Granada: Day 2

After quite some debate Sister and I managed to figure out most of the places that we had visited the previous evening. And, as a result of us being Golden, track down her hat, the loss of which had threatened to spoil the whole of her year.

Headwear restored we were off to the Alhambra. If only we'd had some opium this'd be proper Kubla Khan stuff, as it was it was merely mesmerising and sublime.

The closest bar to the Alhambra furnished with a fine breakfast at about 2pm (closest excluding the ones inside where I had enjoyed a couple of pre-breakfast stiffeners). Potato fried with egg, vegetables and Jamon, was as hearty and unpretentious as it sounds. Bang on.

Back into town and a little beer at Damas Queros allows to properly investigate the various sizes of beer recepticles on offer. In Granada a 'Cana' seemed to weigh in below half a pint, which can mean it's gone before any tapas arrives. Here we discover the more manly 'Tubo'- perfect at around 300ml. We also have mushrooms al alijo with bread. A small portion must have made a sizeable dent in an entire clove, but Sister and I are never knowingly out-garlicked and hence loved this one.

From there to one of the most ultra-trad bars in town: 'Los Diamantes.' Tiny, with almost no seating space and three-deep at the bar at any given time. Seemed to specialize in deep-fried stuff, both dishes we had could have done with some sauce.

Also on c. Navas we found Puerta del Carmen bar and two Equipo Navazos sherries by the glass; La Bota de Fino #18 and La Bota de Palo Cortado #21. They were like good sherry on steroids: with greater intensity, complexity, precision and delineation of flavours. Jamon carved at the bar was all that was needed with them.

On to c. Elvira, universally recommended as the place to go for El Tapeo. Unfortunately in the time between this advice being formed and our arrival most seemed to have become hairdressers.

Weird, but no matter because at the end we managed to find Al Sur de Granada a deli, shop and wine bar that I had been recommended and had every intention of going to right up to the point on the flight over when I forgot its name and address.

It must have 30 or so natural wines by the glass, including the entire Barranco Oscuro range. Highlights were Tres Uves, and a Chardonnay called 'Cardonnohay'. We returned to Al Sur a number of times throughout the three days to work through their list and soon came to realise that the wine really was the star attraction: each tapa was vertically identical and amounted to no more than a small bruschetta with cheese, blood sausage and some veg.

Maybe a good thing 'though- otherwise I may never have left.

Tapa of the Day: Champinones al Alijo

Granada: Day 1

My little Sister (motto: 'Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Shiny Things.') recently decided to emigrate to a made up country*. Which, needless to say, has caused considerable anxiety amongst her friends and family.

Said country also happens to be Arabic, which, needless to say, has caused her considerable anxiety, especially in regards to her normal wine and pork based diet. Which meant the destination for the obligatory going-away-blowout holiday needed to be thought out carefully.

For about 20 seconds.

Granada. A city famous for its tradition of a free tapa with every drink and in a region that worships pigs like deities and rates them like S&P. We decided not to pay for food the entire trip to allow us to fully master the art of El Tapeo...

Day one was a Sunday, a day of rest and stodgy Paella. But later on we managed to find the superlative El Deseo, which furnished us with Barranco Oscuro wines by the glass, and something Godly (I know not what) which involved tomatoes, aubergine, olive oil and goat's cheese alchemically combined to make a tapa of monumental excellence.

They also had a good chicken, chickpea and veg salad, and some cracking aged manchego, hollowed from its wheel at the bar, sprinkled with sticky-sweet Jerez vinegar. Served with a mad, bad and spiky glass of Blancas Nobles it was nutty, salty, sweet, sour, simple and delicious.

From there we moved to the Granadian equivalent of a rough pub to watch Granada triumph away to Athletic Bilbao. Here we endured a dubious sandwich, spread thinly with tuna and tomato paste, as well as some potatoes covered in a shiny red sauce; shinier and saucier than ketchup, but not fooling anyone with its presumed aspirations to Brava.

A day marked by extremes of quality but ultimately marred by the fact that Sister later insisted on drinking half her own bodyweight in Mojitos and losing her hat.

Tapa of the Day: Aubergine and Tomato mush.

* Fujairah

Dugois Arbois Savagnin '05 & Chateau Batailley '94

Over the last couple of months I have been wallowing with the eagles at night a fair amount more than is probably good for me. So the rare occurance of making it to bed before 7am on Saturday meant that I was up in time to accompany Sister, through the blazing October sunshine to Borough market in search of pork.

'Nduja is one of the many ingredients available in London at the moment that are as trendy and delicious as they are unpronouncable. It is a raw pork sausage from Cantabria made mostly with head and neck cuts and then laced with shed-loads of hot peperoncino chilli. The porcine equivalent of speedballing.

Some people like to cook with it; frying it up or adding to sauces for pasta or fish. And whilst I'm sure this is great, it's also a bit of a cop-out. It's really just a pimped up Sobressade and hence better eaten on it's own, spread thickly on crusty bread.

It's also fantastically difficult to pair. The rich porkiness that you get from cheap cuts and raw fat shot through with untamed chilli seems specifically designed to obliterate almost any wine you care to mention.

We tried a couple of leftfield juices with supper: Dugois Arbois Savagnin '05 and Chateau Batailley '94.

The Batailley was the better wine: all sour blackberry and sweet raspberry, cracking woodiness, length and balance. No angles, and right in its prime.

The Savagnin is definitely an oxidative style, with a distinct, nutty vin jaune-y nose. But the palate's dancin', with a keen acidity and buckets of apples, cut by a lemon-pith finish. This was the wine for 'Nduja- the apple played nicely with the pork, and the citrus cut through the fattiness. There's not really an answer for that amount of chilli, but it was close enough.

Soaring with the pigs in the morning.

Nando's

11-12 Friary Street, GU1 4EN. £7

Popular amongst the youth of today is eating chickens. And the best place to eat them alonside other like-minded gang members is, apparently, Nando's.

We untangle a folded menu to reveal a choice of food that must run to at least 10,000 options. There are wings and breasts, sauces and salads, wraps and corn and a mind-boggling array of potato based sides.

