I wouldn't normally feel comfortable sticking a score on a place after sampling just 2 dishes from a menu, but I will make an exception for the Knave of Clubs for two reasons. Firstly, they have put the rotisserie "centre stage" at one end of the large dining room and that is what, I imagine, the large majority of their visitors will be ordering. Secondly, I bloody loved the place, so I don't think they'll mind me writing about it even without trying most of what their kitchens can offer. We started, though, with oysters - an extremely reasonable £20 for 6 large, lean specimens supplied with all the correct condiments. In a town when the average price per bivalve is hovering around the £5 mark (and in some cases is well above that), it's nice to know that there's somewhere still offering value like this. The same sense of value is evident in the rest of the menu. They really could charge a lot more for a whole chicken than £38, especially given the quality of these birds (from arguably London's best butcher Turner and George), and even if they didn't come with a giant helping of sides. For your money you get loads of chicken fat roasties, a nice sharply-dressed green salad, some slices of baguette and a little pot of light, homemade aioli. All of this generosity would have come to naught if the chicken itself wasn't up to scratch, but fortunately thanks to the provenance I mentioned, plus judicious use of brining (not too salty but just enough to ensure every bit of the flesh is tender and juicy), plus a really lovely chermoula spice rub, the end result was a truly impressive bit of rotisserie - the best pub roast chicken I've had the pleasure to tear into in recent memory; certainly the best value. We absolutely demolished the chicken then spent many happy minutes mopping up the chermoula cooking juices with the slices of baguette, and for a while, all was well with the world. The bill, with a £32 bottle of wine came to £51pp - you really can spend a lot more than this and get a lot less, and not just in central London. In fact the whole experience, including the lovely and attentive staff, made me forgive the only real complaint I have about the place - bloody communal tables. But the spots are spread out around them quite generously, and actually just gives me an excuse to return and try the bistro-style One Club Row upstairs in the same building, where chef Patrick Powell (ex- Allegra) is really stretching his wings. I bet it's great. Watch this space. P.S. Anyone who subscribes by email I am aware of the fact that follow.it have started to be very annoying and not posting the content in the body of the email, just a link to it hosted by them. I didn't ask for this, and am not making any money from it. If you want to continue receiving the full posts via email, can I suggest you subscribe to my substack here, where you can opt to receive the full posts via email, for free.

I'm going to start this post about the Parakeet, with - unfortunately (for them, and possibly for you) - a bit of a rant. Why is it that no matter how much money has been lavished on a place, no matter how starry the chefs, how extensive the wine list, how exclusive the whisky collection (the Parakeet has some very interesting bourbons), the beer offering is almost always absolute garbage? I've lost count of the amount of gastropubs I've turned up to for a pre-dinner pint that seem to think it's OK to serve an exciting, seasonal modern British menu with a straight face alongside Camden Hells, Moretti, Guinness and bugger-all else. There's nothing poisonous about any of these bog-standard beers, and not everywhere can be the Wenlock Arms, but honestly guys, it's not difficult - serve the mass-market crap if you must but why not have one or two taps available for something from Deya, or Verdant, or Signature, or Pressure Drop, or god knows how many other great independent craft breweries on your doorstep? Would it really kill you? So yes my evening at the Parakeet got off to a bit of a humdrum start, with a pint of something entirely forgettable, but I'll give them this - at least, unlike so many 'gastropubs', it's still a proper pub, with a handsome and tastefully restored high-Victorian bar area supported by banquette seating at least equal in size to the dining section. And they're both beautiful spaces, with stained glass details and dark wood panelling, the dining area theatrically unveiled with the raising of curtains at the beginning of service. They can do a good Negroni too, and know how to put together a supremely