The Mighty Spice Company

A couple of weeks ago, the nice people at The Mighty Spice Company sent me three of their chilled spice mixes to sample. Exciting stuff, this; I've not found anything similar to these fresh blends on sale in the UK. The Mighty Spice Company's offering is a really refreshing change from the oily, musty pastes and sauces you'll find on offer in the supermarket which taste vaguely of foreign - instead, these blends are made from fresh ingredients without fillers and additives (so they need to be kept refrigerated), and are really well-judged, with clean and subtle balances of flavour. They've been in development for two years, and you can really taste the effort that's gone into tweaking these mixtures to perfection.

Currently, the range includes a Szechwan mix, a Tandoori mix and a Thai Green mix. All three come with simple recipes on the side of the pack (recipes are also available on the Mighty Spice website), but the mixes are so flexible that you can (as, inevitably, I did - I'm very bad at following instructions) improvise around them very successfully. I was really chuffed to find that the mixes are comprehensive enough that I was able to make a positively fantastic stir-fry without having to add (and chop - hooray!) any ginger, garlic or other spices - and the balance of soy sauce and oyster sauce forming the background of the mix was spot on, so I didn't have to add any wet ingredients either. I made a lamb curry with the tandoori mix, some crushed tomatoes and coconut - especially good the next day, after a night in the fridge to let the flavours mingle, and again, it needed absolutely no additions to the very well-blended spice mix. The Thai mix was a bit milder than I would usually have chosen, but tasted green and fresh.

My favourite? Probably the Szechwan spice mix, which was loaded with Szechwan peppercorns. It's a good way into the spice for those of you who aren't familiar with it and its curious tongue-numbing (but not painful) heat, a sensation a little like a cross between a mint leaf and a chilli. In taste it's nothing like mint or chilli, but pleasantly citric. None of your syrupy, Chinese-sauce-inna-jar flavours here; this was a really bright, lively sauce that worked well with some chicken and sweet vegetables.

I'm sure it won't be long before you're able to find The Mighty Spice Company's products on sale in a supermarket chiller cabinet near you, but for now they're very new and are mostly available in London. You'll find the spice mixes stocked at Wholefoods Market, Selfridges, Harvey Nichols and several organic grocers - a complete list of stockists is available here. I'd heartily recommend you spend the £3.99 on one of their mixes for a professional, easy and hopelessly tasty supper. Brilliant stuff - thanks, Mighty Spice guys!

Delmonico's Restaurant, Financial District, NYC

America is a country where every third restaurant seems to be a steakhouse. I didn't want to overdo the steak, having watched Beverly Hills Cop as a child and taken that thing about your colon very seriously, so we decided on one steakish meal over the week we were in New York. This presented a problem - with so many steak joints on offer, which should I choose? There's Kobe Club, which reviews well but is amazingly expensive (their menu suggests that you order at least two of their 4 oz portions of Wagyu - but the cheapest 4 oz portion is $50, and with side dishes, a shrimp to balance on top of your steak, the very pricey starters, and supplements for any sauces involving ingredients like foie gras, marrow or truffles, it adds up very quickly). I want at least some money left in my wallet for clothes shopping while I'm in New York, so Kobe Club is off the list. Craftsteak also has an excellent reputation, but Tom Colicchio spreads himself awfully thin - he's currently involved in 13 restaurants across the United States, so it doesn't feel very special. Good steak is something so many restaurants here do - so I want a restaurant with something extra-interesting to it. Enter Delmonico's. (Turn your speakers off before clicking this link - there is intensely aggravating music.)

What's interesting about Delmonico's? Simple: it's the oldest continuously run restaurant in the US, and may be the first fine dining establishment in the whole country, having been established in 1827. Those pillars outside? Imported from Pompeii in the 19th century. This is where Lobster Newburg, Chicken a la King and Baked Alaska were invented; the restaurant also gave its name to the Delmonico steak, a cut served in restaurants all over the country. (They also claim to have invented Eggs Benedict, but this seems to be controversial.) Mark Twain has eaten here - so have Theodore Roosevelt, Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Tesla, Napoleon III and a positive galaxy of America's great and good. We booked for a Wednesday night, put on those clothes we'd been able to afford because we didn't go to Kobe Club, and got stuck in.

The dining room is very masculine; all dark leather and wood panelling, like a meaty gentlemen's club. Service was smiling and fantastically personal - my cocktails, including the most savoury and well-balanced Dirty Martini I've ever tasted, were constructed at the tableside in a silver shaker. The menu still includes some of the classic dishes from the restaurant's past, although I was disappointed that there were no Delmonico Potatoes - a gratin made from parboiled potatoes grated into long shreds with parmesan and nutmeg. That famous steak was there, though, along with the Lobster Newburg and Baked Alaska.

Dr W plumped for a Caesar salad to start with so he could fit in as much steak as possible later on. It was a good example, dressing clearly made in-house and strongly flavoured, with white anchovies interlaced on top. I went for the foie gras, dusted with crushed hazelnuts and grilled, then served hot with three fruity sauces. The crushed nut/foie combination is one that pops up more and more often these days, and it's a good one, the toasty richness of the nuts complimenting the buttery foie beautifully. This little lobe was nicely and neatly prepared, too; no stringy or bitter bits.

The Delmonico steak (a wet-aged, boneless ribeye) was thick, and served perfectly medium rare; it was gently crusted on the outside, the fat crisping and delicious, and marbling the whole piece. It was also enormous, weighing in at 20 oz, and I wasn't able to finish it, which made me extremely jealous of Dr W, whose salad decision was a good one which enabled him to absorb his entire steak into his person. Spinach and parmesan and something called "The Perfect Hash Browns" made for good sides, although I'd quibble with the "perfect" thing; they weren't particularly interesting or memorable.

It is a happy freak of biology that I appear to have been born with a separate stomach especially for dessert. I couldn't have packed another atom of beef in there, but Baked Alaska (two spoons, because Dr W was so full that tears were appearing in the corners of his eyes) sounded just the ticket. And where those hash browns hadn't lived up to their description, the Baked Alaska was pretty much divine. A piped hedgehog made from tens of caramelised meringue peaks surrounded a soft, but not melting centre of gorgeous, gorgeous banana-candy ice cream, sat on top of a piece of sponge studded with juicy pieces of apricots. Regular readers will know that I'm not much of a pudding person, but I would be perfectly happy to eat Delmonico's Baked Alaska and nothing else for...ooh...at least one meal every day.

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.

