Melito, Oxford Circus

Why are some cash machines located lower than others? In any row one will always be a couple of feet nearer the pavement than the rest. Is it like the special urinal in the gents, the one that allows small boys to relieve themselves without having to jump up and down, a procedure that tends to get a bit messy?

Trinity, Clapham

Trinity is the second Clapham restaurant of chef patron Adam Byatt, with the first being the now defunct Thyme, and it works very hard to amalgamate fine dining with its friendly neighbourhood restaurant ethos. Soft lighting gently framed the windows with only a small discreet plaque revealing the restaurant within, Trinity.

The Cambria, Camberwell.

If anyone gives you lip about South London being a cultural wasteland and tells you the only food we specialise in is fried chicken, I suggest you take them down to The Cambria where it’s so good they’ll feel very much at home, wherever they’re from.

Bel Canto

Intense. That is probably the best way to describe the experience at Bel Canto. You see, at Bel Canto, guests are served by waiters who perform opera at regular intervals. And in the relatively small room of the restaurant, that’s quite a lot of reverberations to take in.

The Witchery by the Castle, Edinburgh

There’s nothing like starting your evening with an escort. By this, I don’t mean a pre-prandial visit to a lady of the night but instead having a man beat a path through a crowd to ensure that you make your reservation on time.The necessity for this bustling though was down to the Witchery restaurant lying only a few yards from Edinburgh Castle.

Redhook, Clerkenwell

I really wanted to like Redhook but there’s a balance between making customers feel like part of the crew and casting them out on such a long line that they feel lost and forgotten, bobbing around in a sea of other thirsty and hungry people. Put some welly into front of house and Redhook could be reeling them in.

Bavarian Beerhouse, Tower Hill

You can tell a lot about a person from their sense of humour, and while, naturally, I take great pleasure in witty wordsmithery and brilliant badinage, my funny bone belongs to sauce. So when I saw that the new Bavarian Beerhouse is located in Crutched Friars, I confess that I allowed myself a small, but heart-felt ‘oo-er’.