can eat for £2 or less, so Shanghai diners are clearly voting with their wallets.

Our writer follows a single turbot from the choppy waters off the Sussex coast to the table of a smart Brighton restaurant

• From sea to plate – in pictures

The sky is clear and the sea calm as the Libby Lou sails out of Brighton marina with the sunrise. Skipper Steve Eason steers his 10-metre day boat out to where he laid eight 500-metre-long nets the day before, a mile off the Sussex coast. He is after slip sole, a smaller fish than Dover sole – its size means it is unsuitable for the UK market so it is exported to France and Holland. It has been a big tide and he is not optimistic. I'm just hoping that we catch something that will be of interest to a local restaurant as I try to follow one fish from sea to plate.

The Channel is like a millpond, but once we start pulling in the nets the boat turns into a rodeo ride. Eason suppresses a smile as the photographer and I try to steady ourselves. The 29-year-old has been working as a fisherman since he left school and the Libby Lou is the second boat he has owned, costing him £50,000 secondhand. Going out on his own most days – he only takes another crew member if he goes drifting for bass – it's a tough and potentially dangerous job. But for Eason, along with the pleasure of being out at sea, there is the thrill of the unknown: will he pull up a lucrative catch, or empty nets? Some days he can make as much as £1,000; on others he could find all his nets have been destroyed by a passing trawler, costing him around £4,000.

When we haul up the nets we find the first two holding a mixture of slip sole; undersized plaice and skate that are thrown back alive; a couple of good-sized cod and gurnard; and brown crabs whose claws are removed for market, their bodies discarded. I am tasked with this job and one, as unimpressed with my skills as Eason is with my sea legs, crushes my finger.

What's left in the net is the fisherman's curse: spider crabs and starfish. The starfish attach themselves to the trapped fish and start feeding on them. The crabs foul up the nets and the fast waters of the Channel mean they don't reach a size that makes them viable for market. They are smashed to bits to free them from the nets.

In the third net there is a 2kg turbot, the "king of fish". The flatfish is one of the most valuable fish caught in UK waters, selling at £7-10 a kilo. Turbot flesh bruises easily, however, and to prevent this it needs to be bled straight away. Eason hands me a knife and instructs me to make a small incision on its underbelly near the tail. There is a remarkable gush of blood.

Five hours after setting off, all the nets have been hauled in and cleaned. The smell is potent; the deck is littered with crab and starfish parts, whelks and seaweed, and my waterproofs are smeared in fishy slime. We have drifted east several miles and as we head back towards the marina, Eason lays out the nets again for the next day and guts the catch, including the turbot, a neat three- to four-inch incision behind the head. We tag the turbot with blue tape to identify it.

Back on land, we head in Eason's pick-up to Brighton and Newhaven Fish Sales (BNFS), which markets and distributes all the catch of Brighton's fishing fleet and has a renowned fishmonger's. Eason will get around £7 a kg for the turbot, £14 all told. BNFS emails local restaurants and fishmongers detailing the day's catch. Our turbot sits packed in ice, ready for delivery. Who will bite?

Fishy Fish was co-founded by The X Factor presenter and DJ Dermot O'Leary and is one of Brighton's leading fish restaurants. Apart from Scottish mussels, it only serves fish and shellfish caught in the English Channel. "When the weather is rough and the boats don't go out, we have to scale down the menu," says managing director James Ginzler who, with head chef Lloyd Jeffers, checks BNFS's email every day. Our turbot catches their eye and they pay £16 a kg for it, head and tail included, so its price has risen to £32.

The next day, we chase the turbot in BNFS's delivery van like fish stalkers. It arrives at Fishy Fish's busy kitchen late morning and Jeffers checks it over before trimming, heading and tailing it with a viciously sharp knife and hammer, cutting it up into 10 neat steaks. How will he serve it? "I'm going to pan-fry it and accompany it with an olive oil mash, a roast carrot vinaigrette, steamed Poole Bay clams and a garnish of shaved fennel," he says. Price: £18.50. Bearing in mind there are other ingredients on the plate to pay for, not to mention the high overheads of running a restaurant, the price of this one dish is more than Eason earned for the whole fish.