RUB BBQ, Chelsea, New York City

So in the end, I didn't update at all during my visit to New York - apologies if you were checking, but I hope you'll understand. This was my first trip to the city, and I found myself doing things a long way from my hotel room from the moment I closed the door every morning until I collapsed, exhausted, into the Kitano hotel's cloudlike embrace every night. Simply put, there is an awful lot of very entertaining stuff to do in New York, from the museums, the architecture, the shopping, the jazz - and the very, very good food - and I found myself much too busy enjoying myself to blog.

RUB BBQ (an acronym, this; spelled out, RUB means Righteous Urban Barbecue) is...well, righteous, and urban, and a barbecue joint. (208 W. 23rd St., New York, NY 10011, nr. Seventh Ave.) I do like restaurants which tell you what they do on the tin. This place is about Kansas City-style barbecue: fat, woodsmoke and the charred crispy bits best eaten when you are young and not prone to heart attacks. It's no-nonsense food, served up in no-nonsense style on waxed paper dishes with pickle chips and hunks of sweetly pappy Wonder Bread - a strangely good accompaniment for smoky, salty, spicy barbecue. Leave any dietary concerns at the door, because the best stuff on offer here is unshamedly fatsome and entirely lacking in vegetably vitamins.

The meat is freshly smoked daily in set quantities, and this sometimes leads to certain items running out surprisingly early in the day (on our first visit they'd already run out of burnt ends by 6pm). I'm not sure whether this is a dastardly ploy to get you back in the door in the hope of finding what you were after - if it is, it certainly worked on me.

There is an appetiser on the menu called BBQ Bacon Chunks. I like bacon, I like barbecue, and I am partial to the sort of food that comes in chunks, so this was a no-brainer. A waxed paper dish of triple-smoked, thumb-sized rectangles of obscenely fat belly pork turned up, cooked to a melting crisp. "Good God, these things must be bad for you," said Dr W, popping them in his mouth one by one in a sort of porky trance. "Mmmurgle," I agreed.

Burnt ends are the blackened, fatty end of a beef brisket, cooked until the fat metamorphoses into a charred and friable, tender magic. Portions here are large, and I am still not quite sure how I managed to absorb a whole plate of the things into my person, but the burnt ends were one of those things it's simply impossible to stop eating. Szechuan smoked duck was good, but not as good as the pork and beef on offer. Its mahogany, lacquered skin was simply gorgeous, all the fat underneath rendered out, but the meat was uninteresting, and not as moist as it could have been.

Table sauces include two barbecue sauces, one mild and one spicy, ketchup and vinegar. The pulled pork (see my recipe for pulled pork here) needed a good dollop of barbecue sauce to liven it up, but once it had been anointed was tender and tasty, with some lovely BCBs (Burnt Crispy Bits). Brisket from further up the joint than the burnt ends was leaner, and Dr W's favourite cut on offer. He tiled the tender slices on a piece of Wonder Bread, added some of that spicy barbecue sauce and ate the whole thing as a sort of heart-attack sandwich. What's going on here? Wonder Bread in its natural state is a soft, sugary abomination, but is weirdly delicious presented like this. Perhaps there is something in the rub.

Because if there is something in the rub, the rub itself is in everything. On every meat, and it also found its way into all the accompaniments we tried - onion strings were battered and fried, then sprinkled with the sweetly spicy rub. It flavoured the coleslaw (making it too sweet for my tastes - but you may wish to ignore what I have to say here, given that pieces of bacon fat the size of my thumb are to my tastes), was scattered all over the fries, and spiked the beans. Those beans beat me - they just tasted too much to enable us to eat more than about a spoonful each, and that rub really made them sweeter than I could manage.

Staggering out of RUB after our second visit, five times fatter than I was when I went in the first time, I found I had a greed-induced stitch in my side, and so stopped in a café to recover. Gazing out of the window, I locked eyes with Rupert Everett, craggily walking a dog. Glorious barbecue and surprise movie stars. I really like this city.

Helsinki cafés

Your daily eating schedule in Helsinki is going to be a bit different from what you're used to. Here, it's the norm to eat a simply gargantuan breakfast, then to skip lunch altogether or eat something very, very light in one of the city's cafés.

Most hotels offer a large buffet breakfast. Whenever I've been in Helsinki I've ended up at one of the Radissons in town. This visit found us at the Radisson SAS Seaside, about ten minutes' walk from the very centre of town. The hotel is also right next to a tram stop - €2 will buy you an hour's use of the city's tram/bus network, and a ticket can be purchased from the driver.

This hotel is less seaside than harbourside, but has extremely comfortable memory foam beds, clean laminate flooring in the rooms (marvellous for allergy sufferers) and great black-out curtains. This being Finland, there are also saunas, including two complimentary ones and one on the roof which can be rented by the hour for parties. Radissons always seem to offer great spreads for their buffet breakfasts, and we conscientiously filled up each morning on little sausages with sweet Finnish mustard, bacon, eggs, organic porridge (cloudberry, raspberry and strawberry jams and maple syrup were on hand), smoked salmon, several different crispbreads and rye breads, soused herring, cucumber both fresh and pickled, salads, continental meats, cheeses, yoghurt, muesli, smoothies, juices and vat upon vat of fresh coffee.

Coffee is good in this city - there seems to be a degree of national pride in serving a really good cup. The best I found (unfortunately, it's priced accordingly) was at Fazer, a café and bakers dating from the 1890s on Kluuvikatu. Fazer is great for the kind of light lunch that is typical here - get food from the counter and pay for it, then sit by the window to watch the crowds go by. We found open sandwiches (be aware that when you order a sandwich in Helsinki, it will be an open one) made from the bakery's own rye bread topped with concoctions like rare roast beef and tzatziki, or smoked salmon, capers and cream cheese. Pastries here are also a winner - I liked the Bebe, a tiny pink-iced oval of hollow pastry piped full of pureed fresh strawberries and whipped cream. When you've finished your meal, head over to the other side of the large room to pick up some chocolates, sweets and baked goods to take home with you.

Near Fazer you'll find Kämp Café at the Kamp Hotel (this is where I'd be staying if I was feeling a bit richer - there's a library, a glorious sweeping staircase leading up from the lobby and a palpable sense of history). You can sit outside on the Esplanadi in spring and summer - this is one of the nicest spots in the city for people-watching. There's a thoughtful wine list and excellent raw seafood. We really enjoyed the lime-spiked beef carpaccio, the wild mushroom risotto, a sweetly fresh king prawn and lemon open sandwich and an extraordinarily good club sandwich. Kämp Café is also open in the evenings for supper.

Kappeli, at the harbour end of Esplanadi, is worth a visit just for the building. It's a belle époque glass conservatory, overlooking the sea and Esplanadi's lovely avenue of trees. Again, the café is self-service. Try the smoked reindeer open sandwich and the excellent coffee. Desserts here are also good.

