Blogger's lunch at Roast with Chapel Down Wines

If you were on Twitter yesterday at lunchtime...and for much of the afternoon...you'll have noticed that four food and wine bloggers and I were furiously live-tweeting a lunch from Roast in London's Borough Market, where wi-fi had been laid on to encourage us to look like total nerds as we ate. It's a restaurant perfectly placed to make the most of the fresh produce from the market - the emphasis here is on seasonality and wonderfully British things like haggis, pork belly and black pudding. Matching wines were provided, at a rate of two with each of the five courses along with a beer and a welcoming glass of fizz, by Chapel Down Winery. I'll recap my tweets and pictures from the meal below for those not on Twitter - as noted on the day, I'm afraid the quality of prose and photography drops as I work my way through the wine. And read down to the bottom, because the restaurant is offering blog readers a special menu with wines if you can make it to Roast on November 24, and Chapel Down have very generously provided a special offer on a case of wine for you as well.

Something of an experimental post, this - it's the first meal I've live-tweeted. Let me know what you think. (It's likely to remain a rare event: eating with a laptop on my knee is something I'd only do at a restaurant's request or suggestion, 'cos it made me feel geek-tacular.) You can read more of my daily ramblings on food if you follow me @liz_upton.

• Ensconced at Roast, gargling Chapel Down fizz. Expect quality of tweets to worsten as the lunch progresses - 2 pairings/course. 1:14pm, Nov 10
• See @wine_scribbler, @foodguardian, @thewinesleuth, @eatlikeagirl and @msgourmetchick for more on this lunch 1:16pm, Nov 10
• Smoked, dry-cured Loch Etive trout w crab cakes at Roast - trout outstanding. @wine_scribbler says shallots overpowering the wine - I like 'em! 1:33pm, Nov 10
  
  
• @wine_scribbler I'm actually preferring the Pinot Reserve - and I'm not sure why I'm tweeting this, given we're sitting next to each other. 1.36pm, Nov 10
• The smoked trout *was* a tricky thing to match wines with - next up, some haggis. 1:41pm, Nov 10
• A bottle of Chapel Down porter has just appeared in front of me - currently 5 glasses on table...getting confused. 1:42pm, Nov 10
• Bloody hell, this porter is good. Oak chips in barrel apparently - a winemaking tech and very splendidly spicy and tannic. 1:44pm, Nov 10
• We're all making Black Velvets with the Chapel Down Vint Res Brut and the CD Porter. Delicious and also slightly shaming. 1:53pm, Nov 10
• Haggis and oxtail on celeriac/spud mash. Heaven, especially w a Black Velvet!
  
  
• Just been given an obscenely good slice of grilled black pud to sample. Ramsey of Carluke in Lanarkshire - superb. 1:58pm, Nov 10
• Leaving the red undrunk. This is *highly* unusual for me. 1:59pm, Nov 10
• ...and we pause briefly while we collect ourselves. Jealously guarding my glass of Black Velvet from the v attentive wine waiters. 2:02pm, Nov 10
• @foodguardian is having trouble liveblogging because of his "Fisher Price phone". I have no sympathy. 2:04pm, Nov 10
• A wine made with the Bacchus grape (English) has just arrived. Rather excited. 2:09pm, Nov 10
• I'm getting tuberose and rubber off this wine - Bacchus not a grape I know well, but v intriguing. 2:10pm, Nov 10
• I lie - that was an 06 Pinot Blanc in an ident. glass. The Bacchus is actually weirdly sweet and unacidic - and v nice. 2:12pm, Nov 10
• BTW, I think we should open a book on precisely when we are all going to be too pissed to continue tweeting. I say by course 4. 2:13pm, Nov 10
• Roast's signature dish - pork belly w mash spuds and apple sauce. Hubba - look at that crackling. 2:23pm, Nov 10
  
• Pork belly outstanding - soft, tender meat, killer crackling. And there's almost as much butter in this mash as at Robuchon. 2:25pm, Nov 10
• Chatting to restaurant owner about these spuds, which I could happily *live* in. King Eds at the mo, but only because seasonal. 2:33pm, Nov 10 (On speaking to the chef later, I discovered that actually they're Maris Piper year round. Damn good, anyway.)
• Christ almighty. Apparently, portions usually x2 this size - that pic was just the *tasting* portion (of which I ate ½). 2:36pm, Nov 10
• Winemaker a bit unconfident about what's up next - UK dessert wines a bit difficult. This is pretty good, but more aperitif-y. 2:45pm, Nov 10
• Spiced clementine custard w anise biscuits - pud like Grandma used to make. Chapel D Nectar gorgeous, but questionable match! 2:51pm, Nov 10
  
  
• So I *really* like this Chapel Down Nectar, but not necessarily with food. The pannacotta underneath is fabboo. 2:54pm, Nov 10
• You might notice that at this point in proceedings the quality of writing and photography is descending *fast*. Sorry. :) 3:01pm, Nov 10
• And an 08 varietal English Pinot Noir. Chocolatey, dry, unoaked. Prolly my favourite of the Chapel Down wines so far. 3:07pm, Nov 10
• Warm chestnut & pear cake w hot choc sauce. Melting, so excuse me while I eat. 3:18pm, Nov 10
• Chef has emerged, with a light coating of sauce. 3:25pm, Nov 10
• Chef's belly tips - Stanley knife, rub salt & lemon, C230 for 30 mins, then down to 165 for 3 hours. 3:31pm, Nov 10
• ...And I'm shutting the computer down now. Feedback's very welcome - how do you lot feel about live-tweeted lunches?

Roast and Chapel Down are offering a special menu with wine pairings for blog readers on November 24. They asked for our help in selecting three of these courses to point you at, and we ended up going for the menu below (with pairings selected by the folks at Chapel Down).