The restaurant fills up and at 1.30pm an order comes in for the turbot from a customer sat on the sunny terrace, enjoying a boozy lunch with friends. Twenty-eight hours after being caught just a mile away, our turbot's meaty flesh is declared "wonderful". Ginzler invites the photographer and me to try it too. As we sit down and tuck in, my finger still tender from the crab bite, I appreciate the turbot all the more for the surroundings of the restaurant, a world away from the blood and guts on the Libby Lou.

• From sea to plate – in pictures

Catalan chef says his plan to convert the award-winning restaurant into a training and research centre is '95% finished'

Spanish star chef Ferran Adrià unveiled plans on Tuesday for a "cooking laboratory", museum and database of top recipes at his world-beating restaurant, elBulli.

Adrià, whose eatery was crowned best in the world five times by Britain's Restaurant magazine before it closed in 2011, gave a preview of the "elBulli foundation", which he said would open next year.

For over two decades the Catalan chef, now 51, pushed the boundaries of cuisine, using hi-tech methods to take apart and rebuild foods in surprising ways.

He served the last meal there in July 2011 and announced his plan to convert it into a training and research centre, so he could concentrate on culinary innovation instead of running the restaurant.

"This foundation has been three years in preparation and is now 95% finished," he told reporters in Barcelona on Tuesday.

The new entity will consist of three parts, including an exhibition on the history of cooking entitled elBulli 1846 and a cooking research "laboratory" called elBulli DNA.

The laboratory will host "40 people from around the world, from cooks to designers to architects", Adrià said. "We will work on efficiency and innovation and the final result will be about cooking and will be published on the internet."

The third part of the foundation will be the "Bullipedia", a "gastronomic encyclopedia" including a database of recipes and ingredients.

"There will be an exhibition space on the one hand and a creative space on the other," Adrià said.

It will all be housed in the former restaurant's premises, in a nature reserve overlooking the Mediterranean near the resort of Roses, a two-hour drive north of Barcelona.

Adrià said regional authorities were willing to change environmental norms so he could build an extension to house the exhibition space, a prospect that has raised concern among nature groups.

"There will be no environmental impact," Adrià promised. "This is a social project. But we want consensus and good relations."

The $1,000 tip paid by Ellen DeGeneres and others for some pizzas at the Oscars ceremony was extravagant. But it pales besides what Johnny Depp once left a waiter

What should we make of the $1,000 tip that Ellen DeGeneres and various movie stars gave to the man who brought them pizzas at the Oscars? A cynic might say that when a famous person does this, the story is bound to get around – especially if, like DeGeneres, you interview the grateful tippee the next day on your show. Even $100 left on the bar after buying a beer gets you the most cost-effective PR available, and a beer.

But what is a famous person supposed to do? Leave a standard tip and you appear mean, because everybody knows you're very wealthy. Leave a huge one and the cynics will say that you are trying to buy our love. Even being moderately generous puts you at risk of being compared with other famous people who gave more – a dilemma once memorably faced by Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. Of course, different stars approach the problem in different ways:

Drew Barrymore Rather than trying to tip the right amount each time, Barrymore is said to have a clever policy of putting 100% on top of every bill. The source for this is the actor and former bartender Ana Ortiz, who says she received that amount from Barrymore twice. As a result, though at a price, her generosity will never be questioned.

Russell Crowe If you are in the mood, this is how to do it. Don't just eat and sign autographs, but visit the kitchens, play the guitar, sing several classic rock numbers and leave a £600 tip on top of a £240 bill – as Crowe did during a break from filming Robin Hood. As one member of staff put it afterwards: "We were like: 'Did that just happen?'"

David Beckham In percentage terms, the $1,000 that Beckham apparently left at Joxer Daly's bar in California to pay a $100 bill puts him among the best tippers in the business. According to his waitress, Claudia Belden, he drank only mineral water and, despite having just played a football match, "smelled so nice".

Johnny Depp Leaving $4,000 on top of the bill at a steakhouse makes Depp one of the most generous celebrity tippers on record, although he had his reasons. The waiter Mohammed Sekhani at Gibsons in Chicago had served Depp many times before, during the filming of Public Enemies and learned to get the approach just right. "He doesn't like to be too fussed over," for any waiters reading.