attractive Spring menu, with a lot of my favourite words - crab, asparagus, wild garlic, oysters - offered at prices that, these days at least, seem almost modest. The point is, the Parakeet are doing lots of things right and so when they do slip up it only serves to remind you how much better it would be if they'd paid slightly closer attention to the details. This, for example - described on the menu as "Poached oysters & sea buckthorn granita". Now I'm going to be generous and forgive the plurality as a typo, rather than anything more sinister, because it's £5 for a single beastie is pretty much the norm these days. But am I right in thinking "poached" means served warm? This was ice-cold and tasted raw - again, perfectly fine if that's what you want but not as described. And doesn't "granita" mean a kind of shaved-ice frozen affair? This was a very nice dressing, with what can be a sharply astringent sea buckthorn element tempered by apple juice, but I wouldn't call it a granita. Duck hoi sin tartlets were very pretty little things which tasted as good as they looked - bags of salty, syrupy hoi sin flavour and with nice soft chunks of pink duck. Crab lasagne bites contained a good amount of crab meat and a very seductive cheese-toastie style arrangement of textures. They were also something I'd genuinely never seen before on a menu, which for this jaded blogger after nearly two decades in the game is impressive by itself. Hopefully it's not too much of a criticism to say that this plate of artichoke, broad beans (properly peeled, thank you) and sunflower seeds possibly would have been better described and sold as a side, rather than a starter. It had nice shaved artichokes, plenty of big juicy broad beans and the seeds added an attractive crunch, but in the end there wasn't quite enough going on to justify itself as a standalone dish. Nevertheless, we did quite happily polish it off. The only real dud of the evening, food-wise at least, was the turbot. Under-seasoned, with an unattractive flabby skin and a strangely blobby-textured, soily flesh, it really wasn't a very pleasant thing to eat and was a poor advertisement for what can otherwise be one of the best fish to eat on the planet. The pickled white asparagus and grape dressing it came with, however, was lovely, which although hardly making up for the turbot did mean there was at least something to enjoy on the plate. Bizarrely though, considering the poor state of the turbot, this battered, deep-fried red mullet was an absolute joy. Inside a nice crunchy greaseless batter was a fillet of superb mullet, every inch of it properly seasoned and bursting with flavour. I'll forgive them missing to remove a few bones from one side - they were easily dealt with, and the masala and curry leaf sauce it came with was rich with tomato and spices. I know through bitter experience that red mullet does not always taste this good, so this was a surprise as well as a delight. Desserts were enjoyable, but didn't seem to have had the same amount of care lavished on them as the savoury courses. Chocolate mousse was tasty enough and a bed of crunchy puffed oats (I think they were) gave it a bit of texture, but it's not really the best chocolate mousse I've eaten this month (step forward, yet again, the Devonshire) never mind longer ago. Citrus Bakewell tart was slightly more interesting and I liked the fragile ribbons of caramelised fruit they'd draped on top, but the cake element was slightly dry and crumbly. Overall, though, the Parakeet are doing more things right than wrong, and if that seems like damning with faint praise it still puts them ahead of a lot of spots in town. I hesitate to mention service on invites like these but everyone seemed very enthusiastic, and kept exactly the right balance between friendliness and professionalism - they also passed the folded napkin test with flying colours. And although the food menu wasn't exactly at the budget end of the scale, they do offer a house white for £29 which is approaching a genuine steal these days. So yes, if I was going to spend this amount of money and take a journey across town for this kind of food there's a few places (not least the Devonshire, but also the Baring, the Drapers Arms and the Pelican) that would be ahead of the list. But if I was a local, I think I'd be pretty happy to have the option to visit. And perhaps that's all that matters. I was invited to the Parakeet and didn't see a bill, but totting up what we ate and drank from the menus comes to about £70pp which isn't bad really.