We also ate at Café Ekberg on Bulevardi. Ekberg has been serving pastries, salads and sandwiches since the 1850s - but although there is table service here, we found the service slow and rather rude (astonishing for Finland, where everyone is usually as nice as pie), the food...OK...and the prices rather high for what we were given. We went with friends, and my egg and anchovy open sandwich on rye bread was probably the best of the four lunches ordered (a chicken sandwich was, peculiarly, a sea of superheated Coronation Chicken on a slice of white bread). If you're an anchovy sort of person, anchovies are usually a good bet in Finland and elsewhere in Scandinavia. They're unlike the ones you can get in the UK and US. Scandinavian anchovies are sweet and delicately spiced, and match wonderfully with hard boiled eggs and rye bread. Ekberg still wins points with me for the profusion of nice old ladies in hats who shared the dining room with us.

I'll wrap this up now. I am suffering a dreadful craving for coffee.

Saaga, Helsinki

I'm afraid that this is the second review in less than a month that compels me to start with a wide-eyed appreciation of the toilets. The men's toilets, in this case - one of our friends came down the stairs of this Lappish restaurant, eyes full of bloodlust, and told me I absolutely had to go and have a look at the corridor of death outside the loo.

It's an Arctic taxidermist's heaven. A not very aerodynamic-looking snow grouse dangles from the ceiling, stubby wings at full stretch. A small stoat in its winter coat clings rigidly to a bough. A wolf stuck in mid-howl gazes glassily into the distance, and an elk's head (if it were mine there would be coats and hats hanging off the antlers) stares past a sad and very dead reindeer. Stiff ptarmigans point the way to the lavatory. A fox's tail, nailed to the wall sans fox, yearns for a Davy Crockett to take it on adventures; and it took us a while, but we finally identified the spotty carpet-thing with holes where there might be legs as the peelings of a seal. In the restaurant proper, a brown bearskin looks insulted as flambéed bear meatballs are delivered to diners, and a little shelf by our table was heaped with detached antlers.

The Lapps like their meat wild, big and preferably with a great big arrow sticking out of it. It's hard to object to animals as interior design when you're also eating them.

Saaga (Bulevardi 34 B, 00120 Helsinki) is that rarest of things, a rather touristy restaurant serving really great food. As usual in Helsinki, the menu is available in a number of languages, and the English version was charmingly poetic - where else will you find dishes called things like 'Fish of the Four Winds, Served on an Arctic Slate', or 'Hungry Like a Wolf'?

Your coat is taken by a gentleman in full Lappish costume (other examples of traditional dress are on display at the National Museum, but here they're actually wearing them), and you're invited to settle in with a drink. I asked for a Lappish Glimmer, one of those deadly concoctions that's mostly pure alcohol (in this case brandy and a cloudberry liqueur with a couple of cloudberries bobbing in among the ice cubes) but tastes completely innocuous. The Finns are good at booze. For starters, I went for fried vendace (my new favourite fish) with Granny's Pickled Cumbers. Granny's cucumbers are a dead ringer for the cucumber salad I blogged here last year, and arrived in a wooden bowl with some baby vendace, flour-dusted and deep-fried, and a sour cream dip. Whitefish a la Lake Nakkälänjäarvi (try saying that after a Lappish Glimmer) was a slice of moussey terrine with a dollop of vendace roe on top, everything garnished with plenty of dill.

Dr W and I ordered Hungry Like a Wolf as a main course - a slab of honed wood tiled with meat. Smoked reindeer shank, elk fillet and a juicy reindeer fillet were bathed in a slightly gamey reindeer sauce, with turnip rösti and roast red onion prepared with birch tar on the side. Other main courses were just as spectacularly presented, with one of our friends being presented with a hunk of lamb (the wimp) on a wood and metal mesh box, a little flame burning away inside. Someone ordered the inevitable flambéed bear meatballs, and I begged a mouthful. I'm still feeling slightly guilty every time I catch the eye of my teddy bear, but these were great - bear is a marbled, slightly sweet meat with loads of flavour, and is only available in a limited number of restaurants in the city. A friend who moved out to Helsinki from England a few years ago tells me that there only a certain number of bears can be hunted for food every year, and that restaurants serving the meat require a special licence. If you can get past childhood memories of Pooh, Yogi and Balloo, it's well worth trying, and the cepes, mashed potato and game sauce this came with were fabulous.

More of the baked cheese with cinnamon cream and cloudberries we tried at Salve was on offer. This time I tried pancakes (more blini than crepe) with more cloudberries and a gorgeously smooth and creamy spruce shoot ice cream. Tart cranberries are also on offer here in hot caramel sauce, served in a bowl made of ice. I can't get beyond the mouth-pucker you get with raw cranberries, and nor could anyone at our table.

We'd been drinking Lappin Kulta beer throughout the meal (I am assured this has nothing to do with rabbit-worship), and had become fairly cheerful. Things descended into a boozy mist when I ordered a coffee with brandy in a Lappish kuksa, a birch cup honed completely smooth. A kuksa is velvet-smooth to the touch, and a wonderfully comforting fit in the hand. This was really a mug full of brandy with the barest splash of coffee, and the woody cup gave up a particular and delicious flavour to the drink. I recall starting the drink with relish. I don't remember finishing it, and the headache the next morning was only alleviated by twenty minutes in the sauna and a lot of cold water.

Bellevue, Helsinki

The Katajanokka area of Helsinki - this translates as Juniper Point in English, which I think is rather splendidly romantic - is where you'll find the Russian Orthodox cathedral, some gorgeous Art Nouveau buildings, and the city's oldest Russian restaurant. Bellevue (Rahapajankatu 3, 00160 Helsinki) opened in 1917, a year which found a lot of Russians looking for an out-of-town venue for lugubrious vodka and bear-stew parties, and has been serving traditional dishes ever since. The menu says that this place would never have survived so long without a thorough understanding of the 'joys and melancholies of the Russian soul'. I can see what they mean. The food was so tasty that it made me want to weep uncontrollably.

Oddly, you're greeted at the door by a signed photograph of Barbara Bush (melancholy). Inside is a cosy clutch of dining rooms, decorated in sombre colours with paintings of troikas on the walls, the sound of Russian bass voices (more melancholy) hanging woefully in the air as you drink your grain alcohol (joy). The menu - there is an English-language one for those, like me, whose Russian is even worse than their Finnish - is packed with old Russian favourites like a borscht thick with grated beetroot, wild boar tartar and potroast bear.