Equally confusing is the pointless hybridisation of fast-food and table service, whereby you order at a counter before your food is brought to you at an indiscriminate point in the future.

To stop my head exploding and make life a little easier I decided to focus on only a small part of the menu: the bit nearest me in the bottom left hand corner. This section was titled "Nandino's" and came with an age limit: "For under 10's".

Balls to that, I ordered the Nandino chicken breast stips, corn-on-the-cob, frozen banana yougurt and a beer (Sagres).

I've not come across adjectives suitably damning for what turned up. The chicken was a triumph of aesthetics over edibility. It did at least look a bit like chicken. The corn ran with this theme.

Sagres is Sagres: a relatively inoffesive way to consume a mild anaesthetic, and, as such, a perfect pairing for the food.

Dessert too finds new ways to undermine the traditional dining experience. Firstly it is self service, secondly the recepticle and hence portion size is entirely of your own choosing and lastly it seems to operate on a 1930s style honesty-box system, whereby if you tell them you've paid for dessert they'll let you have it.

We grabbed a couple of plastic coke cups, filled them with 'Frozen Banana Youghurt' and exited the premises. Utterly wonderful stuff. Packed full of that delicious, artificial pick'n'mix-banana-sweet flavour, and with consistency less fatty, coating and cloying than traditional ice cream. Strongly recommended when mixed half and half with rum.

This kind of gutter/stars food dichotomy is difficult to evaluate so all I shall say is that it remains the only restaurant I have visited to which I will only return to steal their ice cream.

Spanish Airport Cheese and Serrano Sandwich

€5, Palma Airport

And so once again we found ourselves in just saddest position in space-time mankind has yet experienced: Palma Airport, on the way to Stansted.

And even yet this despair proves time and again powerless to destroy the ineffable wonder of the Spanish Airport Cheese Sandwich.

But I was drunk and in the mood for experimentation, and the conflagration of these factors led me to a twist on the theme: the Spanish Airport Cheese & Serrano Ham Sandwich. It's a Ronseal number containing nothing but cheese, ham and bread and none the worse for it. Don't fuck with the classics, nobody wants a Bowdlerised sandwich.

That slightly stale ciabatta-style bread is my madeline; Valencia Airport all those years ago, with the vagrants and their dogs and their ugly Catalan. The mastication required stretches this sandwich to full twenty minutes. €5 isn't cheap for a sandwich, but Sister's hotdog was over in five, so that's value right there.

The cheese is obviously what this sandwich is all about. Two thin slices of a tasty, salty, cheddar-type affair. We'll stop there- I'm not about to unweave this rainbow.

If only they'd left it. The ham is low-quality; stringy, hard and requiring the trimming of fat that makes the whole affair rather more of a trial than necessary. It also pushes us a little far over the salt-line which meant sister and I had to drink the best part of two litres of San Miguel with our meal. Though we did get free hats to congratulate us on this. Swings and roundabouts.

My quarrel with this sandwich is fairly petty. It's still very highy recommended: 18 points at least. Just a pity it always comes when it does.

Cherished, strengthened and fed, without the aid of joy.

M&S New York Deli Pastrami Sandwich

£3.99, M&S

On sitting down to read possibly the finest piece of writing ever (once again), I was much taken with the desire to eat a sandwich.

I was introduced to this particular sandwich recently by my friend Emily2 on a tediously prolix journey from Oxford to Guildford when we managed to eat three, washed down with what was perhaps, with hindsight, a superfluity of of M&S ready-made Gin and Slim.

The history of the New York Pastrami Sandwich is one that is shrouded in myst'ry, steeped in controversy and shot-through by warring factions; Volk says it's his sandwich / And Katz's say it's their sandwich.

On to my sandwich... The pastrami's great; tasty, and loads of it, reminds me of corned beef but without the niggling doubts about what it's made of. Gherkins and sauerkraut are good (possibly great) accompaniments, their zingy flavour and crunch playing perfectly with the meat. The light American mustard dressing is icing-on-the-cake rather than gilding-the-lily.

Damn good so far, but then you hit cheese. At least you do texturally, beacuse it tastes very precisely of nothing. No American, Jewish or otherwise, has ever done anything worthwhile with cheese, and this sandwich is no exception: an especially pointless addition.

The bread too leaves a lot to be desired. It's density and uniformity do make for a sandwich with commendable structural integrity, but there's no bite to it, and they defintiely could've done better taste-wise.

In all 'though this is a very good sandwich. On the "Spanish Airport Cheese Sandwich 20-Point Scale"* it's a solid 13. And there's potential for more, without a couple of unforced errors (cheese, bread) this is easily a 16 point sandwich, maybe even 17.


* A fairly self-explanatory rating system, whereby a sandwich is judged against the 20-point Platonically Ideal cheese sandwich- available in all good Spanish airports.

Trimbach Riesling '09 & El Velero Ortiz Anchoas

£9.99, Majestic & £4, Sainsbury's

Most the week had been dominated by a (hitherto unexperienced) yearning to eat very expensive tinned Spanish anchovies.

For a tenacious sort finding them is not difficult, the tapas-inisation of the London food scene has seen to that, the problems arrive in locating companions, both people and wine.

Emily1's virtues are legion; she lives near me, reads the Romantic Poets, enjoys sweet wine, understands the importance of lunch, seems reasonably forgiving, and doesn't eat fish. More horrifically expensive anchovies for me.

Riesling's virtues are also legion. Lunch was a gim'me.

Aforementioned anchovies, quail eggs, sundried tomatoes, cucumber salad, pork pies, sausage rolls, couscous, ripe Camembert, apricot chutney, a baguette, and 2009 Trimbach Riesling.

The anchovies were good, firm and tasty, with a slightly metallic aftertaste. Each was indiviually wrapped around a single caper: a suitably profligate attitude to production costs.

Trimbach's effort was also straight up. A classic Alsatian style, wet rocks and sleek citrus on the nose, a wisp of smoke. Piercingly dry palate, lime and lemon peel, with just a hint of tropicality coming through on the finish.

