The spices on the quail left my tastebuds buzzing like hornets

Our reviewer goes in search of a Cantonese 'greatest hits' at A Wong

Keith McNally’s era-defining Manhattan brasserie opened in London this month - but has it stood the crossing?

This tranquil former village pub is far from the madding Cambridge crowd.

You know how, in a dream, you find yourself surrounded with familiar objects, landscapes and people but also with completely unfamiliar, surreal and alarming things? That sense of walking down a street near your old school which is also, somehow, a path on the side of the Grand Canyon, populated with giant talking lemurs? The Naamyaa Café made me feel like that. It's both Western and Eastern, basic and exotic, frank and inscrutable.

It's been a long time since there was much of a buzz about Langan's Brasserie. The archetypal trendy London restaurant of the 1970s has rather fallen out of fashion in this century, along with male ponytails and two-bottle lunches. The only person I can think of who still goes regularly is my brother, who once had his tie cut off there by Alan Brazil, after a particularly rowdy business dinner.

Our writer, a bi-weekly restaurant critic for the Independent on Sunday (and not a massive crisp fan) tries the new "real food flavours" crisps

Is the Hakkasan group's latest proposition worth the City-slicker prices?

It gives your dinner added spice to know you're eating it on the premises of a notorious degenerate. And the names 'Beckford' and 'Fonthill' summon up a chap who, in the early 19th century, was thought by many to be "the most evil man in England".

It's a tavern not a gastropub – and if you don't know the difference, you soon will

In Manhattan, restaurateurs and chefs maddened by the blitzkrieg of bloggers' flashbulbs are starting to ban diners from taking photographs of their meals. In Manchester, where new Manhattan-inspired mega-restaurant Neighbourhood has just opened, photography seems to be positively encouraged. Dressed-up gal-pals are merrily snapping away at each other, and even the staff are at it; you've got to love a chef who proudly captures a hamburger on his BlackBerry before letting it leave the pass.

Can theatrical hang-out Joe Allen – barely changed in decades – still put on a show?

Restaurants and literature are such natural bedfellows, it's amazing nobody's done this before. Remember Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler? Or The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers? Remember the little Parisian cafés where Ernest Hemingway claimed (in A Moveable Feast) he used to write when living on next to nothing in 1920s Paris?

British food 'barbarous'? Clearly, Orwell never got to eat at this Mayfair café

It's easy, when reporting on restaurants rather than, say, politics, to get a false perspective on what makes a big story. Apart from the adventures of a few telly chefs, our 'news' seems fairly parochial stuff to the wider world. A restaurateur poaching a prized site from under a rival's nose won't generally push global events off the front page, though it might just make it if a chef were to cut off a rival's nose and poach it.