I've been wanting to try vendace roe since we've been in Helsinki. The northern European vendace is not the same as the fish of the same name you find in parts of England; it's a whitefish which was called the 'favourite fish of the Tsars', and its roe is particularly prized. My serving of apricot-coloured roe turned up in a little lacquered wooden bowl painted with rowan berries, alongside bowls of smetana (a fermented cream a bit like rich soured cream) and sweet red onion. The blini that arrived to go with the roe was a monster - about five inches across and half an inch deep, made from a floatingly light buckwheat batter and sizzling in literally heart-stopping amounts of aromatic butter. Joyful tastebuds, melancholy arteries. Vendace roe has a delicate flavour, less salty than most other fish roes you'll find on tables Russian and otherwise, and was richly gorgeous glopped all over the blini with generous amounts of smetana and onion.

You'll find a recipe for Chicken Kiev on this site, and it's interesting to compare it with Bellevue's more authentically Russian (and rather more attractive) version - they provide the recipe here. This Kiev is plump and juicy. The waiter stabs it with a knife at the table for you, and a simply amazing amount of lemony butter leaks out into the mildly curried rice on the plate. A peach chutney marries up very nicely with the rich, butter-swimming chicken breast. I wasn't able to finish mine; especially after all the butter in the blini, I found I was in danger of keeling over (melancholy) from the sheer richness of it all. Fortunately, Dr W is like a Jacob's Cream Cracker in his ability to soak up vast amounts of butter (joy, I suppose), and happily ate anything I'd left.

All this left me unable to face anything very challenging for dessert, so I asked for the Russian tea tray. A glass of pale, black tea in a silver holder arrived, alongside some strawberries and biscuits, and a silver pot of raspberry jam. 'Put it in your tea', said the lady serving me. I assumed this was another Russian melancholy joy, and did what she said.

Tea with jam is, it turns out, a bloody marvellous idea, and I have no idea why it's not precipitated further west. (See? Joy at the discovery that there's something you can do to make tea even nicer, and melancholy when you realise that there's no way anybody back home is going to believe you when you tell them how good it is.) Raspberry jam is really, really good in tea, being rather tart as well as sweet, and it turned the little glass of steaming tea into something like distilled joy when compared with those melancholy dried fruit teas you can buy at vast expense in branches of Whittards back home.

Filled with joy and melancholy, we walked back to our hotel alongside the waterfront, torn between kicking our heels and throwing ourselves into the Baltic.

Salve, Helsinki

So here I am in Helsinki, enjoying fantastic Scandinavian breakfasts and icy-clear sunshine. It's about eight years since I was last here, and I don't know why I left it so long; I love this city, with its mixture of deco and modernist architecture, its lovely tree-lined boulevards, the curiously Baltic quality of light and wonderful, wonderful food.

Salve (Hietalahdenranta 11, 00180 Helsinki) is a quiet-looking little joint, opposite one of Helsinki's harbours. Walking past on the way to the adjacent flea market, you'd never guess that this is, in fact, one of the city's oldest restaurants. Salve is a traditional sailors' pub, which has been serving its speciality, fried herrings and mashed potato, for more than a century.

We visited early on a Sunday evening, expecting a relatively quiet restaurant. It was, in fact, packed, and we were lucky to find a table at the back, next to the bar. There's maritime memorabilia all over the place; huge, waxed ropes dangling here and there, a Captain Haddock-type effigy by the door, and little wooden model boats in full sail hanging from the ceiling. The menu is in six languages. This is a boon for those of you who, like me, struggle with Finnish. I can reliably pronounce only a handful of words in Finnish, including hei (hello), kiitos (thank you), kippis (cheers), olut (beer) and sauna (sauna, unsurprisingly). You'll find that this very small vocabulary will serve you very well over here, where beer, saunas and extreme friendliness are the order of the day.

There are only a few starters on the menu - the main event is the herring, which heads up a list of mostly fishy main courses. The herring is delivered to the restaurant fresh from the boats you can see bobbing about across the road. It's cleaned and prepared in the restaurant's kitchens, then dredged in a savoury flour mixture, fried and piled on top of a heap of mashed potato. Although Helsinki has its months of darkness in the winter, its springs herald very long, startlingly bright days of sunshine, and the flavour of the potatoes is all the more rich and concentrated for this, especially at this time of year.

These are enormous portions, and even with the ravening hunger that results from a recent bout of flu and mild jetlag, I couldn't finish mine.

Desserts are along traditional lines, with an emphasis on dairy and berries. There's a free-for-all in this country on berries; you can pick what you want unless you're in certain parts of Lapland, where the cloudberries are particularly prized and are rationed. Cloudberries, a yellow fruit a bit like a raspberry on steroids, are particularly delicious, and I ordered a dish of sweet baked cheese in a cinnamon cream with cloudberry jam. This is a traditional dish that you'll find in most restaurants serving Finnish cuisine. The cheese resembles halloumi in texture, but is only very barely salted, and it takes on a toothsome sweetness when prepared with cream and a dusting of cinnamon. Dr W went for a glass of frozen cranberries in butterscotch syrup - another very typical dessert. I'm one of those people who find cranberries extremely bitter, especially when raw, but if you're someone who likes cranberry juice, you'll probably enjoy this dish; and you're likely to find it in most restaurants serving Finnish cuisine.

Salve is a traditional and inexpensive restaurant brimming with style and local custom. Use an acidic cup of the excellent coffee to settle your stomach before you waddle back to your hotel, and congratulate yourself on having eaten a piece of real Finnish history.

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.

Easter egg

Hotel Chocolat sent me one of their thick-shelled eggs to sample - you can win one in the GD/Hotel Chocolat Easter competition. This year's egg was called You crack me up, and the Hotel Chocolat people appear to have realised since last year that I am, under the wrinkled surface, about twelve, and so respond much better to their slightly less adult offerings. This egg was brilliant - rather than trying for grown-up flavours like last year's liqueur chocolates, it was filled with smiley-faced pralines and solid chocolate chicks and bunnies. Enough to bring a smile to even the most leathery food-blogger's face.

Once again, the shell is almost comically thick. (This is great - it's my favourite bit.) Half is made from Hotel Chocolat's 40% cocoa solid milk chocolate, which is creamy, malty and not too sweet. The other is milk chocolate with a swirl of white, and both are so thick and chunky that you'll need a good bit of molar action to deal with them.

Two bags full of bunnies and chicks for the slaughter (I can't be the only person who eats things like this head first - and I found myself picking the eyes off the little Humpty guys and eating those before going for the praline inside) are also inside the packaging. Hotel Chocolat's packaging is always really good fun, and strangely classy - I was given a box of their bits and bobs by some friends at Christmas with a lovely magnetised lid which I found myself keeping to put things in when I'd polished off the chocolates. The origami-complicated box with this egg was beautiful, and did a great job of protecting the chocolate shell inside. Hotel Chocolat have a great range on offer this year - enter the competition, and have a look at their eggly offerings for 2008 online.