This was a fine meal even by our own lofty standards, and a clear indication that the long hot streak that my sense of whimsy is currently enjoying shows no signs of letting up.

McDonald's

£2.28 pp, 57 Cornmarket street, Oxford.

A minor calamity meant that I had to abandon plans for "brunch" in West London and go to Oxford for a picnic and punting.

Our punting technique left much to be desired, but our onboard picnicking was textbook, as was the subsequent drinking session, taking in all manner of ales, cocktails, wines and a meal split between two different restaurants.

Starters and cocktails at the Oxford branch of Jamie Oliver's superlative Italian eaterie, segued seamlessly into a plan to execute a longstanding ambition of mine...

It may seem unlikely, but up until pretty much exactly a year ago I had been plagued by a lifelong vegetarianism. In the intervening time I have endeavoured to eat my way around as much of the Animal Kingdom as possible, but had specifically held back on the big one, the quickest, easiest, and cheapest way to clog your arteries yet invented- the burger.

And I was going to start with the one that started it all; the granddaddy of obesity epidemics, the butterfly wing at the beginning of a billion bouts of heart disease, the McDonalds Hamburger.

As a dining venue McDonalds is found wanting pretty well across the board, the atmosphere, seating, lighting and service all seem designed to maximise turnover, getting people in and out as quickly as possible. But perhaps the greatest impediment to a good time is the lack of alcohol. Impediment, that is, to the unambitious, because whilst I placed our order at the till I dispatched my Sister to the pub next door to fetch us some beer.

The burger itself is almost inedible, which is funny because in a physical sense it requires almost no effort to actually eat. It has the texture of something that has been masticated, digested and reconstitued. You certainly wouldn't need teeth to for it, 'though that's just as well as it's only people without teeth who are likely to be insensible enough to want to. By far the best thing here is a lone slice of gherkin, providing the sole bastion of crunch in the whole soggy affair. There are very large number of more pleasurable and less dangerous things to do with a pound coin in the world, all way up to having someone drop one from the top of a very tall building onto your head.

I found all of this rather a surprise, the place after all is very, very popular, and I was expecting it at least to be tasty in a full-of-fat-sugar-and-salt kind of way. But the disappointment, I was assured by my two companions, was no one's fault but my own. Far better, they assured me, to trade (ever-so, ever-so slightly) up and opt for the double cheeseburger at £1.29. So we did that.

It has two slices of gherkin, and consequently is exactly twice as good, 'though not, you will notice, twice as expensive. In a very twisted world I would commend the quality-price-ratio in comparison to its little brother.

But things aren't that bad yet, so I shan't- the whole thing's rubbish, it's all uphill from here.

The King's Head

It appeared that the Russian had gone mad at some point between leaving his house and arriving at our lunching destination.

Or at least that was all I could surmise with his hand around my throat as he shouted maniacally about class A drugs and threatened to kill me.

He then quit the pub, to the immense relief of bar staff who evidently hadn't been trained in how to deal with a barney, and returned home.

Ho hum.

After finishing my pint I went to fetch him whereupon it transpired that shortly before arriving at the King's Head he discovered that I had been out the previous evening with his American Sister and TOD, which was apparently not cool. To be fair, I have known for some time that TOD is the kind of person that can inspire this kind of reaction, but the Russian is normally a jovial, happy-go-lucky sort, not prone to violent outbursts, and never knowingly leaves a pub unfed.

Lunch was at this point already an hour late. The late arrival of this particular meal is something that will often ruin my day, if not my entire month. Lucky then then the newly re-branded King's Head pulled out the stops in terms of eminantly satisfying eating experiences.

It's not that the food here is revolutionary- you wouldn't expect it to be. More that it's fresh, high quality, well-served, home-made, and reasonably priced. Which is probably even better.

£2 for a couple of stellar sausage rolls or an equally good scotch egg is great value. They serve both good crisp fries and mind-blowingly good twice cooked chips. A shared fish and chips came with the fish cut in two and two portions of the accompanying salad, peas and chips. Winning beer is by Purity.

Whether this attention to detail was on account of mine and the Russian's no doubt burgeoning reputation at the place I cannot say. What I can say 'tho is that I'll be back. Maybe in disguise.

Jamie's Italian

13 Friary St, GU1 4EH, £30 pp

I arrived at one of Jamie Oliver’s Italian eateries at the tail end of a concerted (and inexplicably unsuccessful) attempt to kill myself.

The previous four days had seen a number of triumphs for myself and a group of collaborators comprising the Russian, his American Sister, my own Sister and a new friend of mine whom I shall call Emily2, as that is very nealy her name, and avoids confusion with another friend of mine, Emily1.

Notable lowlights included ‘Formal Supper’ at Queen’s College Oxford at which myself, Sister and the American enjoyed drinking a fair amount of rare red Petillant Naturel and eating almost none of the food whilst wearing silly hats, getting ejected, and consequently breaking back into the same club a total of four times in a single evening, and taking 4 ½ hours to get from Oxford to Guildford via every M&S New York Pastrami sandwich between the two.

And once you get locked into a serious bender the tendency is to push it as far as you can. So Emily2 and I went for supper.

We were almost certainly intoxicated on arrival, and steady stream of first rate Prosecco based cocktails served only to abet this. ‘Though it really did highlight the consistent excellence of the service on offer; our young lady at one point expertly fielding Emily2’s deadpan complaint about a piece of white spaghetti amongst the squid ink stuff before moving swiftly on to complimenting us on our choice of espresso martinis for pudding (served in proper glasses- please take note Soho)

The food is really quite surprisingly good, even if everything is described, cooked and served a la Oliver and hence swimming in dizzy adjectives and olive oil, and presented in incomprehensible receptacles.

Our assortment of breads was good but came stuffed tightly into a small metal pot, which meant the liberation of one piece caused the rest to go all over the floor. My own seared Grey Mullet came with a sauce (roasted peppers, olives, chillis &c.) and a small rocket salad. Great.

