Study finds people most exposed to takeaways eat more fast food and are likely to have higher BMI

People who live or work near takeaways eat more junk food and are almost twice as likely to be obese as those who have none on their doorstep, a study has found.

Consumers who are the most tempted by takeaways and fast food eat an extra 40g of high-calorie food – the same as half a small serving of McDonald's fries – every week compared with those who stay away.

Working near a fast food place or takeaway caused the biggest problems, closely followed by having them near home.

The research, published online in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), is the first UK study to combine data from home, work and commuting and involved 5,442 adults from Cambridgeshire aged 29 to 62.

On average, people were exposed to 32 takeaway outlets – nine each in their local neighbourhood and on their commute, and 14 within a mile of work. There were around 48% more takeaway outlets and fast food joints near work compared with home, the study found.

Researchers examined how much takeaway food people ate using questionnaires for foods such as pizza, burgers, fried food (such as fried chicken) and chips. They also measured people's body mass index (BMI) as a measure of their weight.

The results showed that people exposed to the highest number of takeaways were 80% more likely to be obese and 20% more likely to have a higher BMI than those with the lowest number of encounters. They also ate more of these types of foods.

The researchers said: "Compared with people least exposed to takeaway food outlets, we estimate those most exposed consumed an additional 5.7g per day of takeaway food, which would constitute a 15% higher consumption than those least exposed.

"In a week, this translates into an additional 39.9g of takeaway food. This weekly amount constitutes more than half a small serving of McDonald's french fries (typically 71g per serving)."

Dr Thomas Burgoine, lead author of the study from the UK's centre for diet and activity research, based in the Medical Research Council's epidemiology unit at the University of Cambridge, said: "The foods we eat away from home tend to be less healthy than the meals we prepare ourselves, so it is important to consider how exposure to food outlets selling these high-calorie foods in our day-to-day environments might be influencing consumption.

"Our study provides new evidence that there is some kind of relationship between the number of takeaway food outlets we encounter, our consumption of these foods, and how much we weigh.

"Of course, this is likely to be just one of a number of factors that contribute to a person's risk of developing obesity. However, our findings do suggest that taking steps to restrict takeaway outlets in our towns and cities, particularly around workplaces, may be one way of positively influencing our diet and health."

Prof Jill Pell, chairwoman of the Medical Research Council's population health sciences group, said: "To date, studies examining the link between the neighbourhood food environment and diet and body weight have provided mixed results, which is why it is important that we continue to study these relationships.

"In future this type of research will provide the robust evidence needed to develop effective strategies to tackle obesity and promote a healthier lifestyle."

Over the past decade, consumption of food outside the home has increased by 29%, while at the same time, the number of takeaway food outlets has increased dramatically, the researchers said. This, they argued, could be contributing to rising levels of overweight and obesity.

'The clue's in the name – there's a lot of meat on offer here, specifically steak – but it turns out that it's also rather special'

Bristol's Corn Street, in what remains of the old walled city, is a neat encapsulation of all that's wrong with our city centres. The handsome thoroughfare oozes history and it's beautiful, a chunk of heritage that would be venerated elsewhere in the world. Here, what do we do with it? Plaster it with Pizza Expresses, Caffè Neros and All Bar Ones, and fill the gorgeous Commercial Rooms (dated 1810) with a Wetherspoon's, its classical columns dandruffed with fag butts.

Thank goodness St Nicholas Market survives almost intact. And thank goodness, too, for the team of Bristolians already responsible for two of the city's more interesting drinking dens (Hyde & Co and the Milk Thistle, where we later neck fine martinis under the baleful gaze of a stuffed moose), because they've colonised the basement of that Wetherspoon's and turned it into something rather special.

This is what our US chums would call a "storied" building: formerly a bank vault, rumoured to be some kind of secret wartime bunker and, of most importance to the likes of me, erstwhile location of Stephen Markwick's lauded bistro, pioneer of a then unusual seasonal/local/foraged mantra. The wonderful mahogany bar and chandeliers of frosted Murano glass grapes have remained throughout several incarnations, and are the luckiest of inheritances. With its low, curved ceiling, wood panelling and pre-Raphaelite murals, it's like eating in a particularly louche Pullman car.

The clue's in the name – there's a lot of meat on offer at the Ox, specifically steak. It comes mostly from local butcher's Buxton of Winterbourne. But there are starring roles for the odd non-local visitor: we have a loose-grained, burgundy-fleshed bavette d'aloyau (skirt steak) that pairs the butteriness of grain-fed USDA prime with the minerality of that uncompromising cut. All steaks are stamped with the smoky footprint of the Josper grill: from girly little fillet to fine sirloin served with magnificently old-fashioned (in a good way) green peppercorn sauce.

Supporting players are lavished with every bit as much care: a starter of deep-fried egg, crisp outside, its yolk a runny golden lava, comes with a little bouquet of aniseedy chervil, charred long-stem broccoli and creamy caesar dressing. What they've done with brussels sprouts is little short of voodoo: deep-fried until the leaves are crackly and smoky, then bathed in vinaigrette, they've made them as evilly moreish as Pringles. From a section headed "Toast", I love the thick sourdough so much – topped with meaty mushrooms char-grilled into sooty blackness and enriched with dripping and the zip of persillade – that next day I make a pilgrimage to its baker, Hart's, and come out laden with the stuff.

I don't like the chips, though. The obligatory triple-fried jobs, they're square and unyielding, like Lego. Put chips on your menu and you must get them right: slim enough to be crisp as frites, substantial enough to be fluffy as home fries. It's weird that so many restaurants get them wrong. At least these, unlike those at a number of supposedly upmarket establishments, are homemade and not McCain.