Typhoon, Portland, OR

Remember Lotus of Siam in Las Vegas? Gourmet Magazine had heaped hyperbolic praise on it, and called it the USA's best Thai restaurant. We had a good, but not shockingly good meal there in December, but I left unconvinced that the continent lacked any Thai places better than this. What do you know - it's barely two months later, and I've found somewhere that beats it hollow.

We visited Typhoon's glossy, vampy Broadway branch at the Lucia hotel in Portland (tel. 503 224 8285). The Lucia is a very stylish boutique joint - all modern murals on the toilet doors, architectural flower arrangements, frosted glass, leather, lacquer and velvet. Typhoon's styling sits well here, and the restaurant was busy both nights we visited (be sure to book).

Service is tight and charming. We'd asked for a booth when booking our first meal at Typhoon, but arrived to find that the booth that had been earmarked for us was still full (writhingly so) of a couple who were maybe enjoying their meal a little too much. No problem for the hostess - she put us at what she and the waitress referred to as 'the Mafia table', a great big booth meant to seat about six, on a platform commanding one end of the restaurant, with a great people-watching view. Thoughtfully, both places were set so that we were next to each other on the side of the giant table with the view.

If it's your first visit, it's absolutely essential that you choose something interesting from the extensive tea list (there's a link to a pdf of the full list at the bottom of the linked page) and that you order the Miang Kum for your starter. It's the house special, and a rare dish that I've not found in any other Thai restaurant. Miang Kum is a peasant-style dish consisting of freshly roast peanuts (not a hint of bitterness here - the peanuts had been roasted that evening); tiny preserved shrimp; little cubes of ginger; slivers of bird's eye chilli; miniature dice of lime, flesh, skin and all; shallot pieces; and freshly toasted, shredded coconut. You take a pinch of each ingredient and wrap it in a fresh spinach leaf, daubed with some of chef Bo Kline's sweet signature sauce, and pop the little parcel in your mouth. An astonishing burst of flavours results - bitter, sweet, salty, sour, and deeply savoury all at once. I roared through the shrimp rather faster than the other ingredients, but our attentive waitress went straight to the kitchen to find some more - and when we came back later in the week and ordered the Miang Kum again, she recognised us and brought out an extra bowl of the shrimp. There's service.

This dish sets the quality for the rest of the meal. Ingredients are fresh and bright, and sourcing is impeccable - the prawns at Typhoon are wild, not farmed, and only cuts like tenderloin and sirloin are served. "How," asked Dr W, "are they making things taste this much without MSG?" I can only guess that there was magic in the fish sauce.

Almost everything we ate on both visits was a standout. Papaya salad was clean, fresh and full of zip. The house fried rice arrived looking unexceptional - but once in the mouth was nearly good enough to make me give up cooking. Pineapple rice, full of curry spices and the fresh fruit, could have made a generous meal on its own. Eggplant Lover made the most of this vegetable's ability to soak up flavours (black bean in this case) and of its gorgeously velvety texture, contrasting beautifully with chunks of tofu. The larb, lip-numbingly hot, was much better than the Lotus of Siam version. Dr W ordered half a five-spice roast duck with buns from a specials list and hasn't stopped talking about it since. The beef with grapes was inspired. And neither meal left us with room for pudding.

Sometimes I look around myself in Cambridge and wonder what the hell we're doing. Perhaps our problem is high property prices making restaurant pitches unaffordable to everybody but the mega-chains like Wagamama, All Bar One, Pizza Express, Pret a Manger and Subway. This doesn't excuse the downright lousy quality of some of our independent restaurants, though - we're particularly weak on good Asian places. We don't have any good, well-priced food of the sort that Portland seems to offer several times on every city block. Don't the English care about what they're eating? If you're lucky enough to be in Portland, grab the opportunity to visit Typhoon and congratulate yourself on being in a city where identikit cardboard meals aren't standard.

Andina, Portland, OR

Andina (1314 NW Glisan, Portland 97209, tel. 503 228 9535) is the only Peruvian restaurant I've ever come across. It is, at the time of writing, one of Portland's most popular and fashionable restaurants. I should have paid attention to this fact and booked rather than just rolling up on a Thursday night in the hope of finding a free table.

There wasn't one, so Dr W and I ended up in the bar area, sitting hip-to-hip on a window bench at a very small table. Surprisingly, this seating arrangement turned out to be absolutely delightful; a man in a Panama hat played the guitar and sang so close to our seats it felt like he was serenading us; we tiled our table with two rounds of tapas; we were able to squish up against one another very pleasantly; and we came home filled with proximity- and music-engendered lust (and oysters). All the same, I don't recommend the bench if you're dining with anybody whose thighs and manly ribs you do not feel comfortable being pressed against.

Peruvian food is completely new to me. Almost all the South American food I'd tasted to date had been based around corn - Mexican tamales, nachos and a million meaty, tomato-y things wrapped in tortillas. There was the Chilean place in Madrid years ago, which I hope is non-typical, where we had rice cooked with some tomato puree, some mince, and a fried egg. Here at Andina the starches are quite different, and the emphasis switches from meat to seafood. Peruvian (or what this restaurant is calling Novoandean) food has some distinct Japanese influences as well, alongside some really interesting pre-Colombian flavours. It makes for a mixture of flavours you'll be hard-pushed to find anywhere else. There are also some extremely handsome waiters. I like this place.

Your meal opens with a moist quinoa bread served with three ajíes, or Peruvian spicy salsas. The passion fruit and habañero one in particular is to die for - and these have enough kick to prompt you to explore the exhaustive drinks list.

Around the bar, bottles of rum lie on their sides, infusing with fruits to the accompaniment of salsa music. There are some superb cocktails on offer here (Portland seems to be a great town for cocktails), and we particularly enjoyed a frozen something called Guanabana...do doo...do doo do, which was made with banana-infused rum, guanabana puree, nutmeg and gloriously creamy almond milk. If you're not on the booze, you'll find yourself well catered for, with some fresh juices and concoctions like chica morada, made from purple corn, lime, pinapple and sugar syrup.

Potatoes, of course, make up a goodly proportion of Andean carbs. I wasn't expecting them to provide colour as well, though, so the lurid violet of the Causa Morada, a cake of mashed purple potato sandwiched with smoked trout and flavoured with key lime juice, came as a real surprise. This is a visual treat, and tasted absolutely great. (Portland Food and Drink, a website I found immensely helpful in making restaurant choices in the city, has a great photo of the octopus version here.) I found the tortilla (a thick potato and onion omelette) a bit stodgy and certainly less exciting, but Dr W disagreed with me and wolfed the whole thing.