Emily2’s Scallop and Squid ink spaghetti was equally good and came spiked with some intensely fiery red chilli. The magic here is how they’ve made the assorted ingredients taste so much; it is vibrant, flavoursome, singing food.

A subsequent visit brought the predictable discovery that the “World’s Best Olives” are not that, but they are quite good and served on ice. I’m not convinced this brought a whole lot flavour-wise but it did make them, and the accompanying tapenade, noticeably colder. The accompanying “music bread” (large shards of flatbread) smacked of finishing the thesaurus and moving on to the dictionary.

My fried squid came with “really garlicky mayo” which is a bold claim to make, especially when the garlic quotient of the sauce in question is situated well below perception threshold. Still- Emily2’s cockle linguine was a return to form; perfect, grit-less, cokcles and pasta in broth of lipsmacking intensity.

Day-glo badges that read “I finished all my vegetables at Jamie’s Italian” are not proffered voluntarily, but nor are they subject to a particularly stringent criteria test- the bemused looking man at the front desk will take your word.

(Assuming you don’t find yourself sharing the restaurant with Emily2 and I) I guarantee anyone will find the whole affair all rather brilliant and charming and reasonably priced.

Polpo, Sputino &c.

£God only knows, Soho.

I had always assumed lunch was a bit like Christmas; special because of its scarcity. It comes but once a day, a neat anchor-point right in the middle, much anticipated beforehand, and remembered fondly over subsequent hours.

Recent experience however has led me to establish that this is a myth, a mos perpetuated by mealtime traditionalists and admirers of 'brunch' alike. There is, in fact, no reason at all not to keep having lunches all afternoon, especially if you are somewhere as small and densely populated by trendy eateries as Soho...

The Russian's American Sister is a prodigously talented luncher, never found wanting in enthusiasm or execution, and only, on occasion, in sense of direction. The hundred metre walk from her apartment to Polpo took just over an hour. Once inside though we were golden.

The lamentable affectation of serving all wine in Duralex tumblers slightly undermined an otherwise good Bellini. Tapas (or 'Cicheti' if we need another word for tapas) varied from ok to pretty good, taking in fennel salami, pickled cabbage, potato and parmesan croquette, artichoke, prosciutto and a curious anchovy and chickpea houmous-tapenade hybrid. But they were very small, and at this point we didn't realise this lunch was merely the beginning of a trilogy.

From their 'Bread' section we came away with a small tomato-less pizza topped with garlicky, cheesy spinach and an egg, and something described thus: "Cured pork shoulder & Peperonata panino" which rather predictably turned out to be a ham and red pepper pannini. Both were good, but the spinach number was better. I can't remeber how much this little lot came to, but it wasn't much, and I nabbed a postcard on the way out- so a sucessful venture all round.

We retired back to the American's flat for some time on the roof terrace and a bottle of 2010 Iglesia Vella from Roc des Anges. The wine was unfortunately a barrel sample, and though not fizzy it had more than a smack of not-quite-finished-fermentation appleyness.

With the line between digestif and aperitif suitably blurred we were ready for lunch.

I was all up for a little trip to Hix Soho just down the street, but the American denounced it as 'shit' and so we had to go to the pub next door for Bangers, Mash and Beer. It was a classic interpretation of the theme, comprising cumberlands, mash, and a summery, hoppy ale or two. Very nice, and only let down by the fact that the onions rings were doused in gravy which comprehensively negated their crunchiness. Oh well.

After lunch we headed out for a few cocktails, the most memorable- in an unmarked downstairs bar decked out like an acid trip- all plastic mushroom lamps and barbie dolls glued to the ceiling. The best- a pretty good passion fruit daiquiri was, perhaps not coincedentally, the only cocktail all day served in a proper glass.

I had come to Soho that afternoon with a number of objectives; I had to return the American a bag of her clothes which she had left at my house on Friday, I wanted to drink posh wine in the sun on her roof terrace, and (ideally) I wanted to find Sputino, a newly opened gaff described universally as "achingly hip".

No cartographer in history has ever gotten to grips with the area ('tho Signore Alighieri had a go a while back I believe), and Sputino apparently had no signage and frosted windows... I didn't hold out much hope.

Imagine my delight then when, not 25 metres from the American's front door, we stumbled across (and subsequently into) it, for lunch.

The American is a 19 year old model, and was wearing sunglasses, as such she pulled off "achingly hip" quite well. My own sunglasses, on the other hand were broken, and I had been pushing the boundary between "achingly hip" and comatose for a couple of hours already. I remember little apart from a good pulled pork mini burger, and another equally good mini burger, though we may have just ordered the same pork one again. She has since informed me that there was also a croque monsieur, shoestring fries (whatever they may be), and some cocktails made with orange blossom involved.

It is an intereating fact that any particular day's fun quotient is in fact proportional to the cube of how many times one has been for lunch. Hence this was a full 27 times better than your run-of-the-mill Sunday.

Which is convenient because attempting this kind of bollix more than twice a year would probably kill me quite quickly.

* Unfortunately I failed a little in taking any photos of our adventure, save the authentically Soho view from the American's front door.

Sa Bodegueta de's Pi

4 Calle Sipells, Cala Millor, €30 pp inc wine

Thursday had come up with an alacrity that was frankly astonishing. Most of the middle of the week seemed to have collapsed in on itself like a disappointing soufflé. I vaguely remember drinking a fair amount of good wine, catching, killing and eating a helluva lot of sea urchins, and hosting a party for a man that was (allegedly) going to prison the next day.

What I had not done was much dining. I measure out my life in sauce ladles; meals are the anchor points, a Maxwell's Demon against the encroaching entropy.

So it was off to Sa Bodegueta d'es Pi, an improbable corner of Paradise very well hidden inside the Dantean awfulness of Cala Millor.

The place is run by the eponymous Pi, her mother in the kitchen and her father, an old family friend of mine who may or may not be called 'Mel'.

A nod to convention sees customers furnished with a menu on entry. More experienced diners, however, are easily distinguished by the combination of nonchalance and contempt with which this is flicked away before requesting simply 'Tapas'.