Donald Trump PR mastermind that he is, Trump decisively squashed a story that he had left a gigantic $10,000 tip on an $82.27 bill at a restaurant in Santa Monica. As he told the New York Post: "This was done by the stupid restaurant to get publicity. It's not my signature." It is therefore a matter of record, in case it was ever in doubt, that Trump has no sense of humour. His tipping style remains unknown.

Priciest but not the cleanliest: one of New York City’s most expensive restaurants racks up 42 health violation points

Washoku, or Japanese cooking, has been honoured by Unesco and is all the rage with British chefs, who are sourcing authentic ingredients and adopting complex techniques

Few words trip so pleasingly off the tongue as washoku. It translates as "Japanese cuisine", and has recently been included on Unesco's Intangible Cultural Heritage list – a privilege formerly reserved for French cuisine. This should radically open up Japanese cooking and ingredients to food lovers and chefs around the world. "We're still on the first rung of the ladder to understanding it," says Heston Blumenthal, who regularly visits Japan for culinary meetings where the world's top chefs exchange ideas. "Unesco's listing of washoku will increase the pace of our knowledge."

Michelin-starred chef Sat Bains was one of the first British chefs to introduce washoku ideas into the tasting menus at his eponymous restaurant in Nottingham. He was invited to Kyoto in 2008 to learn about kaiseki ryori (Japanese haute cuisine, where food is served in tiny courses). "Kaiseki meals are perfectly balanced, intensely flavoured and very seasonal," he says. He has cut back on salt, fat and heavy protein, instead using dashi (stock made with dried kelp and bonito flakes) and seaweed for depth. Imagine sweet, salt-baked root vegetables, served in a delicate dashi broth with a béarnaise-influenced reduction of tarragon, shallot and white wine vinegar.

Jozef Youssef runs pop up restaurant Kitchen Theory and has just launched a series of experimental kaiseki dinners in London. He spent a month learning about the cuisine while working in Tokyo in 2012. "It was amazing to see Japanese techniques first-hand. They have a completely different approach to food," he says. "They are taught to bring out the essence of an ingredient. It seems very simple, but some of the methods are quite complicated. They use colour, texture, scent and presentation to enhance the diner's sense of seasonality and transience."

Chef and food writer Valentine Warner is another fan: "Everything they do with food is sincere and considered," he says "I think it's going to replace Scandinavian cooking as the next in food."

It often takes years for a Japanese cook to perfect one particular skill, whether it is making the perfect noodle broth or cutting sashimi that melts in the mouth. There is a measured ritual in every movement, and perfection is demanded from ingredients, which means that the quality of produce in the UK has often been a problem. Yoshinori Ishii, executive chef at Michelin-starred Umu in London, explains: "When I first arrived here, the fresh fish tasted pungent to me, and even the vegetables varied enormously in quality."

The answer, for him, lay in treating Britain like a nascent Japan – he transformed his supply chain. He taught Cornish fishermen to catch fish the Japanese way, ikejime– spiking the fish in the brain for instant death and to prevent the release of certain chemicals (this gives the fish a sweeter taste). He found Exmoor caviar and sourced Japanese vegetables grown in Lewes by NamaYasai, which supplies everything from daikon to edamame. Robin Williams, NamaYasai's organic farmer, has seen his business grow steadily since he and his Japanese wife began in 2005.

"You'd be surprised how many top chefs, such as Brett Graham at The Ledbury, use Japanese ingredients," he says. And rightly so: Japanese aubergines have a delicate skin; kabocha pumpkins are exquisite roasted; and kabu, little white turnips, are so sweet you can eat them raw. Another chef Williams supplies, Marc Bolger from Circa Events in Brighton, explains: "NamaYasai follow the Japanese practice of picking things the same day you're going to eat them. It makes them taste amazing."

Once you look, you find the influence of washoku in the most unexpected places. Take the very British-sounding William Curley, a chocolatier. Bite into one of his chocolates and you might find a Japanese black vinegar or cherry blossom ganache. "We've found that the subtlety of Japanese flavourings really enhances the taste of chocolate," says Suzue Curley, his fellow patissier and Japanese partner. They are planning to offer "yuzu gateau, kinako shortbread and matcha Mont Blanc" later this year, with sake pairings.

