Studio Gauthier, Fitzrovia

Hard as it may be to believe from my supremely easy-going and liberal attitude these days (no laughing at the back), there was a time when I was, well, if not completely anti-vegan then certainly vegan-skeptic. To someone who once considered vegetarianism radically restrictive, veganism seemed like vegetarianism with the few remaining good bits (butter, cheese, cream, eggs) taken out, a path taken only by people who didn't really like food in the first place and were looking for a more socially acceptable word to substitute for "dietary neurosis".

And certainly, there are cuisines that (for want of a better word) "veganise" better than others. Most of the SE Asian and Indian subcontinent handle veganism supremely well - certain subgenres of Indian food are largely vegan anyway, and I have it on good authority from a vegan friend who went on holiday to Thailand recently that he ate extremely well almost everywhere. Just don't try being a vegan in France - one member of my family recently asked for a vegan alternative to a set menu starter and was served pâté de foie gras, a substitution very much from the Nana Royal attitude to hospitality.

Sushi, with its focus on fresh fish, doesn't seem like an obvious cuisine to lend itself to going vegan, but then chains like Pret and Wasabi have done so for a number of years already with their avocado and cucumber rolls. What if it was done properly, with a chef's attitude to detail and with real presentational flair? Studio Gauthier attempts to do just that, making excellent sushi that just happens to have no animal in it. Can it really work?

Well, in a word, yes. The first thing to arrive to our table was this cute presentation of plant-based "caviar", the deception strengthened by being served in a little custom-printed caviar tin. The "caviar" itself was remarkably realistic - certainly the equal to the lumpfish roe you can get from Tesco, probably even nicer - and underneath was a layer of creamy, salty plant-based crème fraiche of some kind (probably made from nuts but don't hold me to that). It was all rather lovely, despite the vegan blinis perhaps not working quite as well as their butter and milk-based counterparts and also being somewhat burned. Passing the huge open kitchen a little later, I noticed one of the staff despondently picking through a pile of burned blinis for the occasional one that could be salvaged and used, so clearly something had gone wrong in the preparation that day. I'm sure they're normally a lot better than this.

When it comes to accurately describing the actual sushi, I'm going to have a bit of an issue, as some of the very clever techniques they used to recreate the standard sushi sets are quite beyond my powers of deduction. But alongside avocado nigiri here are "salmon" and "tuna" nigiri made, I'm told from tapioca starch with more fake tuna urumaki, all of it more than convincing. What also helped was that the sushi rice was warm - a detail that plenty of "actual" (and far more expensive) sushi places get wrong.

Another plate of nigiri featured chargrilled aubergine, piquillo peppers with passion fruit chutney and, in the centre there, "Green Dynamite" - crisp rice fritters topped with tofu "crab", and sliced jalapeño dotted with sriracha. Thoughtfully put together and each mouthful bursting with flavour, I think it was about this point that I completely forgot I was eating plant-based food and was just eagerly looking forward to the next thing to arrive.

More "tuna" and avocado and truffled miso nigiri came sharing a plate with a bitesize inari - a spongey, sweet tofu thing stuffed with soft, warm rice. Inari are actually vegan anyway, so perhaps the success of this shouldn't be too much of a surprise, but it was still a very good example of its kind, and right up there with the caviar as one of my favourite things overall.

With a couple of cocktails, the bill came to £43pp, more than reasonable for London these days, certainly for food which although doesn't contain any expensive protein did still clearly have a lot of work and thought gone into it. I'm just docking a couple of points firstly for the burned blinis, and also for slightly inexperienced service charged at slightly-over-normal 15% - we had to ask a couple of times for various things. Also, the room isn't air-conditioned which you could just about get away with when it's 28C (the day we visited) but once it goes over 30C, which it often does in London these days, you're not going to want to be there very long. Still, these are niggles.

Even a committed protein eater like me had a blast at Studio Gauthier - it's intelligent, enjoyable food done well in attractive yet informal surroundings, and for not very much money at all. For vegans though, this could very easily be everything they ever wanted in a restaurant, where instead of having to choose between the only plant option (usually mushroom risotto, or something involving butternut squash) or going hungry, they can have anything they want from this enticing menu, and be just as smug and satisfied as their protein-eating friends anywhere else in town. And that alone has to be worth a trip, surely?

8/10

Uncle Hon's BBQ, Hackney Wick

After traipsing halfway across London, dodging travel works and closed Overground lines and carriages with malfunctioning air conditioning and all the other things that make moving around this city on a weekend in the summer such an endless joy, it's equally annoying to find that your destination is good or bad. If it's good, you will bemoan the fact that somewhere worth visiting is so bloody difficult to get to, and seethe with jealousy of those lucky locals who have such a good place on their doorstep. And if it's bad, you wish you'd spent your Saturday morning and sanity going somewhere else.