This gives mama free rein in the kitchen which experience suggests is a very good thing indeed.

What happened this time was possibly even better than I have ever had here before, a tour de force of inventive Mallorquin cooking.

Sobrassada fried in honey was good enough for me to suggest that our meal had peaked too soon. Pa Amb Boli was proper, yet posh and zingily fresh. The spinach croquettes are almost a signature dish here, but this time paled in comparison to courgette stuffed with salt cod (good god!) and the subsequent steak; black and blue on a barbecue, thickly sliced, and blood(il)y brilliant.

There are no words.

AN/2, the femme fatale of serious Mallorquin wines, was a perfect match to all this. Sexy acid-cherry Callet, with a smoky, noir twist of Syrah.

The pricing here is low and slightly arbitrary, the wine list wonderful, the service perfect, food brilliant, and setting lovely. If you ever have the calamitous misfortune to find yourself in Cala Millor: go.

Roka

37 Charlotte Street, London, £65 pp excluding wine.

The combination of St. Patrick's Day and TOD's Irish ancestry had apparently lent him power of veto when it came to my choice of headwear for the evening. I am a serious man, and do not take sartorial decisions lightly, so was not about to pander to any bandana related bigotry that he may have cultivated.

We were due at a restaurant called Roka, whose clientele possess more money than sense, class and style combined, which made my compadre worried he may know someone there, and worse... they would see him with me.

This unfortunate alignment led to a minor hissy fit and him catching a cab for home around twenty minutes before our booking.

Not one to let solitude come between me and the possibility of a cocktail, I made for the joint, scowled at the bouncer (really?) and ordered an unimpressive Mojito. Realising his early folly TOD gave ground on the bandana front, appeared sometime later, and we found our table.

Food was in his hands, as I had got to that stage in an evening when my Japanese becomes a little rusty. And what came, via some friendly, speedy, don't-bat-an-eyelid service was pretty damn spectacular. Light as air prawn tempura, belly tuna sushi so slickly unctuous that it required the waitress to assure TOD it wasn't Foie Gras, and a couple of dishes from their centrepiece Robata grill; some lovely lamb cutlets on the bone, and a bit of small bird, pigeon or partridge or some such.

It was all very, very good... far too good for the clientele. But what really got me was the consistency. It wasn't genius teetering on the brink of insanity, just a long, fine sustained brilliance. Which for restaurant with a grillion covers, almost as many chefs, and probably onto its third sitting of the evening by 10.30 is staggering.

Topping all this was a wine list that oozed an unfocused dandy-ish class. Leaning heavily on Rieslings, Gewurztraminers and other Franco-German joys, it spoke of someone who cared about food and wine and fun. Better still TOD had very generously offered to pay for the wine, though this meant I could feel the power/responsibility combo weighing down on me a little.

10 minutes in however I was no closer to divining any rhyme or reason, and I was close to a hissy fit of my own when I came across it: Trimbach Cuvee Frederic Emile 2004. £92 is not cheap, but the food deserved it, and good god it was good. Kerosene, and minerals, tight citrus acidity backing expansive tropical fruit. It had everything, and in sublime balance.

The best things in life are emphatically not free: we must all make concessions, be they monetary, moral, or personal.

Unless of course you're me.

Le Pont de la Tour

36D Shad Thames London, £230 for 3

Now that the dust has settled and we have time to compose our thoughts and reactions, things have got a lot more confusing. So I’ll go for objectivity, present the facts straight, and leave long and difficult conclusions to someone else.

TOD arrived by taxi at my house at ten in the morning. He had some pink champagne for my family, a waistcoat which he struggled to put on for some time before discarding along with his hat, and was wearing pyjamas. These last were specifically ‘to give the impression that I’ve been to bed.’ A valiant attempt at subterfuge but more composure, less erratic behaviour and fewer stories about the visions he had of himself cooking bacon, would have completed the illusion better.

We were due at Le Pont de la Tour at Midday, though by 11 this was beginning to look unlikely, especially as past heroics mean TOD is blacklisted at Addison Lee. But arrive we did, at some point, via a pub, a cab, a members-only gym and a walk through the rain along the South Bank of the Thames.

Le Pont de la Tour’s opening salvo was by some distance the finest I have encountered in this country. They gave us frutos secos with the Martinis. Proper ones too: mixed, and with both sizes of corn.

The food is of the type that comes littered with technicolour smears, jus and garnish. Sister’s aubergine tower starter she said tasted like pizza. Which is probably a compliment of sorts. My own ‘Foie Gras Parfait’ (a special concoction dreamed up originally to make anyone who orders it sound like a prat), tasted like liver pate, the toast like toast, the garnish wasn’t bringing much to the party, and I left the smear of orange.

For mains TOD and Sister had a piece of accessorised Salmon. The chef's deconstruction of the other ingredients means I can’t tell you much more, but the fish was cooked to perfection.

I decided on 'Daube de Boeuf' because I didn’t know what it was, and was delighted to discover it means a large slow-cooked shanky bit of cow. Another diner may not have been so happy with the situation, as the internet has since informed that, of course, that’s not what it means at all.

I had noticed early on that this is one of those places that, rather pretentiously, does not give you salt or pepper. I’m not too keen on this practice at the best of times, but here it really serves to highlight the complete lack of flavour of everything that we ate. The ability to braise a bit of beef to melting perfection, but make both it, and the accompanying jus, taste of paper and water respectively is a peculiar skill to cultivate.

There are various reasons that my memory of the events is a little hazy, but I’m pretty sure that being unable to tell what most ingredients were using the traditional means of seeing and tasting it is quite high on the list.

Still, the obsolescence of sensory perception probably wasn’t making much of a difference to TOD who I established at one point was neither thinking about nor hearing what he himself was saying:

TOD – “Is everything OK man? There seem to be a lot of lulls in the conversation”
CV – “What? No there aren’t.”
TOD – “Well then I must have been asleep. Did I fall asleep?”
CV – “What? No. And when were these lulls?”
TOD – “They’re happening all the time. You know… when you and your sister aren’t talking.”
CV – “You mean when you’re talking?”
TOD – “Yeah.”

