Set in the heart of Hoxton, The Real Greek is serving up traditional Greek food with a calorie-counted menu and new Cretan-inspired dishes that promise to make dining out and balancing a healthy lifestyle easy.

It’s a cliché of course to say that restaurants like Greens offer comfort food for the upper classes. This is a notion based on the idea that the upper classes don’t like ‘fancy’ food or stuff from Johnny Foreigner. They’re supposed to only like food that reminds them of nursery or public school. Well, as it happens, I am an ex-public schoolboy meself doncha know and we were never served oysters or lobster at our place. No doubt things were different at Eton.

It isn’t easy to fill venues on the industrial stretch of Bethnal Green road where Beach Blanket Babylon has hunkered down. Brick Lane’s melee bristles five minutes away. Commercial Road’s pencil moustache and cupcake brigade posture to the right. But despite the relative quiet on our Friday night visit, the punters seemed still to be loving it.

In a TV commercial a few years back a grumpy old lady bitterly complained that her local bank branch had been turned into ‘a trendy wine bar’. Well here around Threadneedle Street there’s hardly a bank branch left that isn’t now a restaurant or bar and while Mint Leaf may be the only ‘Indian’ it is rather trendy.

This imposing Victorian pub is cavernous and it is not until you walk through the entrance that you get a feel for the scale of the place. With good quality, well cooked dishes at reasonable prices, The Britannia is certainly worth visiting.

A short canal-side walk past the bustling bars and eateries left our abstention seeming ill founded as, in the middle of the after-work crowd, we spotted our destination, Massis. A curiously subdued venue set amid towering hives of industry the food here is simple, tasty and a wonderful conduit for easy bonhomie among friends.

There are a couple of things everyone should have local to them, a good curry house and a relaxed bar/restaurant. Until recently Wandsworth residents had The Chutney to satisfy the former, but since the demise of Dittos Bar & Restaurant nothing has come along to replace the latter. Now there’s Steam to give Wandsworth some puff.

Two foraging carnivores have modestly gentrified Clerkenwell’s ‘Coach & Horses’ into gastropub territory. However rather than tick box diners expectant of Michelin frippery alongside a beer garden / sprog storage pen, it now draws genuinely hungry foodies craving good value, hearty quality.

The Italians know what food is for – it’s for lunch – a meal that can often stretch on until it becomes dinner. The best Italian food is found, unsurprisingly in Italy, but in about the same time it takes for a budget airline to deposit you, cantankerous and queasy from your in-flight ‘snack’, at Pisa airport you could be at Nonna’s in Sheffield.

Through sculptures, lighting and curious sounds, the otherwise derelict top tiers of a Peckham car park have been transformed into polished decay and dreamy decadence.’Bold Tendencies’, is the third summer showcase from the local but far-reaching, ‘Hannah Barry’ gallery.