The drinking of sake is as integral a part of washoku as wine is to French cuisine, and Satomi Dosseur, sake sommelier at Zuma, believes that its reputation in Britain is changing. "Many of our customers used to think sake was something strong that you drank hot in a small cup, but now many love it even more than wine, especially chilled or at body heat," she says.

And as our awareness of this wonderful cuisine grows, so do the opportunities to learn. The recent launch of Sozai, Britain's first Japanese cooking school, and an upcoming series of sake seminars in London and Paris are just the start of what Keiichi Hayashi, the Japanese ambassador to Britain, has declared "the year of washoku". Time, then, to brush up on your skills. If you are a keen cook, the first step is to buy Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art by Shizuo Tsuji– it is on every washuko-loving chef's shelf.

Attempting to announce a new restaurant, Oliver says he will open a 'very slippery' and 'amazing Italian submarine'

Hong Kong fans of British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver fell about laughing on Wednesday after he announced a new Italian restaurant for the city in Cantonese – with a few slip-ups.

Making a stab at the local Chinese dialect in a light-hearted YouTube video, he announces: "I will open an amazing Italian submarine."

Attempting to repeat words read out by a Cantonese-speaker off-screen, he also promises that the restaurant will be "very slippery", before collapsing into giggles.

The video has drawn more than 35,000 hits since it was posted on Tuesday.

Oliver, 38, has a string of restaurants in Britain, Australia, Dubai, Ireland, Russia, Turkey and Singapore.

He is set to open the first Hong Kong branch of his Jamie's Italian chain in the city's Causeway Bay shopping district in the coming months.

His first attempt to say "Causeway Bay" in Cantonese came out as "car crash", while the second sounded like "bronze bed".

The video nonetheless delighted local fans. "Jamie Oliver speaks Cantonese! So funny!" wrote Christy Lui in one comment posted below the video, while others called him "adorable" and welcomed him to the city. "Hong Kong people like your Cantonese! But they like you even better," wrote Cheng Dai Hup.

Oliver's first attempt to open a restaurant in Hong Kong fell through in 2009.

Known for his crusades against unhealthy food, Oliver's restaurants, TV series and cookbooks have made him a multimillionaire.

'My first course is as thuggishly rich as Eric Cowell's dad'

Occasionally I'm moved smugly to suspect that I've seen it all. And then something keels up to remind me that I ain't seen nothing yet. This new arrival, tacked on to Borough Market, appears to offer something genuinely, perhaps barkingly, new. The Hotel Chocolat company tells us that Rabot 1745 is "Britain's first gourmet chocolate restaurant" specialising in "cocoa cuisine". They tell us this in the kind of breathless tone of voice that suggests it's what we've all been waiting for, much in the way we've all been waiting for Britain's first restaurant staffed by chimpanzees.

This is a curious fish altogether. Heavy on the "hurricane-felled ironwood", it's supposed to come across like a Caribbean plantation house. It's more like eating in a Kelly Hoppen-designed sauna. There are winged wooden chairs, polished wooden tables, wood-panelling, walls padded in what looks like chocolate-covered leather, decorative cocoa bean-shaped hangings… It's overwhelmingly brown. We get it, guys. And despite the fact that they roast beans on site from their own St Lucia estate – hence the name – there is none of the seductive fug you'd expect from a joint whose ground floor is an actual chocolate factory.

The outrageously garrulous menu – why use one word when "rare, seared beef fillet infused with Borough-roasted cacao, celeriac, cornichon and juniper condiment, cacao gin jelly, cacao balsamic syrup" will do? – hammers home the message. It's not about sweet chocolate until you get to pudding, but rather cocoa bean, nib, rare white cocoa pulp. There are beans at our place settings: "Ecuadorean, Madam, freshly roasted this morning," beams our affable Scouse server. We rustle off the papery outer cover and bite in: the roasted nibs snap, nutty and buttery, cool then warm. Rich, dark flavour floods the palate. It's a cute touch.