I've got this far without saying "Hawksmoor". It has been a struggle. I've no doubt copious notes have been made by the Ox's owners in those particular Brit-accented steak palaces. But in the words of the X Factor's gurning leprechaun, the Bristol bunch have made it their own. They've done some sensible marketing initiatives – an early-bird special that means the place is packed at 7pm, and evenings with no-corkage BYO putting bums on seats during weekday lulls. Cocktails are pretty impressive, and staff – especially the dark-haired gal in her cowboyish duds who pats us as though we were ancient relatives – are lovely. With its butch name – I've met Oxes from Belfast to Portland, Oregon, and it's always a statement of intent – it might come across like a proper toughie. But in fact it's warm, friendly and embracing: this Ox is a big ol' teddy bear.

• The Ox The Basement, 43 Corn Street, Bristol, 0117 922 1001. Open lunch, Thurs-Fri, 12.30-2.30pm; dinner, Tues-Sat, 5-10.30pm. About £35 a head, plus drinks and service.

Food 7/10
Atmosphere 8/10
Value for money 7/10

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The chef at Cumbria's award-winning L'Enclume reveals how his food philosophy will pay off at his high-profile opening in London

At 7.30pm on the night of the greatest storm of the winter, I sit down to dinner at L'Enclume, in Cartmel. Outside, it's mayhem: the trees are jerking wildly from side to side, like girls trying to squeeze into too-tight jeans; the beck has developed waves; the scaffolding on the medieval priory lists and creaks alarmingly. But inside, all is calm. The ebb and flow of service is as soothing as a cashmere blanket. In quick succession, I'm presented with the first of 21 courses: an oyster "pebble" hidden like treasure in a wooden box; a cow's heel, dehydrated to resemble a prawn cracker and served with curds and onion "ashes"; a "hot pot" that is really a beef consommé with three perfect meat and potato pearls floating inside it. There is a version of a prawn cocktail served in a pottery "sack" with mace powder and a massive dose of chutzpah; a cod and saffron "yolk" that comes with puffed rice and a miserable sense, once you've had the first mouthful, that it will be gone far too soon; and then, like a clean page, a plate of good, sweet bread made with local Cumbrian ale.

It's at this point, just as I'm spreading rendered pork fat thickly on to a warm roll, that it happens: the lights go out. In the pitch dark, the rattle of the windows seems louder than ever; when the rain hits the glass, the sound is of marbles falling on a tin tea tray. But the room itself is oddly quiet. No one cries out in disappointment, perhaps because their anxiety at such a prospect is so great. L'Enclume, which has two Michelin stars and the kind of reputation that turns even Porsche-driving plutocrats into reverent pilgrims, is booked up months ahead; it's also quite a journey, unless you happen to live in Grange-over-Sands. Those who have saved up for a visit, who have braved the West Coast Main Line or the M6, are hardly going to indulge in amateur dramatics now. They're going to cross their fingers and pray the kitchen has a generator out back.

A waiter appears, bearing venison with charcoal oil, mustard and fennel. "This is a tartare," he says. "And I promise that's not just because the electricity is off." At the other side of the room, another waiter is reassuring people that all is not lost. "We'll do our best," he says. "There may be some dishes we can't make if the electricity doesn't come back on, but we'll deal with that when it happens." Later, I will find out that one member of staff has already driven to Grange-over-Sands to pick up his mother's flambé kit, a relic from the 70s, and his Primus stove, just in case. "The show will go on," says the waiter.

The pace slows a little. It's a while before the arrival of the native lobster with black pudding, parsnip, and sour cream with roe and chives, and there follows quite a gap before the salt-baked beetroot, glazed ox tongue, yoghurt and apple marigold appears. Then, at 8.50pm, the lights come back on. No one cheers because no one wants to tempt fate. They want what's still to come – the monkfish with bread beer and triangular garlic, the suckling lop with pennywort, and the celeriac with sweet cheese and malt, a refreshing fizz of apple and Douglas fir served in a little stoneware bottle on the side – and I don't blame them. This is once-in-a-lifetime food: beautiful, unusual, singularly delicious. When the lights, after another brief blip, do stay on right until the moment a tiny Kendal mint cake ice-cream is delivered to me on a slab of Lakeland slate, the sense of relief is palpable. None of us will ever forget our dinner on this wild and windy night. But this would be the case even without the storms and the power cuts. It's the food we'll remember, not the darkness; the Yorkshire rhubarb with sorrel and brown butter, not the flickering candles and the howling gale.

Simon Rogan is chef-proprietor of L'Enclume, and his apparently preternatural calm in the face of the worst the weather can do bodes well for the coming months. In May, Rogan will take over from Gordon Ramsay at Claridge's, one of the great dining rooms of the world. The pressure will be intense. For one thing, Rogan, though acclaimed in the UK, is not yet an international name; Claridge's has taken a calculated risk by signing him, and he will need to repay its faith and investment quickly, and in spades. For another, he will run this new kitchen alongside his ventures at the Midland Hotel in Manchester, where he has two restaurants (The French and Mr Cooper's) and his empire in Cartmel (as well as L'Enclume, Rogan owns a more casual restaurant, Rogan & Co, and a pub, the Pig and Whistle). How is he going to keep his eye on everything? "Well, they're not in different countries," he says. "So that's the first thing. The Pig, Rogan & Co and Mr Cooper's will have to get by without me; it's about trusting my lieutenants there. That leaves me with L'Enclume, The French and Claridge's. I'll spend half the week in London. But when service finishes at about 10.30pm your adrenaline is still going. Chefs can't sleep until two in the morning, so when I'm finished in London, I might as well jump in the car and drive home." Claridge's will be his focus, but he is not about to start neglecting L'Enclume. "We've still to achieve a third Michelin star, which we want very much," he says.