• On arrival, a glass of Chapel Down Brut Rose
• Ramsey of Carluke haggis with celeriac and oxtail sauce, with a glass of Chapel Down Rondo Regent Pinot Noir NV
• Slow-roast Wicks Manor pork belly with mashed potatoes and Bramley apple sauce, served with a glass of Roast Bacchus Reserve 2007 (NB this will be the full sized portion, not the tasting portion from the pics above)
• Spiced clementine custard with anise biscuits, served with a glass of Chapel Down Nectar 2007
• Tea or coffee

With the wines, the menu will cost £44.50. If you want to book, call the restaurant on 0845 034 7300 and mention that you are booking for the Chapel Down Roast Bloggers’ Dinner on November 24.

Chapel Down are also offering readers a case of their Pinot Reserve 2004 for £99 for a case of six, including delivery to any UK mainland adddress. (A case usually retails at £150 plus delivery.) All you need to do is call the vineyard on 01580 763033, ask for Lizzie or Wendy and quote Blogger Offer.

Le Gavroche, Upper Brook St, London

A confession - I have a (probably pathological) dislike of writing about my absolute favourite restaurants here. There aren't that many which fall into that category; a couple in London, a couple in the US, a couple - OK, more than a couple - in France; but there's an unpleasantly selfish part of me which really, really doesn't want to share. It's irrational, and lately I've pledged to get the hell over this particular issue, which is good news for you, because you are finally getting to read about places I keep returning to, like L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon and Le Gavroche (the pic is pinched from Wikimedia Commons - I hate bringing a camera to places like this). You'll also get to read about several of my favourites, so far jealously unshared, in October, when Food Journeys of a Lifetime: 500 Extraordinary Places to Eat Around the Globe is released - it's a National Geographic publication, and 20 of those extraordinary places were written about by me. More on that when the book finally comes out.

So. Gavroche. You know the chap - grubby urchin in Les Miserables. And you're probably aware of the food royalty that own and still run the restaurant, founded in 1967 by Michel and Albert Roux. The kitchen is now run by Michel Roux Jr (son of Albert), and both older chefs still take an active interest in the place; good news for chefspotters. (I'm an avid one, and I was as pleased to see Albert Roux walk past my table on Monday as I would have been to see Brad Pitt, who is doubtless much less deft with artichokes.)

As usual, I rolled up for a weekday lunch, part of what I consider the freelancer's dividend. I've mentioned it before, but if you're in a position to do this, it bears repeating: many of London's best restaurants offer surprisingly well-priced lunch menus in the week. The weekday set lunch menu here is, at first glance, pricier than elsewhere, at £48 a head - but this sum includes half a bottle of wine (you're given a choice of four, which are always beautifully selected - ours was a 2004 St-Emilion Grand Cru from Chateau Vieux Sarpe, carefully decanted at the table); half a bottle of Evian; and coffee and petits fours, which most other places will have you pay for separately at lunchtime. The food itself is as good as you'll find in the UK, and generous amuses bouches and petits fours (who knew that physalis, caramel and coconut was such a good combination?) round things out so well that you'll leave thrilled at the value of what you've eaten.

The amuses are always good - to be honest, they're often extraordinary. Artichoke Lucullus, cut into elegant crescents and stuffed with summer truffles, foie gras and chicken mousse; sea bass carpaccio; little toasts with a blue cheese mousse so beautifully balanced I could have eaten a dozen more for a main course.

Once you launch onto the menu proper, you'll find there's some clever work going on balancing luxe ingredients like truffles and foie gras with delicious things which cost the kitchen far less - a perfectly poached egg balanced on a Russian salad of potatoes, peas, carrots and celeriac sounds good but dull until you realise there are a couple of gargantuan slice of summer truffle perching on top, and a creamy truffle emulsion binding the vegetables together. Girolles are paired with a slow-cooked lamb's tongue, cut into meltingly tender slices. It's one of those menus where you're hard-pressed to make a decision, everything sounding so perfectly edible - I should also point out that it's one of those menus that's written entirely in French. I used to live in Paris, and I'm the sort of anal-retentive who takes great pleasure in memorising the French for things like guinea fowl and fairy-ring mushroom. Even so, I came unstuck and had (horror!) to ask for help from the waiting staff. My friend and I were pretty sure Maigre was a sort of fish - but what sort? And what was a Sauce Antiboise? (It's a white fish related to the sea bass, it turns out; and Antiboise simply means 'from Antibes', which I should bloody well have known. It's a raw tomato concasse with basil and olives...and probably much more, but my dining companion was very sensibly preventing me from eating everything on her plate under the pretext of making notes.)

The staff (to a man/woman, French) are supremely helpful and will offer all the help you need with translation - you are clearly not expected to know what a maigre is, which makes me question the usefulness of the monoglot menu. Two of them are also supremely disconcerting. They're identical twins, with matching extravagant hair dye, matching statement glasses, and matching mis-matched earrings. Cue a nanosecond of worry that an hallucinogen has been slipped into your Salade Russe.

This is the sort of restaurant where I'm happy to order veal liver. There's a certain mental accounting you need to do when you next encounter it on a menu. Consider for a moment how much veal you see in British restaurants. There's very, very little; even saltimbocca is usually made with pork these days. Now consider how much veal liver you see on menus (a surprising amount), and how many livers the average calf has. (That's one, for those without a Biology GCSE.) There are simply not enough veal calves being eaten in the UK to provide the number of livers you'll see on menus. The inevitable upshot is that much of the stuff you've ordered under the guise of veal liver has actually been beef liver - with the coarser texture, strong odour and flavour that that implies - so I never, ever order veal liver unless I'm somewhere I'm absolutely confident won't palm me off with a superannuated gland. The liver at Le Gavroche is the real thing, so fresh it gives to the teeth like the flesh of a ripe plum, and its delicate flavour is seasoned sensitively with a very gentle green peppercorn sauce and a shallot confit. Ask for it to be served pink - simply beautiful stuff.

