Bites: Bacchus goes for the simple life

Bacchus, the restaurant in London's East End nicknamed "Hoxton Blumenthal", served its last avant-garde tasting menu last night, almost exactly two years after opening.

Although Bacchus is no more, tomorrow sees the site relaunched under the same ownership as the Bacchus Pub and Kitchen, a boozer with a simple British menu overseen by chef Richard Tewnion (pictured), formally of the Chelsea gastropub The Pig's Ear. Bacchus's head chef, Nuno Mendes, will relocate to a new restaurant early next year, believed to be in a new Bethnal Green boutique hotel.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, citizens of Lavonia, Georgia celebrated the closure of Cafe Risque by burning its signage after its purchase by the city for just shy of $1m. The café was opened in 2001 by a strip-club operator who tricked the authorities by claiming to be opening a country-style affair called Skeeter's Big Biscuits, before transforming it over night into a 24-hour topless diner. The city had been trying to shut it down ever since.