In a world of sprawling Mercato Metropolitanos, Market Halls and Arcade Food Halls, the miniscule Holborn Food Hub is a reminder that food courts come in all shapes and sizes. I'm sure they had very good reasons for filling a space the size of a mobile phone repair shop with fully 3 different food vendors and a ludicrously antisocial arrangement of table and chairs all seemingly piled up on top of each other, as whatever they're doing is working - most days the queue at lunchtime stretches down the street. But we were lucky - and early - enough on a Thursday to bag a small table and order a couple of bits from the 7 Floor Malaysia Tea Room (the name is a bit of a mystery - maybe they started on the 7th floor of somewhere else, as Holborn Food Hub is very definitely on the ground floor). Chicken wings arrived first - robust, healthy things, properly jointed (no wingtips here) and with a lovely bubbly, crackly exterior. Assam Laksa was a giant bowl full of pineapple-spiked seafood broth, topped with sticks of cucumber and pineapple and onion and with a mound of thick Udon-y style noodles (I'm sure there's a Malaysian word for them, sorry) hiding underneath. The aroma as it moved around the room was incredible - and triggered a long-forgotten memory of visiting a hawker still in Kuala Lumpur back when I was just fresh out of university. Back then I probably ended up with something more timid like, well, chicken wings - but it's amazing how long the memory of smells linger as more or less everything else gradually fades. Beef rendang was impeccable - probably the best the capital has to offer, and I've tried a few. There is a surprising amount of very bad rendang in London (the Roti King version is awful - particularly odd when you consider the rest of their offering is decent) but this was doing absolutely everything right, from the complex depth of flavour of the sauce to the beautifully meltingly tender chunks of beef. Also worthy of note was the accompanying sambal which added a beguiling whole new set of umami flavours into the mix. Some slices of cucumber added a welcome salad element, fried shallots (I think they were) added crunch and salty vegetal flavour, and finally a hard boiled egg (because why not) completed the dish. Just like the Assam Laksa, if you were served this from a hawker stall in Malaysia you would be more than happy. There was no printed bill - the girl behind the counter just offered the contactless machine having seemingly done the total in her head - but £41 seemed perfectly reasonable for the amount and quality of food, and I should also mention the service which was so lovely and friendly it was like being invited to eat in someone's front room. Albeit a front room with way too many closely-packed tables and chairs. 9/10

Earlier this month I was lucky enough to eat probably the best burger I've ever had in my life. It was a smash burger, cooked quickly on a flat-top to a good crust, placed inside a toasted sweet bun and dressed with little more than deli cheese. And before I get accused of being deliberately misleading I'll say now - it wasn't at Whole Beast. The Friendly in San Diego is a slightly bizarre little operation serving just two things - decent, if unspectacular, pizza by the slice in the New York style, and probably the greatest burger on the West Coast. It's a simple concept but then the greatest things often are - good, coarse, high fat content ground beef, smashed onto a searing hot flat top and aggressively seasoned. Deli cheese is melted on top, and then the single patty goes into a wide, flat bun. So far, so 2025. So this is a tale of two burgers. Or to be more accurate, three burgers across two burger joints. It's not Whole Beast's fault that I had a life-changing sandwich made to a very similar spec in California four days before I found myself heading up Blackhorse Road towards their residency at Exhale taproom, but then I'm afraid life isn't fair. Just ask Dick and Mac McDonald. Whole Beast are clearly burger-lovers, and burger aficionados, as they are doing pretty much everything right in the construction of their offerings. Both have a generous amount of good beef, smashed out flat and wide, spilling attractively outside of the soft toasted buns. The cheeseburger (£13) is a thing of wonderful simplicity made with care and heart - the toasted bread and crisp beef crackle deliciously as you bite down into it, and the melted cheese eases the whole thing along. It really is a superb burger. I like the green chilli cheeseburger slightly less, perhaps because the chilli element comes in the form of a kind of smooth, cold chutney, and there's quite a lot of it, which throws the delicate balance of textures in the smash burger off slightly. I did appreciate the hit of chilli though - they didn't hold back on that - and this was, all said, still a very well constructed burger, with the same crunchy, almost honeycombed beef patty and squishy soft/toasted buns. Their