Is he serious about driving to Cumbria at 2am? I believe he is. Of all the chefs I have interviewed – quite a number by now – Rogan is one of the more driven. Stubborn, restless and fiercely competitive, he dislikes criticism, and has in the past been prepared to fail rather than to take advice (this is his judgment, not mine). Though the call from Thomas Kochs, the general manager of Claridge's, came just hours before he was about to sign with another major hotel group for a London dining room, he found himself unable to say no.

"I'd heard bits and pieces through the grapevine," he says. "They were talking to René [Redzepi, of Noma in Copenhagen], and they were talking to Thomas Keller [of the French Laundry, in California]… I felt at the time that it should really go to a British chef, and I would still feel that now, even if it wasn't going to be me. But of course, it should be me!" He arrived at Claridge's to meet Kochs in full disguise – or at least, in a baseball cap and sunglasses – and they hit it off straight away. Soon after this, Kochs made a return visit to Cartmel. "Beautiful, artistic, unexpected, no repeats, no silliness," Kochs says, when I call him later for his side of the story. Kochs is – how to put this? – quite an effervescent man. But even by his standards, he sounds ecstatic. He decided to bet on Rogan, because he is the future. "We thought: how will people want to dine in the next 10 years? His philosophy connected to that. And Simon is right. It would have been just a little bit wrong if we had chosen a German or a French chef."

Where does Rogan's drive come from? "I'm 44," he says, as though this were part of it. "I've always wanted to achieve." But is there anything in his background that might have contributed towards it? Not really, though he began cooking early; his parents both worked, his father as fruit and vegetable wholesaler on Southampton market, his mother as a clerical assistant, and it was left to him to produce the family meal. "I loved it. I taught myself: roast dinners, spag bol, curries, cottage pie. At 13, I got a weekend job at a Greek restaurant. I earned £24 a week, and that was like being a millionaire at school. They took me on full-time at 16, when my dreams of being a footballer were beginning to fade." He was promoted to grill duties and sent on day release to catering college. "I turned up thinking I was the bee's knees, but all the others were working in good hotels in the New Forest, and I was actually absolutely rubbish and didn't know anything." This focused his mind. "I quit the job in the Greek restaurant, and went to a posh hotel myself. The chef had been at the Savoy, and he gave me a great classical grounding. Now I was earning no money at all, but that no longer mattered: I was head over heels in love with it. I wanted to get to the top, and that was 10 years of getting punched and battered and things thrown at me."

He worked in a variety of places; he spent eight years, for instance, with Jean-Christophe Novelli. But all the time, the feeling was growing: he wanted to work for himself, and to do something different. "I had a chef de partie who had worked for Marc Veyrat in the Alps, who was God to me [in his heyday, Veyrat, a practitioner of molecular gastronomy, had six Michelin stars and was considered by many to be the best chef in the world]. His use of Alpine wild herbs and flowers; that was what I wanted to do. I used to think so every time he talked about him."

In late 2002, he took a call from a recruitment consultant friend. Catering and Hotelkeeper had been in touch about some premises, an old forge, in Cumbria; the freeholders were having trouble renting it out. "I was looking for a restaurant, but not here. I was living in Littlehampton. It took me five weeks to come up. I had a look round, and the owners sold me their vision of how we would survive. I didn't believe them, of course. I didn't know where my customers were going to come from. All I knew was that it was a beautiful building, and that they would give me the tables and chairs of my choice." He hadn't been to Cartmel before; he'd barely been to Cumbria, so far as I can tell. But in the car on the way home, he put in his offer. How did this go down with his partner, Penny? "Badly. She was very much against. Our son was only a month old. It was a huge gamble. We had to sell our house, car, hi-fi, all our prize possessions. And for what? A restaurant in the middle of nowhere that was going to serve this avant-garde food."

For the next eight months, he experimented. "It was a fluke that I ended up here, but I soon realised I couldn't have landed anywhere better, given what I wanted to do: the pure air, the amazing ingredients." These days, L'Enclume is supplied almost entirely by a farm Rogan owns farther down the valley (it has expanded recently, the better to be able to supply Claridge's, too). But some crucial ingredients continue to be foraged, just as they were when he first arrived. "The first thing was the wild herbs and flowers," he says. "We started using lovage, calamint and elderflower – all quite unusual then – and our tasting menus grew from there." His vision was incredibly clear, right down to the way the room would look. L'Enclume has a kind of purity that makes you think of Scandinavia: whitewashed stone walls; handsome oak tables made by local craftsmen that are ever-so-slightly irregular in shape, like pebbles; stoneware plates from a local pottery; glasses made from recycled bottles by young offenders. It is as if Cranks had collided with Le Gavroche (I mean this as a compliment).

At first, it was tough. The restaurant was open for only half the week, and even then he struggled to fill it. "A busy night was 20 people, if we were lucky." Slowly, though, the word started to spread. In 2005, having banished foreign ingredients from his menu, Rogan picked up its first Michelin star (he was bleaching the grout in the shower of one of the restaurant's bedrooms when he heard the news). Ever since, its march has been relentless. In the 2014 Good Food Guide, it replaced Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck as the best restaurant in Britain. The effect, both for Cartmel and for Cumbria, has been dramatic. Rogan's village empire has since attracted other businesses: a cheese shop, a microbrewery, a bakery. Meanwhile, L'Enclume is seen as a blueprint for just what a hyper-local restaurant can be. "People said we'd never be able to limit ourselves to cooking with only Cumbrian produce, or not in the winter. But we've done it, and now others are copying us, which is flattering when they're sincere. When they're just trying to rip us off, though, it's annoying."