The cheeseboard is simply enormous, stacked high with French bliss, but we had our heads turned by the poached peach with champagne and raspberry mousse. A whole, peeled white peach, stone still in, had been poached to perfect silky softness in champagne, like a solid Bellini, and stood up in a swirl of raspberry mousse, just tart enough to offer a contrast. Regular readers will know that I don't have much of a sweet tooth, but even I would have turned down a fine bacon sandwich if offered this instead. (This doesn't sound like much of a compliment. Believe me, it is. I will do almost anything for a fine bacon sandwich - husband, take note.)

Of course, not everything here is perfect, or I would have set up a tent under one of the tables by now. Gavroche, the eponymous urchin, appears thumb-sized and in glorious 3D at the bottom of the shaft of all the cutlery, and frankly, he's hideous. Like the decor - this restaurant perfectly apes a 1980s gentleman's club, down to the carpeting, the green leather banquettes and the awful art on the walls. When I was a kid in the 80s, we had a very wealthy hotel-owning, huntin', shootin' neighbour, who affected plus-fours and displayed photos of himself with strings of recently murdered trout on his walls. He'd be right at home here with the ugly beaten-metal sculptures of edible birds, which the restaurant sells for thousands of pounds to...someone. The room, and its clientele, is overwhelmingly masculine - we were the only all-female table in the place. But I don't care - they welcomed me with a crescent of artichoke full of foie gras, truffles and chicken mousse, so they can be as ugly and male as Rasputin for all I care.

L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon, London W1

In London for a day of Ladies' Nice Things, my Mum and I had decided to take advantage of L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon's (020 7010 8600) set lunch menu (£25 for three courses - cooking at this level is hard enough to find anywhere in the capital, let alone at this sort of price). There is little as good for the appetite as perching on the world's plushiest bar stools and looking over the open finishing kitchen as a synchronised team of young French chefs waltz around each other in pressed, white formation, whipping potatoes, peeling baby artichokes, and slicing truffles.

We'll start this one back-to-front, at the point where the bill arrived. We noticed the two glasses of champagne we'd opened the meal with (for what is worth celebrating more than a nice day out with your Mum?) had been omitted from the receipt, and called the server over to ask him to add them on. He didn't miss a beat, but said 'Not at all; if the champagne has not appeared on the bill, please accept it with our compliments'.

Good dining's not all about what's on your plate. Service, noise level, comfort and the beauty of the room (and this room is like a red and black-lacquered Japanese box with a living wall of leaves) all have their part to play, and here all those elements slot neatly together to result in a real joy of a restaurant. Robuchon, who was named Chef of the Century back in the 1980s by Gault Millau, has 25 Michelin stars divided between his neat squadron of a dozen restaurants in cities all over the world. I've eaten in the Las Vegas Atelier and the London one, and quality, style and service are absolutely consistent between the two restaurants.

Meals at l'Atelier are presented either as small plates which the diner can select tapas-style from the menu; as larger plates to be enjoyed as a starter, main course and dessert; or as a dégustation set (£110) of the smaller plates chosen by the chef. Some of these dishes have become famous in their own right and are always found on the tasting menu: the quail stuffed with foie gras; the mashed potato, which is 50% butter and whipped into a cloud of silk. Robuchon's cooking is of the voluptuously rich school that he was instrumental in founding after France's flirtation with nouvelle cuisine; your meal here will be smooth with butter and oils and dense with meticulous, slow-cooked flavours.

That lunch menu is a magnificent introduction to Robuchon's cooking; at any rate, I'm not sure I could cope with the richness of the dégustation menu at lunchtime. There are two choices for each of the three courses, and the menu changes with the day's market. Salmon rillettes were packed with dill and fresh horseradish (which is, incidentally, making an appearance on market stalls in Cambridge at the moment - local readers should head out and grab a root for a horseradish sauce recipe I'm planning for next week) - hot-smoked salmon whipped into crème fraîche, studded with fat jewels of cold-smoked salmon, accompanied by a sharp salad made from paper-thin slivers of fennel. Soups are always fresh and frequently thick with cream - my broccoli soup had a crouton floating on top, slathered with tapenade and a spoonful of sweet onion confit which reminded me of the French onion soup (so good I'm never ordering it anywhere else again) I had there back in March.

Razor clams are something you seldom see in British restaurants, and I always order them when I see them. They're a beautiful shellfish, large, sweet and tender to the tooth. These were from Colchester, superbly fresh; and had been removed from the shell, then gratinated with a leek fondue, butter-soft, and Parmigiano. Not a trace of the fine, sandy grit that almost invariably clouds razor clam dishes - and I was thankful for an epi of bread from the basket which staunched some of the butteriness. Patte noir chicken was roasted (I suspect the involvement of a rotisserie grill) to a lovely, butter-aided succulence with a mahogany-crisp skin. We'd asked for a bowl of mashed potato in addition to the lunch menu - even if it's not on the menu, they'll find some for you - and agreed we could happily live on the stuff, and possibly in it too.

Wine pairings are suggested for each dish, and we asked for a glass each - a 2007 Montlouis to go with my clams, and a Stonier Pinot Noir from Australia with the chicken. Both beautifully selected, the Montlouis reflecting the butter-sweetness of the clams, and the Pinot Noir really European in character - plenty of fruit, but closer to a Burgundy in style; lovely stuff. I got back from the ladies' (a dim spot in the excellent design - it's all very elegant, but the lights in there make you look like the living dead) to find my Mum happily launched on a second glass, which she claimed would help her pudding down.