Our unblemished palates may not have required a trio of superb sorbets (rasberry, apple and a third which Sister correctly identified as Ribena), but these silences clearly needed filling. Initially I was a little concerned as they looked exactly like most of the other stuff we had just been served, but accompanied by homemade Lengua de Gato biscuits (not as good as out of a packet), they were brilliant.

A jolly post-prandial game involving throwing sugar cubes at each other was frowned upon by service which occupied a hinterland between frosty and hostile. Apart from the sommelier, who was quite good, but this was just as well because it was she who was tasked with the job of explaining the most staggering fuck-up of the day…

The week before we dined, D&D restaurant chain (of which Le Pont de la Tour is part) had spent a fair amount of time merrily issuing press releases claiming that they were slashing the prices of 100 of their top wines by up to half.

Needless to say that upon entering the restaurant I had commandeered the list from TOD, to prevent any daft choices, and set about it excitedly. Repeated assurances that it did contain up-to-date prices may well have been true, what it did not contain were any of the quite large selection of wines in their Top 100 which I was thinking about ordering.

Eventually we settled on a bottle of IGT Toscana (I do not use the ‘S-term' because I'm not keen on coming across as a tosser, and this one was pretty ordinary anyway) which was subject to their usual 400% mark-up. Not cool.

The very beginning and very end of our meal were pretty excellent, but the best that could be said of the middle was that it was extremely inoffensive. Mediocrity is a terrible criticism, but here I feel they've got away pretty lightly as the another way of describing it would be bland, souless, cynical, cold, outdated, imprecise, stuck-up and absurd.

Les Deux Salons

40-42 William IV Street London, £50 pp

In the Great Greasy Gourmet International Cuisine Derby, the French have it by a nose.

Theirs is the only cooking that pervades our cultural consciousness to the extent that it has become memetic, the French bistro or brasserie– all red and white and menu du jour and vin de table – is a universally shared false memory.

The food is both pompous and peasanty, rich, hearty and clever. We all know the dishes; escargots, coq au vin, cassoulet, beef bourguinan; they are food as Platonic Ideal.

The Italians come close, but the use of olive oil rather than animal fat lets them down. The Spaniard can do clever things to a pig, the Japanese to fish. Closer still is American fast-food, a deep-fried buffalo wing smothered in hot sauce is a tasty mouthful indeed. But it is a base modern equivalent: yes it is food for the people and the ingredients are cheap and plentiful, but there’s nothing in its head.

And herein lies the secret to the French success. You can think of any raw ingredient, any primary food product, and there’s a country that does it better than France. Their cuisine has evolved out of necessity. Both the alchemy and the inclination required to elevate the snail to the status of a national dish are attributes peculiar to the French, and neither could exist without the other. Nobody does the addition of fat, salt and heat quite like them.

The menu at Les Deux Salons is a joy; andouillette and off-cuts and all soaked in the memory of unspeakable things done to geese. But this sets an ambitious pace, as these are dishes we have all eaten a million times in our minds, and reality is always going to suffer by comparison.

So much here is right; the décor is a tasteful fin-de-siecle take on a classic brasserie, and the wine list, pretty much all of which is available in 250ml carafes fuels a buzzy atmosphere.

We kick off with the least French thing on the menu, a special of scallop tartare with lime and pickled ginger. When it arrives the ginger has been withdrawn from the card and substituted for some coriander, which probably worked better and made a delicious light dish spiked with lime in the form of caviar-like balls.

Mother’s pork belly was good, flavourful and nicely layered, but not I thought as heady and hedonistic as it should be. A little like a reconstructed chop.

My own veal shin was braised to perfection, soft but not sloppy, and served simply with some greenery. There was definite potential here, and at the least it would have been very nice if it hadn’t been so extravagantly over-seasoned as to make it almost inedible.

I plumped for a carafe of Spanish Monastrell off a list that is better than the website’s. It was intensely typical of the variety, and absolutely lovely. It did wear its ‘naturalness’ rather aggressively though, which left a muddy feel in the mouth and a thick black sediment in the carafe.

Cocktails were well made, though I’m pretty sure my Daiquiri involved Tequila, and absolutely certain they put a glace cherry in it. Neither are were offensive moves, but both a little weird.

Les Deux Salons is a welcome addition to theatreland; maybe the waiters are a little too charming but generally they’ve got the Frenchy bit nailed pretty well, all the way down to the inevitable slightly over-priced, slightly disappointing food. And in the end that’s all they really need.

Maine Lobster at "The Club"

$???

I had begun the day in notable style, arriving back at 10 in the morning wearing a pirate hat and santa pants.

A few hours previously the Russian's younger sister had mistakenly stolen a suede coat, a couple of leather jackets and a car, but still proved no match for my fearsome negotiating talents...

She might have my trousers, but I have her hat.

I had evidently navigated a peculiar evening with some panache, but even so I was more than a little concerned by what the next one had in store. We were due to visit a fairly hardcore South Carolina private members club ("No Negroes please, unless you're staff" kind of thing) for Lobster Night. Of course it wasn't the crustaceans that concerned me, more the unfortunate possibility that I would get drunk, run amok and then somebody would shoot me.

My compadre, however, was going to be of little use in the melee, as he had seemed somewhat listless all day. At one point that morning he *may* have been sexually assaulted by a photographer (male), and later had definitely agreed to go on a hunting tour of Argentina. Even a takeaway pizza and some fine 1980s Burgundy had failed to put the fight back in him.

Stoically determined to ingratiate myself with the locals, I armed myself with a stiff-upper-lip, a tweed jacket, a number of fictional stories about shooting things, and a bunch of racial stereotypes and made for The Club.

America is a land of superlatives: Most, Best and Biggest are ways of life, but first among these is Most. This is evidenced clearly in the country's approach to eating lobster. For a start the American doesn't "catch" a lobster as you or I might, he "harvests" it. In the state of Maine alone he did this to over 35 million kilos of the buggers in 2009 with a street value approaching $330m. 10,000 kilos of this is on hand for the five day Maine Lobster Festival, where the 100,000 or so visitors can tuck into the $34 Triple Lobster Dinner. The Club's Lobster Night was no more than a drop in the metaphorical ocean. Still, it was going to be interesting to see how the American Lobster stacked up against our own smaller European variation.