At L'Enclume, his cooking is growing ever more simple. "It's a case of growing the perfect carrot rather than cooking it perfectly. My dream menu would serve 20 raw courses, but I know [he laughs] I'd never get away with that." He won't single out a favourite dish. "It's about the whole menu: the way it flows, the rhythm, the balance." Nor will he tell me much about the menu he is planning for Claridge's, save to admit that while most of his ingredients will continue to be British, he will permit the odd white truffle. "I won't be reinventing myself," he says. "They wanted me, not some new version of me." Is he nervous? "Not really. The eyes of the world will be watching, but that's why I'm there." He tells me that it irritates him greatly that L'Enclume still isn't spoken of in the same tones as, say, El Bulli used to be – a fact he attributes to its distance from London. "People still feel it's a ball ache to get here, and tourists who come to London are just too bloody lazy." But at Claridge's, they will have no excuse: the restaurant will be a taxi journey at most.

I'm sure he's right; doubtless some people do look at the map and think: no thanks. But more fool them. There's something magical about the journey to Cartmel: the proximity of mountains and sea; the silvery peninsula light; the sense, as you dip down into the valley, that your quest is at an end. After we finish speaking, I leave the restaurant, and head back to my room to change for dinner. It's a short walk, but the wind is building; I must push against it, right shoulder first, as if it were a barn door. As I do, I think of Rogan's forager (he employs one full-time). Was he on the fells today? Crikey, I hope not. Michelin stars apart, it's this, of course, that is Rogan's greatest achievement – the way his food connects you in some quite primal way to its source. Will he be able to pull off the same trick in the muffled, art deco splendour of Claridge's? His new masters must be praying that he will. For there's something wonderfully honest about this way of cooking, and salutary, too. The trick of it is that you simply cannot take it for granted. Gratitude is part of the deal.

Simon Rogan's new restaurant at Claridge's, London W1 opens in early May

With its flavour-packed cooking and erotica in the basement, there's nothing shy about Bristol's Wallfish Bistro

112 Princess Victoria Street, Bristol (01179 735 435). Open Wednesday-Sunday. Meal for two, including wine and service: £80

You wish Wallfish Bistro was a short stroll from your house. You don't right at this moment. Right now your eyes keep flicking to the photos to work out whether that's something you'd like to eat. But 1,100 words from now – possibly half that, if I do my job properly – you will. It's the sort of quietly overachieving, understated neighbourhood bistro that anybody with a grown-up's appetite, good taste and the cash to fund an occasional restaurant habit would want a stagger away from their front door.

For me it took one look at the menu. I immediately knew everything was going to be OK. Generally menus are where the English language goes to be hog-tied and tortured by people desperately overcompensating, be it for the quality of the food or of their written English. If the food is good the latter doesn't matter. Mostly it should be about nouns: big, fat promising ones, with the occasional preposition. The Wallfish menu is full of terrific nouns.

Quite right. The restaurant, a simple space of caramel-leather banquettes, bare-wood tables and the flash of eggshell blue, has much to live up to. It occupies a site in the knowingly boho Clifton district of Bristol, all whitewash and candy pastel stucco like a seaside town's backstreet, that was once home to Keith Floyd's first business. There is a plaque on the outside wall attesting to his presence here between 1969 and 1972, before he necked all his profits and went bust. There's an awful lot of churn in the restaurant business, but sometimes the buildings they once occupied feel like they have long memories.

The inheritors of this site are chef Seldon Curry and restaurant manager Liberty Wenham who, between them, have worked for the River Cottage operation, Ducksoup, in London's Soho and with Rowley Leigh at Le Café Anglais. It is the latter that the opening of the menu recalls with its list of aperitifs – the white-peach Bellini for £5 fizzes with the whisper of spring – and various nibbles. From that list, deep-fried squid comes with a crust of fennel seeds and cumin, and a dusting of chilli. I am stealing this idea.

Wallfish, as per the restaurant's logo, is another word for snails – a West Country tradition which has been forgotten and rediscovered numerous times over the years. The word is obscure enough not to warrant an entry in Alan Davidson's Oxford Companion to Food (and that even includes an entry for giraffe). During one bout of rediscovery in the 1960s it was decided that serving wallfish with garlic was fancy and foreign and just wrong, so they turned up in Somerset pubs with only herbed butter.

The Wallfish Bistro is not in thrall to such petty nationalism; its snails come with garlic butter. It is a menu some might call restless and others at ease with itself. There is the muscular English certainty of a mixed-beet salad with Devon blue cheese and pickled walnuts or Portland crab on toast. That sits comfortably next to the enlightened internationalism of queen scallops with a chorizo crumb or grilled quail with lemon, yogurt and harissa.

Fried cod cheeks – what happened to these glossy pebbles of flesh before we noticed that cod actually have cheeks? – come crisp and hot alongside a bowl of mayonnaise flavoured with wild garlic. It has a pleasingly bitter kick, as if determined to make sure you'll recall having eaten it. A chicken broth with more wild garlic has a hedgerow's worth of sautéed wild mushrooms and, in the middle, a perfectly poached egg that leaks its yolk into the soup with one incision.

This is food that makes its mark through assertive flavours rather than tedious good looks. Witness two chops of salt marsh lamb from an animal that has lived, the bronzed ribbon of fat so crisp and hot and running, the meat pink, laid across a big toddler's mess of puréed roasted onions, caramelised sweetbreads, a few greens and the whack of anchovy. Nobody will hang that on their wall, which is quite right. It demands to be eaten.

A lump of gurnard, seared the right shade of golden, comes with clams and samphire and a light beurre blanc. It's seafood cookery for people who genuinely like fish rather than those who merely pretend to. There are many things here I regret not trying: the goat and pork ragu, the steak with bone marrow and chips, the sea bream with charred lemon and rosemary. Oh, you know: just all of it. Starters are around £6.50, and mains mostly in the low teens, with a one-course express lunch (with a glass of wine) on offer for a tenner.

