Choose Yalla Yalla for dips and spanking fresh salads, gut-busting grills, and unusual puds worth exploring. Don’t if you’re in the market for mind-blowing hot mezze, or have no desire to drink the sort of cocktails that return you to the heady days of swigging illicit alcopops outside the yoof club. And, if you do go, sneak in a salt cellar.

Like any London brasserie worth its celery salt, a greater emphasis is on a well-turned-out room humming with money and gossip than anything as pedestrian as the eating. So whilst this inverted snob isn’t in a hurry to go back, if you happen to have a wad of fifties burning a hole in your pocket and adore to dine under a glass-domed’cupola’, you could do a lot worse. Just take your coat off first and don’t wear a watch.

The chicken skin was, as we guessed it would be, terrible. Greasy, lank and tasteless. Fit only to be peeled off like a soggy condom and as quickly discarded. The unseasoned meat was moist, verging on wet, and tasted of not much at all, not even chicken. The menu boasts that Clockjack’s marinade is a special secret recipe. The secret may possibly be that it’s just tap water.

Indian Essence is clearly the Kohinoor diamond in a crown of Petts Wood paste gems. Food quality is undeniable- but it’s a case of ‘ask not what Atul Kochhar can do to reinvigorate local Indian dining, but what local residents are willing to try in order to reinvigorate local Indian dining’. 

Blackwood’s at Nira Caledonia intends to raise the bar for fine dining in Edinburgh, and with his state-of-the-art Josper grill, head chef David Scott hopes to smoke out his New Town neighbours. Janet Watson fights her way through the wind and rain to find out if he can do the business.

They say absinthe possesses potent mind-bending properties. And a Ã¢â‚¬Ëœgreen fairy’-laced decoction at Scott Hallsworth’s Wabi certainly sets me up for a meal surreal from the scratchings that tell the eye’pork’ but scream’rice’ in the mouth, to a dessert of more ‘chocolate textures’ than you could shake a Flake at. 

David finds he’s not exactly ‘mad for it’ when he chow meins down in’Best Local Chinese Restaurant in the UK’ (Gordon Ramsay’s F Word 2009)

The coldest day of the year thus far, and we’ve battled a blizzard and the treacherous frozen pavements around Kings Cross to arrive at tonight’s destination, The Rotunda. Emerging into the lively and brightly lit atrium, we made our way to the entrance, picking our way through a busy bar filled with theatre-goers and Guardian staffers.

How do you like your steak? I don’t mean rare, medium or ruined, I mean what kind of ambience do you want?  The university educated, job in the media, parents in the shires, style of Hawksmoor, or the school of hard knocks, what bloody parents, making a fortune at the bank, style of STK?

It’s very City inside – J and I being the only people in the restaurant not wearing ties. Downstairs is a busy bar while upstairs there’s a la carte on offer. It’s a bit of a climb up there as the lift only takes one person – presumably it was designed by the same people who make the escape pods for Bond villains.