We began with a salad so unpretentious that they hadn't even bothered to mix the ingredients, some iceberg lettuce, sliced cucumber and cherry tomatoes were arranged in clumps on a small plate.

Before the main event we enjoyed wide-ranging conversation, covering hunting, shooting, fishing, the global warming conspiracy and the shortcomings of foreigners. I recall being a little disappointed with the size of my lobster, which was served with a couple of potatoes, some winning corn-on-the-cob and a little pot of melted "butter" in which to dip the flesh, as is the custom in the colonies. I say "butter" because, although I left it untouched throughout, at no point did it solidify. Presumably the same mutant cows that make squeezy cheese out of a bottle.

Once accessorised with some mayonnaise the creature proved more than acceptable. It seemed slightly less sweet and full flavoured than a good Scots lobster, and the claw meat was a tad watery, but all-in-all I was pleasantly surprised. Not the best, nor the biggest, but they've got the other one to a T.

Brasserie Toulouse Lautrec

140 Newington Butts, London. £35 pp including wine.

It seems the game wasn't rigged, or at least, not rigged very well.

This unfortunate fact resulted in the Russian losing the best part of £1000. Which in turn led to a decision that the best medicine would be a day-long bender involving a little sherry, a lot of ale, a trip to a casino to lose some more money playing games that definitely are rigged, several abortive efforts to find dinner, and finally a superb meal in Kennington piano-bar-cum-restaurant Brasserie Toulouse Lautrec.

The place is a recently opened sister restaurant to an old favourite The Lobster Pot, which it is next door to and run by the two sons of extravagantly moustachioed Frenchman Herve Regent, the owner and chef there.

The restaurant was amazingly busy for a Sunday night, though son #1 made an heroic effort as front of house, and, seemingly, the only waiter.

After settling down we set about examining the nicely priced, £20 for two courses, set menu. I was enthused to see a glut of French brasserie classics give little more than a passing nod to vegetarianism, though I did have to spend quite a while trying to explain to the Russian what an endive is. I appear not to have excelled in this matter as he promptly decided on the 'Endive Gratin' to start. Being a salad vegetable the endive obviously doesn't take well to gratin-type situations. This particular example was a predictably sloppy affair, and barely enlivened by the addition of some ham/bacon.

My own starter of half a dozen snails was noticeably superior. I side-stepped the £4.50 supplement for the full dozen, though I'm fairly certain they brought me more than six anyway. They were authentically chewy and tasteless affairs floating in some excellent garlic butter, and went well with the (entire loaf of) cracking bread we had been brought.

The Russian stepped up manfully to the £8 supplement for the Cote de Bouef main, which was good, but served with a side of those increasingly common hunks of fried potato that masquerade as a sort of posh 'chip.'

I am unable to ignore the presence of braised lamb shank on a menu, so went for that. It was a lovely, big, soft piece of meat, served simply with some crunchy, run-of-the-mill veg (broccoli, carrot &c.). This was so precisely what I wanted that even the menu's absurd lie that my meat had been cooked for 24 hours failed to bother me.

I navigated a peculiarly assembled wine list to emerge with a good Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon, which worked well with the two mains, though with the suspicion that the £26.60 price tag may be dipping its toe a little over the 300% mark-up threshold.

I'll go out on a limb and say that the food here is possibly even better than The Lobster Pot, though it's a close run thing, and it's certainly better value.

We retired to a largely empty upstairs for a small digestif; a Leffe for me and a carafe of Malbec for the Russian. I have faint recollection of a funny-looking man singing, who I assume was meant to be there, but it's testament to the knowing eccentricity of the place that this beardy prescence seemed to cap a charming evening rather well.

Jamon Iberico

£400

There comes a moment in everyones life when you realise that there just isn't quite enough pig involved.

Most people will perhaps add a chop or two next time they are in the supermarket. The more adventurous might opt for some Italian charcuterie with an unpronounceable name and an endorsement from Jamie Oliver. But both of these are clearly easy ways out, and bound to disappoint.

The Russian, however, is a man whose problem-solving abilities are legendary. No situation is too much for his particular breed of inspired whimsy and near limitless financial backing. And this is how on a recent visit I found myself face-to-face with an entire Iberico ham leg complete with authentic stand-thing (or Jamonero) and hopelessly blunt knife. Not much change from £400 apparently.

The recent proliferation of tapas restaurants mean that many will be au fait with the intricacies of jamon iberico. It is a cured Spanish ham, courtesy of the black Iberian pig. The pig itself seems usually to be a greyish colour, the 'black' of the name referring instead to the colour of the hooves.

The Spaniard's love of Denomicions has lead him to create a complicated scale of quality based primarily on quite how many acorns said pig has been eating. The zenith of this being jamon iberico de bellota, cured for three years and coming from pigs which are not fed grain but rather allowed to range freely and consume as many acorns as they can snuffle out. Needless to say, this is what the Russian had.

The first difficulty one comes upon when confronted with a whole ham leg is just how to go about hacking it up. Entire books have been devoted to the subject, but time was of the essence so we eschewed the experts and set about it ourselves...

Carving Iberico is ham markedly harder than you might imagine.

Initial efforts resulted in pieces that were probably closer to 'hunks' than the traditionalist might desire. But with time and the addition of a steel we improved and, by the end of the evening, produced some professionally thin slices.

Served at a correctly warm temperature the meat's fat hovered on the brink of liquidity and brought a lush silken texture to the splendid nutty salt-savouriness.

The care, the pride, and the pretentiousness pays off- a serious food lives up to a serious price-tag. Casticismo is yours for £400.

Notting Hill Brasserie

92 Kensington Park Road, London. £150 for two including wine

As I suspected he might do, TOD met my latest arrival in West London with some violent and suspicious behaviour.