This is a small operation, at least during the day. Liberty is out front recommending wines from a short offering which starts at £15 (on Wednesday nights they currently do bring-your-own with no corkage). Sheldon is out back doing most of the honours, which explains a list of desserts built on expediency. There's a panna cotta with the knicker-pink flash of rhubarb, and a chocolate mousse on top of salt caramel with a dollop of crème fraîche to calm everything down. No, not especially ambitious, but each is deftly executed and has us scraping at the glaze.

Down in the basement dining room I stumble across a copy of Rude Food, a book I very much enjoyed as an 80s adolescent. It's full of glossy Athena-esque photos of women with bananas nestled betwixt perky boobs, though my favourite was always the middle digit inserted into the lemon sole mousseline. And in the loo is a volume of Victorian food smut called Saucy ladies: 150 delicate sauces accompanied by 60 indelicate ladies. This is a recipe book I really should own.

I did not know Keith Floyd well, though his TV persona was so obvious and unforced that I believe it's fair to make assertions: I think he would have approved very much of Wallfish Bistro; of its lack of pretension, its commitment to appetite and, most of all, of a kitchen skilled in all the right departments. All that and a little erotica in the basement. I think Floyd would have wanted to eat here often, and I can say no better. And now you want to eat here, too. You wish it was just around the corner from your house. I knew you would.

Jay's news bites

■ For more local old-school joys try the mildly eccentric Brasserie Toulouse Lautrec near London's Elephant and Castle. It serves snails by the dozen, a cassoulet that will take two days to digest and a fully accessorised côte de boeuf. Afterwards take your drinks upstairs to the small jazz venue, a labour of love by owner Hervé Regent, whose gifted sons run the kitchen and front of house. A true gem (brasserietoulouselautrec.co.uk)

■ Life just got easier for Mexican food fans craving the genuine article, with the launch of Mexgrocer.co.uk, which imports products direct to Britain on Amazon. It does a strong line in corn tortillas, chillies in forms many and various and achiote, the Yucatan-style, tomato-based sauce made with annatto seeds.

■ The award for a book title that doth protest too much goes to Kristy Turner for But I Could Never Go Vegan! 125 Recipes That Prove you Can Live Without Cheese. It's Not All Rabbit Food And Your Friends Will Still Come Over For Dinner, set to be published in January 2015. Get your orders in now.

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

Banquets inspired by the photographer's grim images of British cuisine are being served up at a London eatery. I'd rather drink a cup of tea in a greasy caff

This week a pop-up restaurant in London is serving up cuisine inspired by the photography of Martin Parr.

That's right, Martin Parr – the terrifyingly honest photographer of Britain shorn of all pretensions of 21st-century cool. His 1995 book British Food might offer a glimpse of the kind of food that awaits diners at Say Cheese – and over five courses too.

Seaside donuts, strings of sausages, fish fingers, baked beans and mini sugar packets are all shown in lurid bright colours in Parr's food photographs of unreconstructed British grub.

I can't face a five-course banquet like that – and anyway, I come from seaside Wales. If I want a Martin Parr meal I don't need a postmodern metro version, I can just go to Rhyl and get the original for a lot less money. I have never forgotten a cup of tea in a Rhyl caff that arrived before me with a solid layer of grey, greasy scum floating on top. How Martin Parr is that?

So what other artists might inspire unlikely cultural cuisine? A pop-up beer hall inspired by the Weimar artist George Grosz might be fun, with German beer and sausages straight out of his grotesque images of Berlin in the 1920s. Or what about a chance to enjoy the drunken feast in William Hogarth's 18th-century painting An Election Entertainment? Diners to this pop-up could booze and scoff oysters until they pass out.

Another idea is an Edward Hopper diner. It would be just like a real New York diner, except that everyone would sit in existential solitude like the people in Hopper's painting Nighthawks.

All this reminds me of Andy Warhol's vision for a chain of restaurants called Andymats. He saw the Andymat as a place where you could dine alone and get served from a machine. In fact, it seems he was prophesying Yo! Sushi.

Yet none of these alternatives is quite as disgusting as the food photography of Martin Parr. Today it's fashionable to defend British food but the truth is that because we had the industrial revolution before anyone else, we lost touch with fresh natural ingredients some time in the 19th century and a lot of British food is as grim as Parr pictures it. I like fish and chips but I recently went to Bilbao and tasted cod cooked the Basque way – what a massive indictment of British "cuisine", based as it is on the same Atlantic fish we have access to. So why don't we have inky squid and cod in pepper sauce?

Martin Parr's vision of British food is a real challenge to national pride and the Parr pop-up restaurant should be quite an experience, if you can stomach it.

Elizabeth Gunnison Dunn: When are more restaurants going to realize that the numbers and the customs don’t add up?

Three days, 16 courses, 20 wines, five cocktails and three bottles of gin ... can one woman last the distance? Nikki Marshall joins the World’s Longest Lunch

'You'd need a grown-up wine buff to do justice to the list, especially the scary main one, which is the size of a paving stone'

Up a steep staircase behind a hidden doorway in London's Chinatown, past a bouncer who's likely to turn you away if you're not young, cute or hip (ideally all three), and does so in a manner that makes Putin look like Nicholas Parsons, lies Experimental Cocktail Club. I think it's purpose-designed to make anyone vaguely normal feel a bit stabby, the sort of place that confirms all the prejudices about the capital from the inhabitants of every Great Chipping On The Shoulder in the entire land.