There were several oyster varieties on offer, most from the nearby Pacific coast, alongside a few Atlantic ones. We went for the local Kumamoto oysters. These are one of my favourite oysters; small, but with a deeply fluted shell, they're juicy but not large enough to be snotty. Zingy ingredients like mangos, radish, shitake mushrooms, ginger, cucumber and more of those chillies made up the pisco rocoto, chalaquita, mango-radish and nikkei salsas served alongside, all a great foil for the richness of the little oysters.

Ají de huacatay pops up in several places on the menu, and the allergy-aware waiters will warn you that this is a peanut-based sauce. It makes for a spicy dip for deliciously fresh prawns coated with smashed quinoa and deep fried. (This is an unbelievably toothsome, crispy way to 'breadcrumb' food, and has inspired me to ignore my deep-seated dislike of pretend-doctor Gillian McKeith, the awful poo lady, and buy a pack of quinoa to experiment with.) The
ají de huacatay also serves as a dip for the very savoury beef-heart kabobs - slim strips of the flavourful, chewy muscle of the heart, marinated and grilled on sticks.

Chorizo was good, but I kind of wished I'd ordered something else - I love the stuff, but it wasn't very new or exciting compared to some of the other things on the menu. Musciame de Atun (which I think was meant to come with some kind of sauce, but which arrived naked) was something I actively disliked: a cured tuna, dried and almost gamey, presented in slices. This is more likely to be my problem than the restaurant's, though; I've never found a cured tuna I have enjoyed - and Dr Weasel loved it.

Everybody's favourite South American ingredient, chocolate, stars on the dessert menu and in some great after-dinner drinks. The Torta de Chocolate was what I've always imagined the River Cafe cookbook's infamous Chocolate Nemesis (a mysteriously non-working recipe which has ruined many dinner parties) should have tasted like. This made me giddy. Dense, not too sweet, unbelievably creamy, moist and rich, it's worth a flight to Portland just to sample it. I rounded off the meal with a boozy hot chocolate drink.

Andina deserves its wall-full of awards. If you're visiting for the first time, I'd recommend doing what we did and going for the tapas rather than the large plates, so you can get a good sampling of the unusual flavours on offer. There are vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free menus on offer as well, so you can take your picky friends.

Chetco River Inn, Brookings, Oregon

Sometimes, amazing things just fall into your hands. We had to make our way from Portland down to Lake Tahoe a couple of weeks ago, and needed a staging post to split the journey up into two (very long) days' drive. I grabbed a map, found a town about halfway between the two places, looked it up in a guidebook and booked a night in the first likely-looking B&B.

I wish I'd booked a whole week.

The Chetco River Inn (21202 High Prairie Road, Brookings, OR, 97415 - email chetcoriverinn@hughes.net, tel. (541) 251-0087) is an utterly charming bed and breakfast in the middle of one of the Pacific coast's temperate rainforests. These forests are magical: so damp that the all the trees are festooned with mosses and sharp-tongued ferns, they teem with wildlife. To reach the inn, you'll need to drive 20 miles down a narrow road, un-metalled in places, with dripping trees overhanging the roadway and the pristine Chetco river bubbling alongside. The inn itself is perfectly positioned in glorious isolation by the river, and is popular with botanists, with hikers and with fishermen, who arrive for the salmon run in the autumn and stay over the winter for the steelheads. If you are lucky, you'll find fish fresh from the river on the inn's dinner table.

We arrived just in time for supper, and Sandra and Clay, the owners, were waiting for us at the inn with their Scottie dogs and a vat of steaming French Onion soup. We found ourself enjoying this and a beautifully prepared, enormous prime rib with a fishing group, who shared their wine (Oregon's Pinot Noirs are particularly good, and we had a great time sampling them) with us in return for some of the microbrewery beer we'd brought down from Portland. Sandra's freshly made banana ice cream was a rich and custardy end to the very generous meal.

We'd booked the cottage at the inn, a separate building only a few years old with accommodation for four. (These photos are taken about twenty paces from the cottage's front door.) This lovely little cabin will sleep two downstairs, where there is a large jacuzzi and well-stocked bathroom; and two in a wonderfully comfortable king-sized bed up on a mezzanine level, overlooking the living area and kitchen. We had the place to ourself, and had one of the most romantic evenings we've ever experienced, falling asleep to the light flickering from the log stove which heats the cottage, and the sound of the dripping trees and night birds.

The weather in the Siskiyou National Forest is always wet but wonderfully atmospheric, with rains for most of the winter - temperate rainforests do not freeze in the cold months, and you'll find surprisingly warm, sunny days in the middle of the coldest months - and mists in the cool summer. We got up before dawn for an early breakfast so that we could watch the steel-grey, winter light rise over the river, the clouds boiling and rolling off the forest. Sandra and Clay prepare a breakfast of legendary proportions. A sugar-dusted, maple syrup-soaked Dutch baby pancake, sausages, delicious home-fried potatoes and gallons of good coffee and juice set us up for a walk along the riverside. In a couple of hour's gentle stroll along the shingle we'd seen an otter, an elk and a simply astonishing selection of birds. (Sandra informs me that the otters are surprisingly tame, and that summer guests who swim in the river, which is the United States' cleanest, will often find the otters swimming alongside them.) A short drive away you'll find Oregon's exceptionally scenic Pacific coast, where the beaches are often deserted, while a little further south are the giant redwood forests.

This place is paradise. I'm already planning our next trip.

Michael Mina, Bellagio, Las Vegas

I am a sap. An uncultivated one, at that. Our last day in Las Vegas saw me standing outside Bellagio and bawling my eyes out when the fountains danced in the sun to the Star Spangled Banner, making rainbows appear in the spray.

God Save the Queen has never had this effect on me.

Bellagio is one of my very favourite casinos in Las Vegas. Dr W finds it a bit too busy, especially at night, so we stay at the quieter Mandalay Bay, but we do a lot of our eating at Bellagio. A foodie could easily stay at Bellagio for a week and not feel any need to step outside the building. Both Le Cirque and Picasso have four AAA diamonds; Jasmine is one of Vegas's top Chinese restaurants (charmingly, all the dishes at Jasmine are priced at some dollars and 88 cents, 88 being an extremely auspicious number which represents long life and prosperity). Prime is an exceptional steakhouse; Jean Phillipe kicked off the new Vegas vogue for fabulous French pastries and houses the world's largest chocolate fountain. There are another five or so classy restaurants I've not tried; all this on top of one of the city's very best buffets; Petrossian, which offers caviar and high tea; and a few more casual cafés.

Michael Mina is Chef Mina's flagship restaurant in a city where he runs four of the things. I have no idea how he manages to assure quality across all of his restaurants, but he works it all with some style - no trip to Vegas is complete for me without at least one visit to his Stripsteak (Mandalay Bay); and his two MGM Grand outposts (Seablue and Nob Hill) attract stellar reviews.