A set of five slim slices from different tarts is a dessert that usually appears on the £25 menu. I'm not a huge fan of the signature dessert, a Chocolate Sensation (you are likely to be far fonder of chocolate than I am - I suspect it's a genetic abnormality, given that Mum's really not into it either). The Chocolate Sensation was the only dessert on offer with the lunch menu, but I asked whether they had the tarts, and five minutes later two helpings arrived, beautifully plated and for no extra charge. And that's absolutely typical of the service at l'Atelier. It's both graceful and gracious, and they will bend over backwards to help you - witness the business with the champagne. The tart selection has changed every time I've visited, but if you are lucky you might encounter the cinnamon custard on filo pastry or the puckeringly sharp lemon tart. Keeping seasonal produce in mind, there was a strawberry shortcake topped with three perfect fresh strawberries and a sort of raspberry clafoutis arrangement - and even chocolate agnostics like us decided the chocolate, caramel and hazelnut concoction, smooth and dense, was about as good as such things get.

Coffee here is great, but I'd suggest you walk the 100 yards to the Monmouth St Coffee House for my favourite cup of coffee in London if you can get off the barstool. (I am 5'2". I find such things challenging.) Mum was thrilled with lunch - I believe she's taking my Dad back to l'Atelier next week for a date.

Ambassade de L'Ile, London

If you'd asked me last week, I'd have said that it was impossible to accidentally book a table at a two-star chef's new restaurant while remaining firmly under the impression that you were booking something quite different. My poor Dad, on phoning to confirm the table at what used to be one of his favourite restaurants, even started the conversation with: "Hello. Is this Lundum's?" And the person picking up said "Yes." (The correct answer would have been "No. Lundum's closed six months ago. This is l'Ambassade de L'Ile.") The waiter did acknowledge that we are not the first party this has happened to. It's a bad way to start a meal, and I hope they sort things out at their reservations desk; l'Ambassade has no need to rely on the reputation of the excellent restaurant that used to occupy this building, and everyone in our group started the evening extremely irritated at the mix-up.

Still: on getting there, we decided to stay; we had all, after all, travelled between two and three hours to get there, we were seduced by the colour scheme (aubergine shag-pile carpet! White panels of leather with what looked like a dear little belly button in the middle of each one!), and I'd read about the chef, Jean-Christophe Ansanay-Alex before. I was secretly rather thrilled to have the chance to try his cooking. His L'Auberge de l'Ile in Lyon has two stars; he used to cook for Christina Onassis; he only has one arm. Prices here are extraordinarily high, but we were celebrating; it's nearly Christmas; and I've been cooking tofu, pork hock and oxtail and other budget proteins for weeks, so was feeling like a bit of cream and truffles. The à la carte had numbers on it which looked to be denominated in rupees rather than pounds (no starter came in under £25), so we all went for the £90 tasting menu, reasoning that three à la carte courses weren't going to come in at much less than that.

I'm still a little uncomfortable about the price, especially given that we fully intended to pay for our half, but had our credit card batted away by my Dad, who gets into Father Christmas mode at this time of year. £90 (without wine from the pricey list - and my Kir Royale alone cost £15) seems a hell of a lot to pay for a meal in the current financial climate, especially when you find yourself picking your way through a clot of tramps swigging lager outside South Kensington tube station on your way home.

Ansanay-Alex's tasting menu does, at least, try as hard as it can to justify its price. It's almost a pastiche of Lyon's rich, buttery, creamy cuisine, and there's a sense that somebody has sat down with a checklist of the most expensive ingredients, making little ticks as he works his way down through scallops, lobster, caviar, white truffles, black truffles and foie gras. The problem with constructing a menu like this is that all sense of balance goes out of the window, with creamy veloutes, buttery Béarnaises and sabayons, absurdly dense reductions and heavy, rich farces rampaging through the menu like a herd of oily buffalo.

L'Ambassade is generous with amuse bouches at the start of the meal and with friandises at the end. A heap of herbs fried in a tempura batter arrives before you've even ordered, and our amuses included a really lovely croquette of black pudding in a cider reduction alongside a tiny clam shell filled with a truffly mirepoix of sweet vegetables, topped with the poached clam.

The menu opens as it means to go on - with a mind to the eventual death of your liver. A velvet-smooth cream of scallop soup had a mosaic of lobster-marinaded scallop slices and squares of melting butter resting on the surface. A teaspoon of caviar (the farmed French variety) was inserted into a soft-boiled hen's egg, surrounded by a thankfully tart lemon sabayon. Sea bass, its oily skin cooked to a salty, crisp bark, sat on a fondant potato (always a show-off accompaniment - they're hard to cook well, and are a tremendously chefly thing to put on a plate), sitting in an ornamental pond of really dense, buttery Béarnaise, full of a tiny dice of clams and tomatoes. Venison loin, wrapped in a caul with a foie and black truffle farce, was bathed in London's densest jus. The tiny tower (why is it always towers?) of beetroot and pear was a joyous contrast to all this richness - but oh, so small. At this point I would have paid almost anything for a salad.

Another soup - this time a chestnut veloute with celery leaves, crisp little puffs of parmesan and a slice of white truffle. It's white truffle season at the moment, and the smell as the dishes approached was glorious. Some white truffle oil was drizzled into the dish - gorgeous, but I wish this buttery, sweet, creamy, nutty, truffly concoction had been served at the start of the meal, when my appetite for all this richness still had legs.

