Elbow room? Yes, that’s lacking. But what I’m more concerned about is just where my growing gut is going to expand to. 40 hungry diners squished into the diminutive School of Wok is all well and good, but none of us accounted for the fact Asma Khan was planning to stuff us to the very gunwales with her British-Raj themed, multi-course Indian feast.

Up until recently, a US classic, bourbon whisky, had an image problem similar to American junk food before it got trendy.It’s presumably with the youth market in mind that Jim Beam has released a new bourbon called Devil’s Cut, a play on the notion of the’angel’s share’ where some of the bourbon is lost to evaporation while ageing in the barrel.

You may think the Times Cheltenham Literature Festival is all about food for thought, but Kate Townsend fids plenty more visceral things to chew on.

We’re all going a bit bonkers for street food right now, but what about roof […]

With chocolate week upon us, Anita Pati travels to York where chocolate is in the very air and immerses herself in a Chocolate Indulgence break. All the visits are spread over a couple of days giving you time to recuperate in your wonderful four-poster bed – if you book the deluxe room – before heading out for more engorgement. So why daydream of chocolate hunks when you can stuff a cityful in

Things are done differently in the country though, they hunt things, they kill and mostly eat the things they hunt, they are comfortable with corduroy and welly boots and mud. Here at Ashdown Park Hotel and Country Club part of the same Elite Hotels Group as The Grand Eastbourne some things are still done pretty much as they would have been done thirty years ago.

What do you like to do in your spare time? Read books, knit scarves, make airfix models of Lancaster Bombers perhaps? Not Tom, he likes to chop up bits of dead animal for fun! It might sound peculiar but butchery is something of a hobby of his: he really does enjoy spending time in the kitchen boning a shoulder of pork, spatchcocking a chicken or knocking up a brace of pork pies.

On a recent visit to a health food shop a’new generation’ of Superfood worthy of the Olympian gods flew off the shelf into Annabelle Hood’s shopping basket. It’s green, it’s mean and it’s heroically healthy.

Do you like your steak dry-aged, wet-aged, from cows that roam the Scottish Highlands or run free on pampas grass in Argentina – and how can you tell the difference? Joanna Biddolph visits The White Oak in Cookham for a steak masterclass with chef-patron Clive Dixon and master butcher Peter Allen – and unexpectedly bites off more than she can chew. 

‘When this rice is done, the grains should be standing on end, begging you to eat them, almost dancing around the pan’, declares Arun Kapil, himself doing a fair spot of the latter as he jigs about eulogising about Green Saffron’s AAA Vintage Basmati rice. He and Carom’s head chef, Balaji Balachander  have got a biriyani on the bubble, to demonstrate why this particular grain strain is just so superior.