Favorites, Reviews, Products

Salt, 8 Church Street, Stratford-upon-Avon CV37 6HB (01789 263 566). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £70-£110 Paul Foster is living other chefs’ fantasies. He has the thing they all want: the small but perfectly formed restaurant where he can be himself. From a distance he has made this look effortless. I’m sure it wasn’t. I first ate his food at a hotel in Suffolk I had never heard of back in 2011, where he was ravaging the river banks for ingredients, pairing roasted chicken wings with brown shrimps and laying pieces of hake on swollen beads of bright green tapioca, flavoured with fiery wild watercress so it looked like frogspawn. There was a poise and balance to his cooking that won him a bunch of awards, including the  Observer Food Monthly young chef of the year award . Which is obviously The Only Award Worth Winning. He went from there to a country house hotel and onwards to this spot in Stratford-upon-Avon. It is his own, or the modern version of his own...

Fishers In the City, 58 Thistle Street, Edinburgh EH2 1EN (0131 225 5109). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £100 I am many things: tall, thick of waist and big haired. One gust of wind and I can end up looking like an unmade bed. Even without the wind, I may still look like that saggy sofa you can’t be bothered to throw out because of all the admin. I have never been able to slip into a room unseen. If I ring a doorbell after dark, I take four steps back after doing so, to avoid scaring the hell out of even my closest friends. If I am walking along a street late at night and there is a single person in front of me I cross to the other side, so as not to be that huge, looming presence in the shadows; the one who is terrifying until proven otherwise. I am indeed many things; easy to ignore is not one of them. Fishers in the City is like an old television that needs to be thumped on the side to stop the picture wobbling And yet the woman on the front desk at Edinbu...

The  Game  Bird, The Stafford, 16-18 St James’s Place, London SW1A 1NJ (020 7518 1234). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £140 It takes guts to write a menu full of original dishes nobody has ever heard of before. But just how much more courage does it take to write a menu full of the blindingly familiar; of dishes most people have tried and have opinions on? This is a peculiarly British thing. In Lyon or Milan, Barcelona or Munich, new restaurants offering endless iterations of the old open all the time. It’s what happens when you have a robust culinary culture: there is a menu, and you are expected to treat it with the respect accorded to the scriptures by the devout. The eater’s game is to find the place that does the best pot au feu or the best  risotto Milanese . In Britain generally and London in particular it’s not like this. The upside of a lack of certainty about what our own food might be, is openness. We’ll try bloody anything, and there’s al...