Well, this is awkward. I've arranged to meet David Baddiel at Restaurant 1701, a smart new kosher restaurant in the grounds of Britain's oldest synagogue, but I'm having trouble finding it. David has phoned me to say he has arrived, and "it's much more Jewish than I was expecting".

Fired Apprentice candidate Tim Stillwell revealed the one thing he has learned from being on the show is to know when to keep his mouth shut.

Trail of the unexpected: Head to Upper Manhattan for a real taste of New York

Simply walking into the Delaunay makes you feel you've found the perfect restaurant. Sited on the corner of Aldwych and Drury Lane, it hums with elegance. The rubicund doorman tips his top hat, a startlingly pretty Roedean-head-girl takes your coat and you enter a wide, welcoming, marble-floored space. To your right, a vast bar is lit up like a cathedral high altar; to your left is a line of tables for posers, chatterers, couples nursing cocktails. Riding on castors is a glass-topped trolley full of teatime cakes – millefeuille, Black Forest gâteau, sachertorte – in case someone fancies a sugar rush at 9pm. Beyond the grey pillars, you make out the dark, indefinably sexy interior where the serious eating goes on. Mein Gott, you think, das ist wunderbar.

I'd rather hoped that Kevin's Grand Design would turn out to be a personal project, but although he seemed to have heavily invested in it, both monetarily and financially, we aren't yet to find out what the Nit-picker's Nit-picker would actually produce if he self-built a home for himself. Instead, this was to be an exercise in exemplary development: "I want to do everything," he said as he embarked on a project to produce low-cost, socially mixed housing. "I want it to be the best, I want it to be the cheapest, I want it to be the most sustainable, I want it to be the most exciting, the most architecturally inspired, the most contextual, the least mediocre." He also wanted to be the "Heston Blumenthal of housing", which sounded a little ominous. You expect an en suite bathroom, but you actually get a playroom-cum-kitchen, connected to the dining room by a playground slide.

And now it's being served up over here. Gerard Gilbert reports

Student food doesn't have to mean takeaway pizza and pasta pesto. Here, top chefs suggest low-cost meals that get top marks for taste. Gillian Orr reports

When it comes to eating abroad, the Brits aren't known for their adventurous appetite.

JONATHAN MEADES has recently visited Brighton, and pronounced. It is not simply a case of dodging the chain-smoking, dog- toting panhandlers ("hair in the community"), as, for all that, the town is no longer truly, raffishly minatory - threatening, from the late Latin, and first used by Thomas More in 1532 ("these wordes be mynatory and threttes"). The OED has no instance this century, and it was only briefly a noun, in the 17th century.

From Ms S. Okada