Coffee tart, peanut ice cream, a little disk of hazelnut meringue. "I wish there was some fruit," said Dr W. "The cream-tasting bit of my tongue doesn't work any more." Everyone at the table concurred heartily. (And the pastry in that tart was the single dud of the evening - cakey and rather solid.) We thought this was the end, but the food just kept on coming - a positive bucket full of salt caramels, most of which found their way into my Mum's handbag; fresh, hot, citrusy Madeleines; almond macarons with a fresh, creamy chocolate truffle centre. Finally, here were cones of gingerbread filled with liquorice ice cream, topped with a hard caramel shaped like, and flavoured with, star anise. This was the lightest, most digestible item we ate. So much so that I gave mine to Dr W to digest.

The (gargantuan) bill arrived sealed with a dollop of aubergine-coloured wax.

This is gorgeous, beautifully presented food, and it's so French I was fully expecting it to go on strike. But it's all a little too much at once - this is rich stuff in every sense of the word, and I wonder how it's going down during the credit crunch. I'd certainly expect a restaurant of this calibre to be far, far more busy on a night shortly before Christmas than it was when we visited. If you're set on visiting, try lunchtime, when a two-course menu comes in at £25, and a three-course one at £30.

Does anyone know where I can buy some aubergine shag-pile carpet?

A.A. Gill, Breakfast at the Wolseley

A friendly publisher mailed me just before I left for New York, asking if I'd review a couple of books here for them. Always up for a freebie (I am nothing if not venal, especially where books are involved), I said yes - and was very, very pleased when Breakfast at the Wolseleyturned out to say A.A.Gillon the cover. If you're not a consumer of English newspapers, you may not have come across him; he's an author and journalist with a liking for smoking jackets and waspish prose. These days, Gill is the restaurant critic for the Sunday Times, and his is usually the first page I turn to when reading the papers in bed. His writing is unapologetically baroque and often vicious - his description of the Welsh as "loquacious, dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls" in the Times about ten years ago (he also said that "You can easily travel from Cardiff to Anglesey without ever stimulating a taste bud,") nearly caused a Celtic uprising and sparked so many complaints from outraged Welshmen (no idea why - I'm married to one of the pugnacious little trolls, and it seemed fair enough to me) that the Press Complaints Commission and Commission for Racial Equality had to weigh in. We Brits love a Commission.

The Wolseley is a café-restaurant next to the Ritz in London, set in a building which was originally a gorgeously opulent showroom for Wolseley automobiles in the 1920s. That aesthetic runs through the restaurant itself as well as the book: the hard cover reproduces the design of the marble floors (themselves copied from Brunelleschi's floors in Santo Spirito in Florence, according to Gill), while a tiny black dust-slip does double duty by carrying the title and author while acting as a slim belt to dress up the cover. I do not usually witter on like this about the outside of a book, but this one is very pretty, and the copious and beautiful photography inside keeps the loveliness factor high. They top it all off with a black satin ribbon bookmark. If this book was a person, it'd be wearing a velvet opera cape.

The book opens with an essay on the Wolseley's history, then one on breakfast; Gill then walks us through a night's preparation in the restaurant kitchens for the breakfast rush, but somehow takes us there via the Turkish siege of Vienna (croissants, pastries, espresso), Capuchin monks in Venice (cappuccino) and the beekeepers of South London (who supply the Wolseley with honey and beeswax for their cannelés de Bordeaux). My only complaint here is that because he's writing about something he really enjoys, Gill is having trouble being as poisonous as usual, and I love him for his poison. Every now and then, though, the sliver-tipped dagger slips through the silky prose, so the restaurant's customer database becomes "a benign Stazi report"; we are ticked off for moving from the "sugar-crusted, multicoloured, zoomorphically shaped processed carbs of childhood for the sombre, brown, bran-rich, blandly goodly flakes of colonic probity and adulthood".

More short essays open each of the food chapters - Vienoisserie; Eggs; English Breakfast; Fruit and Cereals; and Tea, Coffee and Hot Chocolate. Rather wonderfully, you are offered bulleted instructions on how, for example, to prepare the perfectly poached or scrambled egg; a perfect cup of coffee (a discussion of the coarseness of your grind and whether you should select an Arabica or a Robusta); tea types and terminology. The night churns on - Polish plongeurs ("slim-featured, pale-eyed, all of them with the same contrary mixture of relief and resentment: a battened-in, taciturn, steely ambition") flop about with rubber gloves and misery. I said above that Gill's prose is baroque and it can be an acquired taste, but it's a taste well worth acquiring if only so that you can read what he has to say about yoghurt.

The essays are punctuated with a good solid armful of breakfast recipes (not by Gill). These are the dishes we all secretly love and avoid eating regularly for the sake of our arteries and pancreas - eggs Benedict, pain au chocolat, omelette Arnold Bennett, lamb's kidneys with Madeira, crèpes, haggis and duck egg. My heart throbs with the writing, my salivary glands do that squirty thing with the recipes. No recipe for the darned cannelés de Bordeaux, which saddens me, because I love the things.

I am torn between keeping this book in the kitchen so I can practise poaching eggs (a trick I have never quite got the hang of) or on the bedside table so I can read about the English breakfast's "cacophony of meat" before bedtime. I suspect I'm just going to be running up and down the stairs a lot. Just as well, given all the black pudding.

Saki, London EC1

Saki calls itself a Food Emporium. Upstairs, you've got a little Japanese supermarket, all bonito flakes and kewpie doll mayonnaise. Downstairs there's an elegant bar and a small, lacquered-box red and black restaurant.

I have spent half an hour staring at a largely blank page, because I have a dilemma. Should I begin this post by telling you about the food or the toilets? I was charmed by both...but I'm going to start with the loos, because although they were probably slightly less fun than the magnificent food, they were a heck of a lot more fun than any other restaurant toilet I've ever used.