The area's cartographers, some deaf people, and a young lady who happened to be standing where he wanted to be, all came under attack. But particular vehemence was reserved for a woman sitting next to us in a pub who was wearing a preposterous hat.

The lobotomy of TOD's social conscience has led to a game in which he enjoys loudly speculating to himself about the dress sense, moral integrity and relative unintelligence of those in his immediate vicinity. And this regrettably-hatted woman had the great misfortune last Saturday of entering it.

She and her companion left half their drinks.

Having known him for far too long than is good for me, I understand that this kind of behaviour is in fact his way of expressing quite how happy he is with his lot. However, at this point, I was rather regretting stoking this particular fire by bringing him a lovely postcard of an umbrella shop as a gift.

Several pints of bitter later, we pointed ourselves in the direction of the Notting Hill Brasserie, TOD having begun the first of the day's many efforts to leave his postcard in a pub.

Good Espresso Martinis at the bar were enhanced by conversation with a charming and knowledgeable barman concerning his trade, before we made our way to a grand and almost entirely empty dining room.

I was prepared for the intimidating feel of the place having earlier purchased a smart handmade umbrella which lent a considerable gravitas to my operation, but it was clear that my umbrella-less companion was a little non-u.

I went for the excellent value £15.50 set lunch, whilst TOD opted a la carte because he wanted a rich and satisfying lobster and scallop starter.

My own starter comprised five melty medallions of pretty well completely raw tuna perched on a salad-y thing, which added a satisfying crunchiness, but little in the way of flavour. Delicate and unpretentious.

After the starters were cleared the excellent barman returned to give TOD back his postcard, which I was now beginning to suspect he probably wasn't responsible enough to look after properly.

For mains TOD enjoyed a high-quality fillet steak, but this was effortlessly trumped by my own braised beef cheek, which oozed a rich umami savouriness.

Earlier TOD had cemented his burgeoning reputation as a selector of poor wine, by ordering a glass of pretty dilute and indistinct Argentinean Chardonnay as an aperitif. Luckily my own choice of a bottle of Dolcetto D'Alba was sound, the wine full of bright racy cherries, and just enough body and structure to stand up to the beef .

A very decent, if diminutive, cheese plate preceded coffees and the bill. It was a good and precisely cooked meal served with a welcome side portion of surreal created by the design of the place, and a staff to customer ratio that can't have been too shy of 10:1.

We made our way back to the Earl of Lonsdale via an unsuccessful attempt to buy a sword from a man with a pony-tail ("Probably not the sword for you mate." after I told him that I just wanted a sword to walk into a pub with).

At some point later TOD lost his postcard.

Gaucho Tower Bridge

2 More London Riverside, London. £50 pp inc wine.

We had reserved a table at the London Bridge branch of Gaucho Grill. A restaurant that unashamedly promises bloodied steak, blood-y wine and blokiness.

On arrival the most noticeable aspect of this particular establishment was the decor, which consisted entirely of bits of cow draped around a dining room. The effect, need I say, was largely unpleasant.

We were dining off the back of a three-hour wine tasting session run by Laithwaites at Vinopolis. TOD had spent much of this time talking bollix at two young ladies who seemed content to feed him cheese and claret whilst pretending to listen. I opted for the more ethereally sexy charms of Pinot Noir, served (winningly) by a woman who had a bag of Liquorice Allsorts under her desk. Afterwards TOD preposterously claimed not to like Liquorice Allsorts, but I think this was jealousy and beneath it he recognized who made the better call.

All this gluttony meant that we decided to skip starters and head straight for the restaurant's raison d'etre- steak.

I cast aside a perplexing folded menu, that probably would have required some advanced knowledge of origami to untangle, and let TOD do the necessary talking.

Before the main show we enjoyed an amuse-bouche of bread with posh herby oil. The dish had been a little over-hyped by my companion, who had insisted the waiter bring extra as it was so delicious. I put this down to a rather 1990s-surburban-houswife enthusiasm for flavoured olive oil, because, though was nice enough, it certainly wasn't a revolutionary take on the tried and tested "bread with posh herby oil" formula.

Afterwards what arrived at our table was; two rare rump steaks, two sauces, a bowl of chips, a second of leeks and a third containing something orange.

All that needs to be said of the steaks is that they were excellent: good quality, cooked accurately and satisfyingly meaty. The chips too were reassuringly chippy.

Accompanying sauces (creamy-with-mushrooms and creamy-with-peppercorns) could well be described as 'semantically challenged'. Their runny consistency seemed to place them firmly in the 'sauce' camp, but the portion size, and the manner of presentation in small pots in the middle of the table, was that of a dip. This duality of purpose amused me for some time and certainly didn't rankle, as they went excellently with the chips.

TOD finished the bowl of orange before I could get to it, but he tells me it was something involving sweet potatoes. This would strike as a slightly peculiar lie to invent, so I have no reason to doubt him.

And anyway I didn't care because I had something far more exciting on my side of the table... leeks.

I know what you're thinking: "Leeks!? But they're the poor man's scallion surely? And preposterously over-rated by Welsh people and sociopaths." And to be fair, I would tend to agree; the leek is an 'umble vegetable, never the star of the show, certainly not Prince Hamlet, somewhat (whisper it) downstairs.

In this instance the addition of blue cheese was transformative and revelatory. The salty zing cut through the char-grilled sweetness of the leeks perfectly. And with the pristine steak it was mesmerising.

I had been charged with selecting the wine, but with the clear implication that nothing but Malbec would do. TOD, always confident in his own infallibility, decided somtime ago that appreciation of red wine has reached its zenith in getting smacked around the chops by the grape's slick jamminess. Our waiter offered us a couple to taste, which was a nice touch, but we went for something more expensive. I'm pretty sure I ordered a Malbec, but our man distinguished himself by bringing a varietal Cabernet Sauvignon. I took this as a divine justification... que sera sera. TOD sulked a little.

Without a chaperone I might have fallen at the first, flummoxed by the weird interior design and foldy menu. But my companion steered us through these early setbacks admirably and we emerged fed, watered, and happy.