But then we meet cocoa nibs in everything from soft-boiled eggs and salsify to focaccia, and the cuteness starts to get very old. You can have them crusting Scotch eggs (or "nib-crusted quail's egg pearl barley 'scotch egg' with warm salad of roasted vegetables, goats cheese and cacao oil emulsion", as the menu has it). Or with "sea tartare", or on buttered spinach; as curried nib oil or on in crackers with clam chowder. It arrives as a crumble with my blobby, spookily suave butternut dumplings, a messy assembly dotted with almonds and suffocated by creamy butternut puree. Here, too, are wilted, garlicky greens, roast potatoes and eldritch items that look like witchetty grubs: they turn out to be Chinese artichokes, or crosnes, thick with brown butter. It's a starter. The whole thing is as thuggishly rich as Eric Cowell's dad.

Presentation is as overwrought as the concept, a mulitiplicity of swoops and swirls and little jugs. With guinea fowl (overcooked and dry; thank goodness for the "nib-infused organic milk yoghurt") comes a disembodied poultry limb standing to attention like a guardsman. I've ordered slow-roast shoulder of Herdwick lamb, and the meat – already sticky, almost jammy, with a jug of even stickier "cacao balsamic" gravy that congeals as it pools out of its jug – is served with roast garlic mash out of which sprout batons of carrot and parsnip. The effect is as if Desperate Dan has gone modernist and deconstructed his cow pie.

Everyone around us is loving the place, and the pal I go with is happy as a cocoa nib-crusted clam. There's a ludicrous, tiered "chocolate Genesis" dessert – drinks, pralines, sorbets, truffles, what have you – that could keep a theobromine addict buzzing for hours. But despite the quality of the chocolate, the cumulative effect on me is a bilious one: I'm as queasy as if I'd necked a family-sized Galaxy selection box. It's inspired of them to have opened in Borough, not because it reflects their shared principles of seasonality and sustainability and slow foodery, but because it's full of tourists.

• Rabot 1745 2-4 Bedale Street, Borough Market, London SE1, 020-7378 8226. Open all week, lunch noon-2.30pm (11am-3pm Sun); dinner 6-10.30pm (10pm Mon-Wed). Three-course meal, about £35-40 a head, plus drinks and service.

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

Follow Marina on Twitter.

The Glasgwegian fish supper is a timeless classic. And Old Salty's shows why it'll be with us for years to come

1126 Argyle Street, Glasgow (0141 357 5677). Meal for two, including wine and service: £35

Old Salty's in Glasgow, which opened last autumn, is not old. Its heavy-browed, dun-coloured stone building in the Finnieston district is definitely old, but it's amazing what a good scrub and buff will do to brickwork like that. There are old masters on the walls, but they are reproductions, the pasty-faced subjects glowering through digitised gravy-browning varnish; the typography on the window has a cheery retro feel, especially on the word "traditional" before the words "chippy & café", but it has an uncommon gloss to it. Inside, there is a proper chippy's stainless steel holding cabinet and the air hangs heavy with the smell of the kind of boiling fat that makes the brain shout "So wrong!" and "So right!" simultaneously. And yet the menu also offers skewers of grilled tiger prawns with lemon and chilli.

Clearly, Old Salty's is playing a complicated game. Its literature talks about wanting to make the "fish supper special again" and in a city like Glasgow that is not a cultural icon you screw with lightly. This is a city with a tenacious grip on its hard-scrabble working-class heritage. Fish and chips is food for people who do proper work. During the Second World War it was never rationed in Britain, partly because the curiously balanced combination of protein, carbs and fat, from two ingredients we could just about source, was regarded as vital for the population's nutritional health. But it was also because the government feared uproar if they did try to ration it.

Glasgow's Finnieston – not so much up and coming as arisen and gone – may well now be full of bars packing negronis. Lawrence McManus, the restaurateur behind Old Salty's, may well have opened a bunch of other places knocking out on-trend dirty burgers, or faux rustic Italian and French dishes. But with this restaurant he needs to walk a careful line: updated enough to attract the young crowd, committed enough to the eternal verities of fish and chips so he cannot be accused of murdering the dish and then jumping all over its corpse.

In the main, Salty's pulls it off. Classic chip-shop condiments sit comfortably upon handsome, rough-hewn tables beneath industrial ducting. It manages "very now" and "very then" at the same time. And all this despite the fact that there are some truly awful things on the menu. Those skewers of tiger prawns bring flesh as tensed and hard as a Glasgow pub doorman on a Friday night. They ricochet off the teeth. Their breaded calamari rings are just so much golden, crumbed elastic. We are eating as a large group – a bunch of food writers and cooks who have managed to disguise pathological greed with a bit of reading and travel. This is a group for whom the deep-fat fryer can make most things better. Even they won't finish the calamari.