This is because Saki, being a self-respecting Japanese establishment, doesn't have normal toilets. They have washlets (the Japanese high-tech loo with the retractable bidet washy stalk thing and the jets of hot air and the heated seat and the thing that squirts you in the bum with such astonishing precision that you come to the conclusion that there must be a camera in there for targeting purposes) in the bathrooms. Allow yourself longer than you expect you will need for your meal, because you'll want to make a few lengthy trips to the lavatory to make sure you've tried out all the thing's functions. And do not push the wash button if you are not sitting down.

Shame on all the men in our party, who refused to use the things, sticking (manfully?) to the urinals.

Enough on the toilets, anyway - we were here for the food, and decided that the best way to sample the best of what was on offer was to go for the omakase, or chef's choice. Most good Japanese restaurants should offer an omakase meal, which will involve many courses including cooked dishes and sushi, all selected from whatever produce is best and freshest on the day.

Our meal opened with seared lobster sashimi with white asparagus and caviar in a sesame sauce. As usual, I had to ask for an alternative (eating lobster usually results in a hospital visit and adrenaline shot for me), and the chef very kindly substituted barely seared scallops for the lobster. The scallops and asparagus were achingly sweet, and the sesame sauce so rich and good that we all agreed we wished we had spoons to scrape the bowl with. I could have done with more caviar, but it was pointed out to me by Dr W that I could always do with more caviar, so this is not a helpful criticism.

Next up was a little nimono (simmered dish) of duck breast with young bamboo shoot (that's the yellow thing in the picture), mooli and a fresh, plump and silky shitake mushroom. The duck here had been rolled in rice flour before simmering, which gave it a shadow of sticky coating, helpful in making sure the gorgeous broth stayed close to the moist meat. A surprising hit of wasabi (freshly grated) lurked between the two bottom bits of duck. I checked to make sure nobody was looking and drank the remaining broth from the bowl when I was done.

The chilled Hakkaisan Junmai Ginjo sake from Nigata served with this course was, for me, the best drink of the night. On the whole, sake pairings with this menu were much more successful than the wine pairings which came with certain courses - if you visit, you might want to consider asking for an all-sake pairing with your meal.

King prawn and nanohana flower tempura came next, with a black vinegar sauce. I believe nanohana is the same plant as oil-seed rape - I could be wrong here, though, and would be delighted to be enlightened by any Japanese-speaking readers!

Prepared in tempura style, the flowers were slightly peppery, and very delicate. Some puffed rice had been used in the batter for the prawns, working beautifully with this course's sake accompaniment (this time a room-temperature brown rice sake from Hyogo).

The menu offered a choice for the next course: black cod with Saikyo miso or rib-eye teriyaki. I chose the cod (black cod, confusingly, is actually a kind of sea bass, and is very rich, so a small piece can make for a satisfying main dish) to see how it compared to the Nobu and Michael Mina versions. Charmingly, it arrived on a hoba (magnolia) leaf imported from Japan, and unlike the versions of this dish I've tried elsewhere, the grill had left almost no browning or caramelisation - the fish was barely, barely cooked, and sweet, flaking delicately to the touch. The table was in disagreement about the ribeye teriyaki - my Mum, whose birthday we were celebrating, found the sauce overpowering, but everyone else seemed to be licking it off their plates when they'd done. Teriyaki means 'shining cooked', and a good teriyaki sauce should be thick and glossy - personally, I liked the mouthful I tried a great deal.

Sushi. Buttery, melt-in-the mouth Toro (the pink tuna on the left - Toro is from the fish's prized, fatty belly) was the best I've had in the UK. The white fish is yellowtail, which had been briefly marinaded in lemon and garlic - just enough to barely 'cook' its proteins and produce a kind of ceviche. The ebi (prawn) was sweet and juicy, and the uni (sea urchin - the black and orange confection on the right) was, again, absolutely the best I've found in the UK. It tasted as it should - sweetly iodine-y, sea-like and fresh, fresh, fresh. My sister-in-law, who has had bad experiences with uni, tried this and said it was great - and that uni this fresh was unlike any she'd had elsewhere. (Compare this picture with the awful, elderly uni I had a couple of years ago elsewhere in London, and you'll see an amazing difference in colour and texture.)

The little chequerboard of tamago (sweetened egg) was good, but I was unconvinced by the vegetable maki at the top of the plate. These rolls were filled with cucumber, avocado, asparagus, carrot...and black onion seeds, which, for me, completely overwhelmed the other flavours in the roll, and made the well-seasoned rice an irrelevance, because you couldn't taste it over the black onion. The freshly grated wasabi made up for that, though; you hardly ever find it fresh, especially in the UK, and it is an aromatic and sweet marvel when you do.

Finally, the dessert (with a birthday candle for Mum), made up of a tiramisu dredged with green tea powder, a fiori di latte ice, and a black sesame panna cotta (my favourite thing on the plate). It's great to find a black sesame preparation this light - usually, the ground seeds find their way into richly oily desserts, but this panna cotta kept all of the flavour without leaving you feeling weighed down. A wine upset with this course - we were meant to be served a Coteaux du Layon, but what arrived appeared to be a dry sherry. We asked for a substitution...and glasses of something which appeared to be the Coteaux du Layon which we were meant to have had appeared without an explanation.

I'll let them off. Their toilets are great.

This bounty does not come cheap. With a wine/sake pairing, the omakase menu is £90/head (£55/head if you are not taking the wine pairing). All the same, this is the best Japanese food I've found yet in London - or anywhere in the UK - and I liked it enough that I'll happily go back and pay the same price all over again.