I went once. They let me in (must have been my trusty 12-quid frock). I disliked it intensely. So when news arrives of their new baby, a place called with either immodesty or eccentricity Compagnie des Vins Surnaturels, I can't say I'm that bothered. But then items start trickling through that pique my interest: a review from the doyenne of restaurant critics; a sussed foodie pal saying they offer the best jamón she's had on these shores; an Instagram snap of a toastie, made with St John sourdough, sandwiching fine cheese and Italian prosciutto cotto fragranced with truffle, the oozy bechamel top crowned with two perfectly fried quail's eggs. Admittedly that last one was from me.

That croque madame might be my new favourite thing. I'm planning a towering hangover just so I can go back and scarf it for breakfast. It's not clever or different, a simple thing, but it's made from the most glorious constituents, evidence of clued-up buying – a theme that becomes familiar throughout my meals there.

So, yes, the jamón is beautifully nutty ibérico (I'm a bit worried it's cut by machine, though: slapped wrist for that one) or pata negra with the melting richness of pig-flavoured toffee. The hot dishes veer between earthy – small green lentils in a pungent stock for a warming soup – to frou frou – foie gras seared "à la plancha" with pink lady apples and mustard. (No point in getting bent out of shape about the liver: the place is very, very French. They even do buttermilk-fried frogs' legs.) Occasionally, it's a little mad: what's billed as "Pâté Lou Safran" is – it has to be said – somewhat dog-meaty, despite being laced with saffron from Quercy and more foie gras. Amusingly, it's served in a jar that comes, I'd guess, straight from the company's new deli next door.

You'd need a grown-up wine buff to do justice to the list, especially the scary main one, which is the size of a paving stone, but fresh-faced sommelier Julia Oudill is happy to talk us through. The "Surnaturels" led me to suppose it would focus on raw or natural wines, but that doesn't seem to be the case; still, the labels are très recherchés, from the slopes of Etna or the vineyards of Greece and Hungary, in addition to France's less-travelled roads. They could have called it The Experimental Wine Club. Super-wines – in the sense of big, rare, important – are available by the glass: a Margaux or an opulent, spice-and-leather Roccheviberti barolo from Piedmont. With this kind of number costing up to £21 a glass, you can give yourself quite the sore head.

There's a Japanese word, kawaii, that basically means cuuuuuuute, in a breathless, schoolgirly voice. CdVS, petite soeur of the original in Paris, is ultra-kawaii: it perches in one of London's most bijou squares, its outdoor tables furnished with woolly blankets for the chill. Weeny tables make it impossible to order anything more than the most Vogue-staffer of repasts (we had to commandeer two); the house look is mini boutique hotel, complete with enchanting-accented, good-looking staff. They almost stumble under the weight of the counterintuitively vast puddings: Bunterish slabs of bergamot-scented poundcake drenched in salted caramel with wodges of apple and crème fraîche. Altogether, it's as cute as a kittens' teaparty served by Amélie. Of course, you can just go and buy many of the components of the menu from the equally kawaii deli, but really, where's the fun in that?

• Compagnie des Vins Surnaturels 8-10 Neal's Yard, London WC2, 020-734 7737. Open all week, 9am-midnight (10am-11pm Sun). About £50 a head including drinks and service.

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

The American playwright and screenwriter on True Detective, David Hockney and langoustines at the River Cafe

Playwright and screenwriter Jon Robin "Robbie" Baitz was brought up in Brazil and South Africa before returning to his birthplace, Los Angeles. In 1988 his first two-act play, The Film Society, transferred to an off-Broadway theatre, following a successful run in LA. His subsequent work for the stage has included The Substance of Fire, People I Know, an adaptation of Hedda Gabler and the Pulitzer prize-nominated A Fair Country. Baitz has written for television, with credits including The West Wing and Alias, and he made the ABC drama Brothers & Sisters, which ran for five series. Baitz's Broadway debut, Other Desert Cities, which received five Tony award nominations and earned him his second Pulitzer Pprize nomination, runs at the Old Vic until 24 May.

TV: True Detective

This is a brilliant, existential, American television series starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, and Cary Fukunaga has directed all of the first eight episodes. It's really influenced the way I've been thinking about how you make television. It explores some of the darker recesses of the American psyche, and myths about religion and the south. It's very impressive. The other thing that's so great is that it allows both of those actors to be their best selves. F Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives but in fact American lives are filled with examples [where this is not the case] and McConaughey's re-emergence as a serious, formidable actor has been kind of great.

Dance: Pina Bausch

Pina Bausch was a great, now dead, German choreographer, but her company [Tanztheater Wuppertal] lives on. It's my favourite dance company in the world and they were recently at Sadler's Wells. They've re-created a seminal piece of hers called 1980, and it's the story of an entire life. It's almost four hours long and it explores childhood and innocence and the strange Freudian world of sexuality that intrudes on children's play. She is arguably one of the great choreographers of the 20th century. There's also a beautiful Wim Wenders film [Pina] about her, made in 3D, which is worth taking note of.

Film: The Counsellor

I think that The Counsellor, directed by Ridley Scott, has been given very short shrift. It's a small art film which was marketed, unfortunately, as a thriller. The author's voice is incredibly important to it; it's almost a poem. Cormac McCarthy, who wrote No Country for Old Men, wrote the original screenplay. I thought No Country for Old Men really started to explore the idea of how economies work and this film expanded on his critique of the American dystopia: the great American west as a catastrophe. I thought it was a beautiful little film with a great meditation on mortality – [especially] the soliloquy by singer/actor Rubén Blades– you can't take your eyes off it and you'll want to hear it again.

Book: City of Nets by Otto Friedrich

My reading list is an ever-evolving puzzle but I'm currently re-reading this beautiful book. It's about the German intellectuals, film-makers and writers who fled Nazi Germany and moved to the glorious sun of Los Angeles during the war. It describes the American Dream as told through the eyes of these refugees and exiles – these very smart people who are used to winter, roasting under the Californian sun. I'm really interested in the history of southern California as a place of ideas, as a place of the arts and as a place that painters love.