crinkle-cut chips are also excellent, every bit as good as those served by Shake Shack (the only smash burger chain worth bothering with), and holding a nice, greaseless crunch right to the very bottom of the bowl. Smoked chicken wings had a fantastic hearty, bouncy texture that spoke of very good chicken, and a lovely note of smoke accompanied every bite. I will forgive them for leaving the wing tips on (why serve something you can't eat? You might just as well leave the feathers on) because they were so fun to get stuck into, and the "wild leek ranch" they were coated in was a refreshing counterpoint to the smoked meat. The only slight disappointment of the lunch were these cucumbers, which despite the addition of "whipped tofu dressing, chilli crisp, furikake" and something else obliquely referred to as "GGG" (your guess is as good as mine) mainly tasted of, well, what they were - plain, unpickled, chopped cucumbers in a vaguely Japanese salad dressing. And I don't know about you, but I can prepare raw cucumbers fairly easily myself at home. And they don't cost £7. So again, it's hardly a disaster that Whole Beast's version of the smash burger isn't quite on a par with what is regularly spoken about as one of North America's greatest (just ask Reddit) - it's just sheer coincidence I managed to try both in the space of a week, and there was only ever going to be one winner in that battle. The fact is, the E17 variety is still, by any measure, a smashing (pun intended) achievement and a lovely way to spend your lunch money. And London's burger scene is all the better for its existence. I forgot to take a photo of the bill but the damage per person came to about £33 with a pint of Exale beer each. And yes, that is a terrible photo of the Friendly Dirty Flat Top Cheeseburger, sorry - you'll have to take my word for it that it looked a lot better in person.

I'm sure the Manoir (as I will call it for this post) can impress whatever the weather, but when the early summer sun is shining, and punters are welcomed into the gardens for their aperitifs and/or digestifs, the place is surely at its best. When you've got gardens like these, sprawling over several manicured acres, including orchards, vegetable allotments, lawns and ponds, all in the shadow of a honeyed Cotswold stone country mansion, you need to make the most of them, and after the first glass of English sparkling wine I was thinking that whatever else happened during the day (and despite the weirdly cheap-looking garden furniture) that well, this is just lovely isn't it? Of course, we weren't just at the Manoir to drink champagne in the sun (although I get the feeling the staff would have no issue with you doing just that) but to see what on earth you get for the eye-watering £230 per person lunch menu - a figure that puts it right out in the top 1% of dining experiences in the country. Paying this amount of money puts a place firmly in the 'extremely special occasion' category, and brings with it a certain set of expectations that, for better or worse, only a near-flawless (or actually flawless) experience can meet. But it was during that first drink on the lawn, once we'd had a few minutes to settle down and take it all in, that we began to notice something. Good service is pretty much the norm these days in the UK - we took a while to catch up with the rest of the world but can now easily hold our own. But the staff at the Manoir appear to be operating on another level entirely. They dance around the place, nimble as ballerinas, confident, happy, assured, attentive yes but not overly-so, chatty and pleasant but never too much - it really is a world-class lesson in front of house. So in all honesty, the food only needed to be good enough and we still would have had the time of our lives at the Manoir, as it's impossible to not enjoy being a part of a service routine so utterly dazzling. But it's a pleasure to report that the generous number of dishes that made up the lunch tasting menu were almost as faultless - starting with these bitesize canapes of beef tartare with shimeji mushroom, salmon tartare with trout roe, and (my favourite) a dainty beetroot and goats' cheese meringue sandwich which absolutely exploded with flavour in the mouth. House bread was a sort of tomato-laced brioche thing which reminded me very much of the onion brioche they used to serve at the Ledbury back in the day. Maybe they still serve it at the Ledbury, I don't know I haven't been in a while. Anyway that was, just like this is, excellent, just moreish enough that you worry about filling up on it before the menu proper starts. This confit egg with pea and smoked bacon was perfectly nice but perhaps the only dish that didn't feel quite in the same 2-Michelin-star league as everything else. I liked the little cheese straw thing wrapped with ham, but there was something a little bland and textureless about the egg and pea mixture itself. Still, another person on our table