Gordon Ramsay at Claridges

I am not really a lady who lunches. I would very much like to be, but my options are limited, given that I live in the middle of a field in Cambridgeshire. All the same, about once a month I try to meet up with a friend who lives in London, where we lunch as if it's going out of fashion. I am fortunate in having found a friend who, like me, gets such an absurd amount of pleasure from good dining. She's one of only a couple of female friends I have who do not just sort of dibble around with wet salads which they do not finish, and it's good to have a lengthy conversation about hollandaise sauce without being considered a fatso.

Why do so few people I know manage to eat and drink without fear and shame? We worry about the ethics of eating, about the size of our bodies. It's absurd; food is such a pleasure. Imagine the joy that suffuses your whole body when you eat something as simple as a good bacon sandwich, let alone as glorious as the foie gras mosaic I had at Gordon Ramsay at Claridges. Imagine how good for you all those endorphins and cheery feelings are - and now compare this to the mealy-mouthed, guilt-ridden attitude we're being encouraged to have to food. You know exactly what I'm talking about - the press releases and government factsheets announcing that any amount of bacon will give you cancer; that eating meat will kill the planet; that thick-sliced bread is making us all obese; that toast cooked beyond the palest gold will fill the female body with specific feminine carcinogens; that the French duck population is being tortured to death to satisfy your shameless greed; that a properly salted meal will raise your blood pressure and stop your heart beating. Where does this awful gastronomic puritanism come from? I believe strongly that the joy, companionship and straightforward sinful pleasure of eating well are in themselves so good for you that any negative effects dealt out by that bacon sandwich are squelched immediately.

This year's standouts, lunch-wise, have been Le Gavroche (review to follow) and last week's visit to Gordon Ramsay at Claridge's. Both restaurants offer a really keenly priced lunch menu, and are usually booked out a couple of months in advance - make sure you plan well ahead. The Claridge's lunch menu comes in at a bewilderingly low £30 (although once you've supplemented this with an aperitif and a glass of wine or two, you'll find the bill creeping skywards).

Gordon Ramsay, for those who have been eschewing food, newspapers, television and conversation for the last twenty years, is one of only three chefs in the UK to hold three Michelin stars - he's actually been awarded a total of 12 of the things spread among his various restaurants, which starts to look a little greedy. In recent years, he's also carved out a television career so successful that he's starting to become almost tiringly ubiquitous. He's also something of a sex symbol, which might explain the high proportion of female diners at Claridge's, one of whom was shoving a salad around her plate. (I have never seen the sex symbol thing myself; Ramsay is not referred to by other chefs as Old Celeriac Head for no reason.) Primarily, though, he's a thoughtful, artistic chef with an eye to the whole dining experience, so service, table dressing and ambiance at his restaurants are given great weight.

The dining room at Claridge's is surprisingly feminine. Like the rest of the hotel, it's a glorious slab of art deco frivolity, with soft apricot and oyster touches. It's a pleasantly quiet dining room with all the soft furnishings and moulded walls, so you can have a conversation with your dining partner without having to listen to everything the people at the next table are saying. I've read about Claridge's daft mineral water list, which can go up to £50 for a litre, but we just asked for sparkling water and were given Badoit - probably my favourite mineral water - and didn't have to sift through the list of deep-sea Hawaiian stuff and the juice squeezed out of volcanoes.

The amuse bouche was a butternut squash soup. The title fails to do it justice - it was simple but perfect; a creamy, buttery, velvet-soft pool of liquid gold. GSE's cured trout starter was tender and sweet, and came with delicate little crisps made from Charlotte potatoes and a lovely little salad of cucumber. My own mosaic of pheasant, foie gras and winter vegetables was one of those things I'd be perfectly happy to smear all over myself and run up and down in. It was simply glorious - a perfect foie gras terrine punctuated with jewels of sweet, poached root vegetables and tiny morsels of pheasant. The vegetables lifted the deeply savoury foie to sparkling, twinkling heights, and an earthy little beetroot salad at the side of the plate provided a quiet and sensitive foil. It was one of the best dishes I've eaten this year.

Update, Jan 2008 - a couple of months later, Gordon Ramsay published the recipe for this gorgeous terrine in the Times. Good luck sourcing some raw foie gras - if you do make this, I'd love to hear from you.

Partridge, skin seared crisp and then dressed in an almost impossibly glossy, buttery jus came next. It's good to see partridge at this time of year served innocent of pears - like rabbit and baby carrots, it's a conceit that is funny the first time you see it, but which quickly gets tired. It came on a bed of diced celariac which had been cooked in more of that wonderful butter - nutty and lactic.

I chose the dessert on the strength of its accompaniment - a ball of star anise ice cream. A plate arrived with an almondy, apple-y paragon of tarts, while the ice cream had a wonderful, almost custardy texture and an intense fragrance from the anise. GSE's winter fruit crumble, with another ice cream (ginger this time) disappeared before I got a look in.

I've only one complaint - my coffee was not, as requested, decaffeinated. We'd planned on some shopping after lunch, and this, in London at Christmastime, is best approached without extreme caffeination. I thrummed and palpitated my way down Oxford Street jittery, but happy beyond belief.

Moro

The Great She Elephant does not so much celebrate her birthdays as rue them. She suggested Moro (Exmouth Market, Farringdon, London, 020 7833 8336) as the venue for this year's quiet lunchtime wake for lost youth. I'm always happy to oblige - GSE has fantastic taste in restaurants.

Moro is a restaurant specialising in southern Spanish food with a strong Moroccan influence, run by the Clarks, a married couple who, confusingly, are both called Sam. It's been going strong for ten years now, and shows no sign of slowing or losing popularity. Tapas is available all day at the bar, while in the restaurant itself you'll find a menu that changes weekly, showcasing seasonal produce. (The menu for the week is available at Moro's excellent website, so if you're like me and mildly obsessive about what you eat for lunch you can start to decide what you want to order days before you visit.)

