In 1967, the Beach Boys took 10 suites at the Hilton. Now they're taking a coach to Croydon. Where did it all go wrong?

The roast beef of Old England with foreign accents

DAVID HELLIER

Set price heaven at Le Gavroche

Catering flop: Top chef's New Covent Garden operation ceases trading despite directors' cash injection of pounds 270,000

Fashion/ the Versace version

The people who greet us may have as much to do with the enjoyment of a meal as those in the kitchen. Here we highlight six hosts with the most.

LAST week I went to what has been nominated the third best restaurant in the country by a recently published restaurant guide. What? Better than Le Gavroche? Better than Manoir aux Quat'Saisons? I haven't been to either, but even I can see that the new Gault Millau Guide, the second British edition of a French publication, is either being deliberately controversial - or it has discovered somewhere pretty wonderful. It was an unusual nomination because the restaurant in question, Tatsuso, is almost completely unheard of. It's also Japanese.

There is hotplate coffee served with UHT milk, and dry, shop- bought bread at the Brown Horse in Winster, Cumbria. There, however, ends any similarity with dismal British pub food. In every other respect, the food at the Brown Horse is a model of what, in the best of possible worlds, we might encounter in a no-frills local.

FOR dessert there was an excellent flan brioche aux fruits confits, better known in its land of origin as bread and butter pudding.

To judge by the affection Robert Mabey inspires in East Anglia's leading restaurateurs, he is a genuinely nice man. This is no mean praise for a chef, whose profession typically involves long hours, short tempers and tangled grudges.

NEXT WEEK the finalists of the Independent/Le Cordon Bleu cookery competition will celebrate at the 18- month-old London restaurant Les Saveurs. Amid the toasts to the competitors, a glass should be raised to Joel Antunes, the 33-year-old French chef feeding them; and another to his staff. They have endured a particularly harsh rite of passage into the British restaurant world.

THE sub-editor (Spikus vulgaris) is a retiring beast inhabiting the jungle of journalism, writes Robert Richardson. On morning papers, he - the female of the species was not discovered until the Sixties, so the masculine pronoun will suffice - spends his life in the twilight zone, arriving anonymously in the afternoon, ruminating over spelling and syntax as the day dies, and padding softly into the night when all is finished.

ACCOUNT handlers are the public face of an advertising agency, often known as 'suits' because they exist to look smart and sell the agency's work - advertising campaigns - to clients, writes Rhys Williams. Most suits balk at the idea that they are merely well-dressed salesmen and hate the title. They will have you believe that 'as the interface between client and agency' they 'contribute significantly to the overall strategic development of a brand'.