Art: David Hockney

In January there was a massive retrospective of David Hockney's paintings in San Francisco. It's a testament to his evolution and his curiosity – his greatest achievement, as an artist, is that he's never stood still. I've never seen a thorough retrospective before… I remember a show at the Whitney Museum of American Art where he did the narration for those recordings you can get as you go from painting to painting – he was very funny and English about his work. I love the landscapes he painted during his return to England – they're so remarkable and evocative. There's something in the landscapes that I found modernist and beautiful.

Restaurant: The River Cafe

One of my favourite restaurants in the world is in the UK. If I'm coming here to do a play, it's an opportunity to eat at the River Cafe a few times. Aside from loving the room, I love their great sensitivity to fresh ingredients put together in a very delicate way, using layers of flavours and not taking any ingredient for granted. I like to go to Sir John Soane's Museum, followed by the River Cafe – that's a perfect London day. I try to order something different every time… but if I see langoustines languishing on the menu, that's usually what I'll have.

This York venue may look ordinary enough, but the food on offer is absolutely out of this world

Le Langhe, Peasholme Green, York (01904 622 584). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £60-£100

Le Langhe in York is a beautiful shop with a bafflingly bland restaurant space attached. Up front is a cheese cabinet laid out like a display at Tiffany's. It's a wonder there aren't dribble marks down the glass. There are soft tobacco-leaf-wrapped cheeses and raw cow's milk cheeses. There are others pockmarked with peppercorns. There are balls of smoked mozzarella, boulders of pecorino both mature and fresh, and rounds of 24-month aged parmesan. A lot of cows have been milked to produce this back-lit largesse.

Against the wall behind the counter is a glass box for the salamis, many and various, dangling like so many church bell pulls, awaiting their moment. There are pastas and oils and cakes. There are wines from obscure vineyards, many in verticals of vintages, for they also have a wholesale business importing the stuff. I have friends who say they can spend £80 a week in here without meaning to. All it takes is a reasonable appetite, a bit of good taste and slack morals in the matter of credit cards.

Past the long cheese cabinet are a couple of steps which lead up to… a conservatory in Penge. It's like the wardrobe to Narnia in reverse. You pass through an edible wonderland festering with temptation and end up in a glum space of bare-wood tables that seems an afterthought. It looks like the kind of place you'd go for carrot cake and a badly made latte. Still, I have been told I can eat very well in here and based on the spread at my back I am inclined to have faith.

That said, I cannot think of another restaurant I have heard (and read) more bitching about. Mostly it is to do with the service, which locals say can make the plot of a Faydeau farce look ordered and efficient. It can, they say, be less a meal than a random sequence of events.

The funny thing is that all this – the humdrum environment, the unreliable service, combined with great food (and the food at Le Langhe really is great) – is exactly the sort of thing that certain travellers venerate about undiscovered gems in Italy. "Darling!" they holler, because they all talk like Nancy Mitford, "It was marvellous. Scrubby little place. Chef shouting at his wife all the way through dinner and the service was a circus act. But the food! It was divine!"

Except that Le Langhe, which refers to the hills of Piedmont where chef-owner Otto comes from, isn't in Italy. Other standards apply. It started on a small site next to York Minster as just a deli. It now occupies a redbrick building opposite the kind of office block on the outskirts of town that could house a call centre. Given it is serving some of the very best food I have ever eaten in York, a city which has always punched well below its weight, it is just odd. For the record, our service was fine if occasionally chaotic. Then again, it was a lunchtime with only six other people there when we sat down.

The menu is complex. There are individually priced dishes, combined prices for starter-main combos, the offer of a four-course tasting menu for £22.50 ringed with lots of imperatives (the whole table MUST participate, the chef decides what you're having), plus cheese and meat boards of various widths and depths. At night there is a seven-course tasting menu for £38.

By contrast, the list of dishes of the day makes everything seem relatively straightforward. There's a soup, a choice of five pastas (£8.95) and four mains (£17 with a small pasta dish). The latter, it says, require "30 min waiting time". Always good to get your apology in first.

For £3.10 there's a soup of lightly bitter cavolo nero with spelt and the piginess of pancetta thrown in as seasoning rather than protein. It bobs with crisp, rugged croutons. Is it too damning to talk of the glories of leftovers, of the way ingredients that started with other dishes in mind can end up creating something special in their own right? I don't think so.

The list of sauces, which they insist will dress rather than bathe their pastas, has a certain melody to it. There is pumpkin and goat's cheese. There is a gutsy-sounding calves' liver sauce, or one of speck, gorgonzola, dolce radicchio and walnuts, which sounds like a high-class buffet thrust together in the Large Hadron Collider.

I have ground veal and finely diced porcini, the two ballsy flavours and textures hugging each other, atop broad egg-yolk-yellow ribbons of a pasta so thin and silken that you have to hold them in your mouth to clock the bite that is still there. The long-aged grated parmesan helps to dry out what would otherwise be too slippery a moment. It is quite simply one of the best pasta dishes I have ever eaten. A main of braised oxtail brings five or so lumps of bone the colour of a heavily creosoted fence but altogether much tastier, alongside a dark sticky jus that has to be the braising liquor reduced and strained and reduced again. A pile of coarse and neutral polenta serves as ballast. I suck the bones clean.

And then a board, one half with stinky cheeses, both running and blue, the other with their meats. There is a dark, muscular wild boar salami and slices of their own porchetta, spiked with fennel seed and garlic. There is a little Parma ham, but that is overshadowed by a soft game salami, which is closing on a terrine, the funk of the meat a vehicle for the ivory blobs of powerful fat. It's not simply the quality that shines through. It's how well they are kept.