The dining room is all stark wood and zinc, with a real feeling of bustle contributed to by the lightning-fast, extravagantly tattooed servers. Moro wins extra points for offering tap water alongside the bottled stuff, and for wordlessly topping up the jug when we'd finished (it was a hot, hot day). Although all these hard surfaces make for a noisy dining experience, especially when the restaurant is full, it's a lovely atmosphere for lunch, especially if you can get a table near the window, overlooking the busy street, or one at the back where you can see into the kitchen. The wine list, mostly Spanish, is really interesting, and you'll find a near-exhaustive list of sherries to sip as an aperitif. And somehow, despite the restaurant's exotic menu and massive popularity, they manage to keep the prices sane.

I started with one of my favourite dishes in the world: sweetbreads. Moro's were glorious little nuggets, dusted in a seasoned flour and fried to a rustling crispness outside, with nuttily soft middles. A cardamom and preserved lemon dressing tied them to chargrilled artichoke bottoms and left me feeling like I'd just eaten an angel. GSE's cuttlefish was carefully braised over a long period with sherry, until it was soft and toothsome. A broad bean salad, made from beans so young and tender that they didn't need removing from their skins, provided a great foil in texture and flavour.

If you see the words 'charcoal grilled' on the menu, order that dish. GSE's lamb, which came with a pea and farika pilaf and pistachio sauce, was delicious; pink and sweet in the centre and charred on the outside. I asked for the vegetable mezze platter, which you can see at the top of the page. Hummus, an aubergine purée, a spoonful of a Syrian lentil dish, more of those baby broad beans, French beans in a yoghurt sauce and Imam Bayaldi (stuffed aubergine) were clustered around a remarkable perfumed, shredded beetroot dish which was flavoured with pistachio and fragrant rose water. I felt the Imam Bayaldi would have been tastier served at a cooler temperature (it and the French beans were hot, while all the other mezze were at room temperature), but this is getting into seriously picky territory. A flat bread, baked in the restaurant and filled with crushed nuts, was served alongside to dip into the mezze, along with some sweet and peppery radishes and other crudités, and a spicy pickled pepper.

These are enormous portions, and this rich, very positively flavoured food is deliciously, satisfyingly filling. We paused for a while and then opted to share a dessert (and I'm glad we did; it was very large and again, wonderfully rich). This yoghurt cake with pistachios and pomegranates was like a deconstructed, Moorish lemon-meringue pie. Moist sponge nestled against a frothy lemon sabayon, and more of those lovely perfumey flavours (this time from scented pistachio and heady pomegranate) underscored the whole thing.

Just walking into this room full of the smell of bread and charcoal is a treat. Eating there's positive bliss.

Pearl Liang, Paddington, London

I'm incredibly excited to be reviewing Pearl Liang (8 Sheldon Square, W2 6EZ, tel: 020 7289 7000). It's a new Chinese restaurant in Paddington with a confident website (beware - it plays music), an interesting menu and excellent credentials (the head chef has defected from Queensway's Mandarin Kitchen). The Great She Elephant and I went for a dim sum lunch yesterday, and my, I'm glad we did.

Dim sum is tricky. There are a bazillion restaurants in London's Chinatown and in Bayswater serving these lovely little packets of Chinese flavour, and while some do it admirably well, some are pretty mediocre. It can be hard to find somewhere where the dim sum is exceptional, but I think I've found it in Pearl Liang, a couple of minutes from Paddington station.

The restaurant has a remarkable interior. It's a bit like a 1970s brothel/disco, with plushy purple upholstery, modern flock wallpaper, lots of gilding and little ice-cube lights. It's all in a new development at the waterside in Paddington (use the map and the directions on Pearl Liang's website, since it can be hard to find without some help), a curious furtive mauve bolthole hidden among the office blocks.

The dim sum menu isn't huge by Chinese standards; a selection of about fifteen steamed dishes and ten fried ones, alongside cheung fun (wide strips of silky rice noodle wrapped around a savoury filling and bathed in a wonderfully savoury sauce) and noodles are offered on a menu where you tick a box on a form to order each dish. This relatively small menu is a good move - every dim sum we sampled was cooked with real attention to detail. A sampler platter of ten individual dim sum is available for under £10, with the familiar (Siu Mai, the pork dumplings shaped like a cup, open at one end, and Har Gow, the translucent prawn dumplings) alongside the unfamiliar (a diamond of sticky rice wrapped in a leaf of seaweed and flavoured strongly with caramelised onions, and a ravishing little spinach dumpling). Perched in the middle was one of the best Char Siu Bao I've tasted.

We ordered the Doug (crispy dough cruller) Cheung Fun and some Lo Bak Goh to go with the platter, alongside a bowl of Malaysian Char Kway Teow noodles. The Lo Bak Goh, a delicious square of grated Chinese radish (one of my favourite dim sum options) was flavoured with a beautifully made Chinese sausage and delicate dried shrimp, and seared to a golden crisp on the outside while softly shredded inside. The Char Kway Teow was spiked with perfectly fresh prawns, and was subtly spiced. If I were being super-picky (and I am), I would have wanted more wok hei, the smoky flavour of a well-seasoned and extremely hot wok, permeating the dish, but hey - it was still as good a dish of Char Kway Teow as I've ever eaten in London. Service is charming and helpful.

The evening menu looks extremely exciting as well. There's lobster steamboat (a kind of Chinese fondue), fresh fish including Dover sole and sea bass, Buddha Jump Over the Wall (the soup which was said to smell so good that the Buddha abandoned his meditation and jumped over the temple wall to sample it) and some other very interesting-sounding options like a pomegranate sweet and sour chicken. I can't wait to get back there to sample the rest of the menu.