I was looking for somewhere really special where we could eat our Christmas meal - although Vegas largely ignores the holiday, some restaurants (Picasso among them) close their doors for Christmas day, so booking can be a little complicated. Happily, Michael Mina was taking reservations. I'll admit to a little trepidation - would service and cooking be as good as usual on Christmas Day, when people would rather be with their families? As it turned out, the answer was a very delicious yes. We both selected the Cookbook Tasting Menu, made up of recipes from Michael Mina: The Cookbook(full of things you're unlikely to cook at home because black cod, small and succulent lobsters, fresh truffles, raw quail eggs, fresh foie gras and Kobe beef are probably not available at your local corner shop). An additional $35 will also secure you a signed copy of the book. I turned the offer down; near my baggage limit already, I couldn't afford the extra weight (and I'm cheap). Although Mina's particular speciality is fish, there is plenty of meat available on both the tasting menus (three tasting menus were on offer on the day we visited, one vegetarian) and on the a la carte menu.

The day's amuse bouche was a carrot and curry soup - simple but very delicious. Michael Mina's breads are always a work of art, and the Agen prune and black pepper buns were no exception.

Tuna tartar is mixed at the table, requiring two servers. Tiny dice of garlic, jalapeño and apple were mixed into the exceptionally fresh tuna, with the yolk of a quail egg, apple, mint chiffonade and pine nuts.

As usual, I had to ask for a non-lobster alternative for the lobster course. (Anaphylaxis is always embarrassing in public.) Our server, who was so helpful throughout the meal that I wanted to take him home with me and give him the vacuum cleaner, suggested swapping it out for any course from the other tasting menu. This is always an excellent sign in a restaurant (some places will just give you a grudging bowl of the soup of the day, which is utterly depressing when your dining partner is chomping through a perfect hunk of truffled claw-meat). The lobster pot pie is one of Mina's signature dishes, and Dr W holds that it's the best lobster dish he's ever tried. The pastry lid is scored and lifted off for you at the table, and I can tell you it smells about as good as Dr W says it tastes. My substitute course was a crisp-skinned black sea bass with scallop tempura in a red wine jus with cauliflower purée and wild mushrooms. The myriad different but complementary things going on in this dish were pure Mina - and the scallop, barely cooked but crisply enrobed in tempura, was uniquely sweet and delicate.

My favourite course was the black cod in miso (sadly a million times more delicate than my own pretty darn good miso-glazed salmon, which is why Michael Mina is a millionaire chef who owns 11 restaurants and I am only a moderately successful food blogger). This is another Mina million-things-at-once dish; it came with enoki, shitake and something my notebook claims as 'mystery mushroom', a soft ravioli (raviolus?) filled with a Chinese shrimp and scallop mixture, all sat in a dark and savoury mushroom consommé on a bed of pak choi.

Rib-eye Rossini was up next. Rib eye is, apparently, Mina's favourite cut of steak. It's tender but comes from an area close to the bone; a good piece is gorgeously marbled and has all the flavour that comes from the proximity of that bone. The foie gras on top was seared to perfection. (Fans of this preparation will either be amused or horrified to learn that elsewhere in the city, at Hubert Keller's Burger Bar and Fleur de Lys, you can order a Kobe Rossini burger, prepared with truffles, dark red wine and shallot jus, and foie gras, approximately like a steak Rossini, for $60. I have never sampled it - Kobe's too soft to make a decent burger from and anyway, the whole thing sounds like a postmodern Las Vegas step too far for me.)

A trio of Mina's signature desserts featured the menu's only nod to that Las Vegas postmoderism - a root beer float. Dr W doesn't like root beer, but he slurped this down like a baby craving mother's milk. Fizzy, icy mother's milk. Three of the best chocolate and pecan cookies to pass your lips also nestle on the plate, next to a chocolate fondant so good that the sale of someone's soul must have been involved somewhere.

An interesting conversation went on at the table next to us. The lady there told her waiter she'd not found a good coffee yet in Las Vegas (I would have pointed her at Bouchon or Jean Philippe). Her waiter said that this has much to do with the city's awful tap water - tap water that is so chlorinated and oddly sweet that I find it hard to drink. He talked about the new espresso machine in the restaurant, the filtered water and the special blend and roast, and told her that if she didn't like her coffee it would be on the house.

When she had finished her first espresso, she ordered another double.

So we, of course, ordered coffees, and they were excellent. The petits fours were a real treat - I much prefer an old-fashioned sampling of petits fours to the boring plate of posh chocolates that so many restaurants seem to be offering these days.

So then. How do I top this next Christmas?

Bouchon, Las Vegas

I have a sense that Thomas Keller, one of America's best chefs and a man with impeccable style and taste, doesn't really do the Vegas thing. Bouchon, his Las Vegas outpost, feels positively out of time and place in this very modern, very garish city. By hiding it in a little-travelled corner of the sprawling Venetian Casino Resort, he's successfully made it feel private, out-of-the-way and oddly genuine in a city full of fibreglass souks serving sushi. (It really is out-of-the-way, in a corner of the Venezia tower; from the car park you will need to take two separate elevators, and if you're approaching from the casino you will have to swallow your pride and ask for directions, because it's near-impossible to locate otherwise.)

Bouchon is a glorious Palladian room housing a Lyonnaise bistro (or 'bouchon'), all marble-topped tables, encaustic tiles, sweeping arched windows, a pewter bar and pristine white-aproned serving staff. The restaurant has won a number of awards, many for its breakfast, and made Anthony Bourdain spit with rage over the French fries (of all things), which he admitted were better than the ones he serves at Les Halles. It serves what is, for my money, absolutely the best breakfast you will find in the city - we made a point of walking the two and a half miles from Mandalay Bay each time we went in order to burn as many morning calories as possible before arriving.

Breakfast diners are given complimentary butter, jam and an epi of freshly baked bread. Bouchon's bakery has a giant reputation, and you're well advised to sample the pastries on offer at the top of the menu alongside the excellent bread. Pains au chocolat are a beautiful example - hundreds of impossibly fine layers of flaky croissant dough, beautifully crisp outside and meltingly tender within, coiled around a stick of bitter chocolate - just begging to be dipped in your coffee. Even that coffee is something special; Chef Keller has selected the blend of four beans from all over the world, and it's a beautiful, dark, chocolatey roast, fantastic with those pastries.

We used to live in Paris before we got married, and I haunted patisseries like Angelina, Laduree and Hédiard. I am utterly alarmed to find better pastries than were available in any of the famous Paris names in a place like Las Vegas. My favourite pastry was probably this cheese Danish - a cloud of sweetened cream cheese on the lightest, flakiest, melting-est Danish base I've ever encountered.