For dessert I am led to a display of that day's offerings. A bread and butter pudding is the only thing that does not hit home. It is compressed and stodgy. A hazelnut torte is a different matter entirely. It looks dry and biscuity, but has a luscious, buttery crunch. The thick cream helps. The wine list, as you would expect of an importer, is huge, the choice by the glass light, pleasingly on cliché. How best, then, to sum up Le Langhe? It is, I think, a great restaurant, but only in spite of itself. It does things its own way. If you can cope with its own way you can eat very well here. Otherwise, it would be better you went elsewhere.

Jay's news bites

■ Francesco Mazzei's L'Anima, in the City of London, is the opposite of Le Langhe. It's all thick tablecloths and tinted glass and swish and gloss. For that you will pay, big time; in return you'll get very good Italian food. His linguine with crab, chilli and Amalfi lemons is a thing of beauty only bettered by his fish stew with fregola. A cheaper L'Anima Café has been promised for later this year (lanima.co.uk).
■ Recent discovery: the boho Pall Mall Wines tucked away down the Royal Opera Arcade off London's Pall Mall, which opened last year. Essentially a wine merchant, the space is scattered with barrels around which you can sit to try wines by the glass from an exceptional list both in terms of breadth and price. There's cheese and charcuterie to soak up the booze. Just don't tell everyone about it (pallmallfinewine.co.uk).
■ It's official: the chummiest pub in Britain is The Pheasant in Allithwaite, Cumbria, runner-up in Britain's Friendliest Business Awards (yes, they exist). Not only do they serve a killer pint, apparently, they also help run the local meals on wheels service.

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

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.

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.

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.

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:

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

Its $310 tasting menu makes Per Se one of New York Citys most expensive restaurants, but its C' grade from health inspectors puts it near the bottom of the heap when it comes to sanitary violations.

Per Se got 42 violation points when it was inspected 19 February, city health department records showed. Infractions included failure to hold hot food at 140 degrees and a lack of a hand-washing facility near the food preparation area.

Arts space and cafe LEAF was included in Guardian Travel's first "budget eats" guide to Liverpool, in 2008, and is still going strong, albeit at a new address. In the meantime, owner Natalie Haywood has branched out at the media arts centre, FACT, and at Oh Me Oh My, a weekday cafe in a grand, Grade II-listed property opposite Liverpool's totemic Liver Building. LEAF and FACT are natural allies way beyond their preference for upper case logos and last year cemented their union when LEAF opened the Garden cafeteria at the centre. Its menu is broadly vegetarian, revolving around sandwiches, Ottolenghi-ish salads and daily specials executed with LEAF's usual foodist rigour. For £3.95, I picked-up a "small" (in fact, quite substantial) box of mixed salads and focaccia that included a terrific riff on preserved, chargrilled artichoke hearts and a lovely honeyed parsnip and walnut coleslaw. All this is available to take away, but, on a clear day with the sun streaming through FACT's glass façade, the Garden, with its fresh flowers and plants, and friendly staff, is a pleasant place to linger over lunch.
88 Wood Street, fact.co.uk. Open Mon-Fri 8.30am-9pm, Sat 10am-9pm, Sun 10.30am-6.30pm, breakfast £2.95-£6.25, sandwiches, salads and main meals £3.95-£6.75

In a new series, Guardian Australia heads out to discover Australia's best everyday restaurants and brilliant grocery shops. Where should we head next? Let us know below

Homebush West sits across the railway tracks from the giant Flemington market and this small strip of shops serves locals, market workers and shoppers. While the market and nearby food suburb superstar Strathfield gets most of the attention, this small group of shops along the intersection of The Crescent and Henley Road deserves a closer look.

The mostly Chinese, Vietnamese and Sri Lankan restaurants and food stores reflect the mix of residents of the community, which include fast-growing populations from India and Nepal. Fruit markets, spice merchants, dumpling sellers, butchers, bakeries and a bottle shop fill out the retail between the restaurants; most eating places are in one of the arcades or at the back of the parking lot behind the main stores.

It's a win-win trend for restaurateurs while diners pay the price, says Emma John

There are few more dispiriting experiences than the supermarket queue: the frustrating wait in an unfathomably slow-moving line, while the promise of a delicious meal hangs in the air, unfulfilled. No one, as far as I know, thinks of queueing as a desirable part of their weekly shop. Its not a sign that you really, really rate the own-brand sausages, nor does it make you cooler than your peers (unless, perhaps, youre waiting next to the frozen food aisle).

This is something I ponder when I walk past the shivering, damp lines of punters grimly holding out for a table at a London restaurant an increasingly frequent sight, especially in the narrow streets of the West End, where a no-reservations policy is now de rigeur for new openings. Booking a table and turning up at the appointed time for your meal is irritatingly passé; were all New Yorkers now, waiting in line for the next available seat. Its a win-win for restaurants, who can increase table turnover while enjoying the cachet of the queue itself free advertising for the desirability of their food. The only losers are the diners.

Q. How many people leave food at the end of a 'meal out'?
A. 27%

Research (pdf) we did for WRAP last year revealed that more than a quarter of respondents left food the last time they ate out. When asked generally about whether they were concerned about leaving food, close to three fifths said they were not concerned.

Carnage in the world of pensions and savings, part three? First it was George Osborne's annuity revolution. Then came the cap on fees for auto-enrolment pensions. Now this: a regulatory investigation into charges and exit penalties on policies going back to the 1970s. Cue an across-the-board plunge in insurers' share prices.

The other damage, however, has been done to the Financial Conduct Authority's reputation for competence. A regulator cannot get into the game of giving selective briefings of a review that won't be announced formally until the following week. What was the FCA thinking? That cheap applause trumps proper process?