said this was his favourite dish, so there's every chance this is just a matter of taste. Next up (for some of us at least) was a lovely big slab of seared foie gras. For a £35 supplement - because presumably a menu costing £230 per person is barely even covering their costs - it came (as you might hope) beautifully cooked, absolutely dissolving in the mouth, and alongside a dainty little apple tart. With a tamarind sauce dropped on top, it really was a fantastically enjoyable plate of food. The non-supplemental alternative was a scallop ceviche with cucumber and Thai spices, which I didn't get to try but am reliably informed was also excellent. Looks the part as well, doesn't it? Everyone absolutely loved this next course, a huge single morel mushroom stuffed with chicken and sweetbreads, sat in a white asparagus and Jura wine foam. Sometimes when French food goes full, no-holds-barred, Frenchier-than-French haute cuisine, there's absolutely no stopping it. This was a course to remember, certainly. Nobody felt confident enough to go for the £50 supplement A4 Wagyu, but there was a certain amount of soul searching when we saw it presented to other tables, above a mini charcoal grill sending waves of incredible beefy flavours wafting around the room. But fortunately, lamb with sweetbread, asparagus and wild garlic was stunning - a piece of loin so tender you could have cut it with a spoon, and new season asparagus and wild garlic from the gardens adding the perfect vegetable pairing. We also loved the little potato tuiles made into the shape of flowers, and the brilliantly sharp dots of mint sauce which added another talking point. Cheeses next - I forget which is considered more 'French', having cheese before dessert or after, but Le Manoir have gone for the former - and a relatively short but focussed selection of cheeses in blindingly good condition. There was an aged Comte (of course) and an English blue, but the stars of the show were two soft washed-rind cheeses, one French and one English, which I completely forgot to write down. Hopefully someone can identify them from the pictures. They were great, anyway. As a palate cleanser with elements of savoury (lime and bitters) and dessert (cream and chocolate), the pre-dessert bridged the gap to the sweet courses perfectly. With a base of bitter chocolate and cocoa nib topped with a dome of lime foam, it looked gorgeous and tasted even better - just ridiculously easy to eat. The strawberry dessert was absolutely perfect in every way. A hundred different pastry techniques all on show at once, all masterfully done, all showcasing a main ingredient at its absolute best and treated beautifully. I particularly liked the way they'd incorporated strawberry into the brandy-snap crunchy topping, and also placed a bit of strawberry puree into a sample of the actual strawberry so you can see where it all started. Also, though again I didn't get to try it, there was something called a "Cafe creme", a cup made of actual chocolate filled with various coffee-flavoured mousses, parfaits and (I think) ice cream. And as per the scallop dish, I didn't hear any complaints, even about the £35 supplement. And perhaps a supplement for foie gras I can understand, or Wagyu beef, but coffee and chocolate? Petits fours, including a wonderful mini magnum on a stick, were served back out in the garden under the late afternoon sun. And it's just as well that the final bits of food we were served here were just as impressive as the first as it was here, sozzled and sated, that we were handed the bill. £1902 for 4 people. But there's two points I need to make about what is clearly a lot of money for a single meal. Firstly, Le Manoir do not hold back on the old wine refills. I think we must have had about double what they advertised (125ml per glass) - at least it certainly felt like it once we'd barrelled out of the place into an Uber - and none of these extras were added to the bill or even mentioned as an issue. They just always made sure our glasses were full. Secondly, and I realise I'm repeating myself, but bloody hell that service. As we had visited on a "very high pollen" day, one of our party sneezed (discreetly I may add) at the table and within seconds a box of tissues had appeared by her side. Our waiter wasn't just charming but fun with it - I realise that has the potential to be completely insufferable but I honestly think he just completely clicked what kind of day we wanted and went with it. The smiles never left our faces for the whole afternoon (at least apart from the times we were filling them with food and booze) and it transformed what would have been an extremely pleasant experience into an exceptional one. Pied a Terre or, I don't know, even £350 better than somewhere like etch in Hove despite having lovely formal gardens to enjoy. A lot of places do very good food now, and the Manoir is no longer the exclusive island of gastronomy it once was over 40 years ago. 8/10