The whole hog

One tiny detail stops our critic falling head over heels for Roti Chai...

The world's most celebrated steak chef has come to town. Is he really a Cut above?

The unique selling proposition about The Hansom Cab – an elegant Victorian boozer near Kensington High Street – is that it's been bought by Piers Morgan, the TV personality and former journalist. Mr Morgan is a curious figure: a chap who seems to revel in being disliked and to enjoy the popular consensus that he's a conceited git. By cunning and chutzpah, he has snagged himself a corner table at Planet Celebrity, advising Tony Blair, high-fiving Simon Cowell and making himself agreeable to the vice-presidents of CNN.

Foie gras cottage pie? Can The Balcon take Franco-British dining to the next level?

It happens sometimes in a foreign city. You leave the tawdry, neon-lit sprawl of the main drag and wander down an unpromising side street, only to stumble across The Perfect Restaurant – golden and gorgeous and oozing relaxation and low-key glamour. Emerging hours later, as though from a dream, you forget to note the name of the restaurant or the street, and when you return, you never manage to find it again.

Are the flavours big enough at Petit Mange, Exeter's new neighbourhood bistro?

I hadn't been to Rules since the mid-1980s and all I remembered of the place was a heavy atmosphere of dark wood, hefty carpets, thick sauces and sturdy-bottomed English lunchers. Heaviness was my main impression; but then history, of a dense, richly-flavoured kind, hangs around Rules like mayoral chains. It's England's oldest restaurant, founded by Thomas Rule in 1798. It's been owned by only three families in 200 years. It's seen off nine English monarchs. It turns up in several novels: the adulterous couple in Graham Greene's The End of the Affair enjoyed their first lurve tryst here over a furtive dish of seductive onions.

I've managed to nab a table at the hottest new opening in town. And not just any town – this one has just been pronounced the food capital of Britain. The chef is Michelin-starred, and well-known to the public as a former winner of TV's Great British Menu. The cocktail bar, managed by a recently crowned National Bartender of the Year, has already been open for a few weeks, to pump up anticipation. But hang on – why all the empty tables? Where are the food bloggers? How come the couple nearest me are having a whispered argument and I can hear one of them hissing, "I told you we should have gone to Café Rouge..."?

For a special meal, the two-starred Midsummer House is worth a punt up the Cam

Evershot, in West Dorset, reeks with literary association. It turns up in Tess of the D'Urbevilles as "the small town or village of Evershead" where Tess pauses on her way to call on Angel Clare's parents: "She made a halt here and breakfasted a second time, heartily enough – not at the Sow and Acorn, for she avoided inns, but at a cottage by the church." The church is St Basil's (patron saint of hoteliers, I expect) and the poet George Crabbe was rector there. Had poor Ms D'Urbeville lived a century later, she could have had her breakfast at Summer Lodge, a former dower-house whose grounds were part-designed by Thomas Hardy, when he was the local architect.

One of the many mysteries surrounding Gordon Ramsay is why his cut-the-crap, no-nonsense TV persona is so far removed from the prissiness of his restaurants. On screen he's all blood, sweat and shouting; in his dining rooms it's all lilies, amuse-bouches and murmuring.

The mark-up on the wine leaves a sour taste in our critic's mouth at Galoupet

Based on cruel actuarial calculation, a tontine is an investment that pays an increasing annuity as other participants die off. In 1804, this morbid mechanism was used to raise funds for the Cleveland Tontine, a coaching inn built to serve the Sunderland-London route, which is now the rackety A19. In 1976, the Tontine was acquired by the three McCoy brothers, Eugene, Tom and Peter, who became leading lights of northern gastronomy. When I last visited the Tontine 20 years ago, a meal in the upstairs restaurant was a curious experience in rural North Yorkshire. Packed with parasols, it was like a stage set from Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and the extravagant dishes were equally theatrical.