Curiously, while Salty's buggers that up, the big fat Crinan scallops, their flashy roes intact, are perfectly grilled and come dribbled with a pokey curry butter. At £1.75 each they are also more than on nodding terms with good value. As indeed is the whole proposition. The most expensive thing here is the cod and chips at £8.95 (a pound cheaper if you take it away). And what cod and chips! The fish is the size of one of my shoes, and I have very big feet.

Happily it's prettier than one of my shoes. It is a burnished, bronzed, smooth, undulating thing, the golden carapace hiding a pearlescent flesh that has steamed perfectly inside the shell. And yes, I've gone off on one, like a wet-lipped food blogger angling for a job, and all over fried fish. But done right, as it is here, fried fish is a thing of beauty. (For those wishing to get huffy about cod consumption, stocks are in a pretty healthy place right now, and especially in the Barents Sea where much of the cod consumed here originates. As I've reported before, a biomass explosion in the Barents, caused by a small rise in sea temperatures, has resulted in quotas – but only to stop prices collapsing.) Both haddock and hake are equally good. Smaller portions are available.

All other chip-shop favourites are here. The famed Glasgow chicken-curry pie is apparently present and correct. Personally, I think this is one of the most dreadful things I have ever put in my mouth, and I'm pretty indiscriminate. There may be a proper soft-crust pastry shell and the meat is all prime breast, but it's smothered in a sickly, sweet sauce that tastes like a quality control failure in a Pot Noodle factory. I am told by my Scottish friends at the table that this is exactly how it should taste. It's their culture. I can't get involved.

Fat cigars of batter-drenched black pudding and haggis go for a swim in the deep-fat fryer and emerge pretty much themselves. Neither are the greatest example of the craft; then again, at £4.25 for enough to use as a draft excluder on a windy Clydebank night, it's hard to complain. The haggis, while a little smooth, has a proper peppery end. Smoked sausage has your authentic Mattessons twang and squeak; unless your teeth have skidded over the oil-slicked casing it's not the real thing. There are mushy peas which meet with approving nods, and of course chips: lots of chips cooked in vegetable oil, which taste exactly right, which is to say, of a stumbling end to a drunken Friday night and a bunk-up behind the bus shelter. Yes, they do curry sauce.

As to dessert, no chocolate-covered confectionery was harmed in the making of this meal. And good luck to them for holding out against that. Deep frying Mars Bars is not funny or clever, and never has been. (Though a battered Snickers is another matter entirely). Instead, there is raspberry jelly which is more like an under-set jam, but is light and fresh and cuts through the grease.

The wine list is perfect. You can have anything you like as long as it's red or white. Look, it's £13.95 a bottle and has 13% alcohol in it. What more do you want? Oh, just have a beer instead, and shush. Service is sweet and engaged and the bill small. I emerged replete in all ways, like I'd been fed against a Russian winter. I'd like to claim I didn't eat for the next 24 hours but we all know that's not true. Still, dinner at Old Salty's, where the past is carefully re-imagined, does set you up for the possibility.

Jay's news bites

■ For another top fish supper, Olley's in south London has much to recommend it, including numerous awards – and its location near my house. Fish can be ordered fried, grilled and steamed and as themed offerings including the "Cilla Black Experience" – haddock, three king prawns, three scallops (olleys.info). Alternatively, 200 miles from me, there's the brilliant and also multi-award-winning Fish & Chips 149 in Bridlington, East Yorkshire (149fishandchips.co.uk).

■ Intriguing what you can get from a modern Chinese takeaway. Police near the Water Margin in Ballymena swore they could smell something, and it wasn't crispy duck. They found a cannabis farm inside, seized plants worth £150,000 and arrested three. "They just followed their nose," said the commanding officer.

■ The Keeper's House at the Royal Academy, reviewed here on 22 December, has changed chef. Ivan Simeoli has been replaced by Ollie Couillaud. According to restaurateur Oliver Peyton, Simeoli "was always keen to be testing the boundaries, which is great, but that can be a bit challenging for customers in the Royal Academy".

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

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