Breakfast entrées include Dr W's favourite, the Bouchon French Toast. This is prepared bread pudding style - a tower of hot, custardy brioche, studded with jewels of cooked apple, drizzled with maple syrup and garnished with thin, thin slices of raw apple. If held at gunpoint, I couldn't choose between the amazingly light and flavourful boudin blanc with beurre noisette and scrambled egg (the only quibble I had over a few meals at Bouchon - these eggs weren't among the best I've eaten, being rather dry and hard) and the croque madame, which oozes glorious bechamel and Gruyère. That croque madame comes with the pommes frites which made Tony Bourdain enter a deep depression, and they're very good indeed. They're dry, crisp, fluffy inside, and hard to stop eating. But for French fry perfection in Las Vegas I recommend that you visit Stripsteak, a Michael Mina restaurant at Mandalay Bay, where the trio of duck fat fries (always served as an amuse bouche, and also available as a side dish) - one pot with paprika dusting and a barbecue sauce, one with truffles and a truffle aïoli, and one with herbs and a home-made ketchup - are far and away the best I've ever eaten.

Bouchon always offers a few daily specials on the blackboard. Peekytoe crab hash with onion confit, a poached egg and hollandaise was, according to the lady at the next table, 'Perfect. Gorgeous.' Dr W's tomato, bacon and spinach omelette with sharp cheddar was a simple preparation presented brilliantly. And Keller's quiches are justifiably famous - tender, moist and delicious, with a brittle, short crust.

Service here was charming and unobtrusive. On each visit, our waiters were very happy to answer questions (even rather technical ones about the sourcing of ingredients), and refilled coffee and water unobtrusively.

As you've probably gathered by looking at the number of dishes mentioned above, we didn't feel much like eating breakfast anywhere else once we'd eaten our first Bouchon meal. Somehow, we didn't manage to make it to the restaurant for an evening meal - I'm leaving supper at Bouchon as a treat for our next visit to Vegas, which is probably my favourite city for eating in the world.

I'd like to buy the world a Coke...

...because seriously, most of you are drinking total garbage. I spent half an hour today subjecting my digestive system to a foaming, fructose-laden onslaught of bubbles, colourants and aromatic aldehydes, all in the name of helping you, dear reader, avoid some of the worst the world has to offer in sodas and mixers. I am now nearing diabetic coma and peeing for all I am worth.

Those of you who have driven down the Las Vegas Strip before can't have failed to notice the hundred-foot Coca Cola bottle nestling (for Vegas) unobtrusively next to the squatting green mega-casino that is MGM Grand. The giant bottle houses a discount show tickets booth and Everything Coca Cola. This is a place (optimistically referred to as a 'museum') mostly devoted to Coca Cola merchandise - if it is your dearest wish to be clothed from head to foot in Coke-branded nylon and festooned with Coke pins and magnets, Everything Coca Cola will be right up your alley. Up on the first floor, there's a bar where you can order the obvious in something called a Collectible Heritage Bottle and sip it through a straw while watching Japanese tourists take photos of one another in the arms of a fibreglass polar bear. The bar also offers one of America's strangest tasting menus - a selection of 16 'International Flavors'. These are drinks produced by the Coca Cola company and sold in places far away. The sort of places where you should be very, very careful when ordering something wet to go with your meal.

We started with Lilt, from the UK. I'm familiar with this stuff; my Grandma used to keep a fridge-full of it, and it's sweet, but not bad - an orange-tinged soda which tastes approximately of grapefruit and pineapple. Kin Cider from Ireland was also inoffensive. It's essentially what we Brits call lemonade; a clear, fizzy, lemon-flavoured drink; Kinley Lemon from Israel was another lemonade, this time slightly cloudy and sharpy citric. South African Stoney Ginger Beer was also cloudy, with a pleasantly gingery kick - very different from Krest Gingerale from Israel, which was a lavatorial colour, packed no heat and ached with blandness. Mezzo Mix is German, and appears to be a mildly spiced sort of cross between a cola and a lemonade. I'd actually consider buying this to cook a ham in; it was less sweet than Coke and had a really good balance of spices. And Fanta Blackcurrant from Hong Kong is really very good indeed; it's flat, and not too sweet, like a very dilute glass of Ribena (a British blackcurrant cordial which most of us toted around in flasks at school).

Things started to go wrong with the eldritch green Fanta Melon, also from Israel. I don't know what the Israelis are doing to their melons, but they should stop immediately. VegitaBeta from Japan was flat, orange, and tasted of ghastly mystery. China's Smart Apple was a glass of apple-smelling nuclear waste; Smart Watermelon was bright orange and very similar to something I had washed my hands with at Circus Circus the day before while reminiscing about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Unprompted, I do not think I would have applied the word 'smart' to either drink, but clearly Coca Cola's marketing people know better.

Passionfruit from Argentina was lurid but actually pretty tasty, and reflected its name (amazing, this, given how little some of the other drinks resembled their suggested ingredients). Mexico's Lift Apple was the colour of nicely oxidised apple juice, and was delightfully unassuming when compared to the Smart Apple, which I can still taste somewhere deep in my digestive tract. Central America started to get seriously weird with Costa Rica's Fanta Kolita. I was under the impression (thanks to a bleary night with Wikipedia trying to work out what on earth Hotel California is about) that a colita was the flowering head of a cannabis plant, but the orange stuff in the glass appeared to be much less exotic - a Latin version of Scotland's truly awful Irn Bru, which is advertised in the UK, with good reason, as being made out of girders. Simba Guarana from Paraguay was also downright alarming: a heavy sarsparilla fizz the colour of weak tea.

All this pales into an insignificant froth when compared to the quinine-laced horror which, according to the Coca Cola-clad barstaff, Italians drink voluntarily. I would be unsurprised if they're using this stuff in Guantanamo Bay to force confessions. Beverly looks totally innocuous. It's clear and fizzy, like an alluring glass of Perrier water. It tastes of death. Sugary, but chemotherapy-bitter death, a bit like chewing on the icing-frosted pith of a pomelo from hell. I checked with the staff that our drink had not been swapped out for poison by a humourist in the kitchen. They shook their heads sagely and said that sophisticated Romans drink Beverly as a delicious aperitif, presumably to set themselves up for an evening's pizza, romance and street-fighting.

Today I discovered that the world has still not learned to sing in perfect harmony. Some of us like our drinks overpoweringly sweet. Others like them flat. Others still like violent fizz and medicinal flavours. But the Italians - they're dangerous. Stay away from them and their death-drinks, because if they're habitually drinking something as revolting