Uncle Hon's isn't awful. It's not great, but it's not awful. The brisket (sorry, ox cheeks) was over-tender to the point of mush (it would definitely not pass the competition BBQ "pull-test") and a bit too sweet. Pulled lamb had a decent flavour but a rather uniform texture - the joys of the "pulled" element of a BBQ tray lie almost entirely in finding little crispy crunchy bits of fat and charred flesh; this was just a bit boring. And some cubes of pork belly were decent enough in that Cantonese roast style but was yet more sweet, syrupy, mushy meat next to two other piles of sweet, syrupy, mushy meat and the whole thing was just a bit sickly.

Iberico ribs were a bit better in terms of texture - they did at least have a bit of a bite and didn't just slop off the bone as is depressingly often the case - but I feel like Iberico has become a bit of a meaningless foodie buzzword like Wagyu, ie. nowhere near the guarantee of quality it once was (if indeed it ever was). These were definitely the best things we ate though, and were pretty easily polished off.

Oh I should say pickles and slaw were fine, if fairly unmemorable, and a single piece of crackling weirdly lodged vertically into a mound of rice like the sword in the stone had a pleasant enough greaseless texture but was pretty under seasoned.

Look, I can see what they're trying to do at Uncle Hon's - fusion American/Chinese BBQ food, bringing a bit of a new twist to what is now fairly ubiquitous London drinking-den fare, and with a bit more thought and skill it could have been, well, if not completely worth that awful journey but at least some compensation for your efforts. But after having paid £50pp for what is an only fairly mediocre tray of food plus 3 small extra pork ribs, we were left feeling fairly unhappy, not very satisfied and more than a little ripped off.

5/10

Norbert's, East Dulwich

They're like the buses, these rotisserie places. You wait years for a decent, affordable spit-roast chicken in the capital, and then two come along at once.

I'm being slightly disingenuous and short-memoried, of course. Soho House's Chicken Shop was a reliably enjoyable place to get the good stuff, and was remarkable value as well. But for whatever reason - who know how these things work, certainly not me - the one in Holborn closed (where I would go at least once every couple of weeks back in the day), then Kentish Town, then Tooting, and then after hanging on for a year or two the final spot in St John's Wood shuttered.

And believe me, I've tried my best at the other end of the budget too. About a decade ago I tried Hélène Darroze's Sunday roast (sorry - Dimanche poulet) at the Connaught, and while some of the starter elements were very nice (particularly a genius-level chicken consommé and Armagnac shot - hook it into my veins) the main event was overcooked, dry and disappointing. And, of course, stupidly expensive.

So until recently - with certain notable exceptions - rotisserie chicken was just not something that London did well. But hot on the heels of the Knave of Clubs (in fact I believe they opened within a couple of months of each other) is Norbert's in East Dulwich, a much more modest operation than that grand old Victorian pub in Shoreditch (I'm sure Norbert's won't mind me saying) but still aiming to apply intelligence and skill to the business of roast poultry.

The menu is short - very short, just the aforementioned chicken with sides and a couple of starters - but then that's the whole point of a specialist place like this. This is not a restaurant that does chicken, it is a chicken restaurant, and if you're vegetarian, well, you can find somewhere else to eat. We started with taramasalata which in itself was lovely but the salt and vinegar crisps it came with was, I think, a flavour too far for the same dish, the astringency fighting with the seafood. Much better would have been plain, I think. But still, an excellent tarama.

Before the main event, though, I need to talk about service - particularly wine service. My female friend had picked out a bottle she wanted to try. It duly arrived, but was poured into my own glass to taste, and without thinking (I'm afraid I've still got some way to go in situations like this) I tasted it and said it was fine. Anyone who knows me will tell you a vote of confidence in a wine from me is about as useful and prestigious as a degree from Trump University, so inevitably, when the same wine was poured into my friend's own glass she in fact didn't like it, and was offered something else. In a hapless attempt to salvage both mine and the restaurant's mistake I offered to pay for the first wine anyway, so we ended up in the end spending a small fortune on wine, not all of which we ended up drinking.

Now clearly, the first mistake was theirs (offering the first taste to the person who hadn't ordered it - let's for their sake assume that was an honest mistake and nothing too worryingly gender-based), and the second was mine (tasting it instead of offering it to my friend - there's a small chance I may have been distracted by taramasalata but that's no excuse), but I think the final mistake was the restaurant's really, for not offering to just take back the unwanted wine. But maybe there's some other nuance I've not thought of - what do you think?

The chicken, though, was just about worth the stress. A healthily thick, dark skin packed with spice and seasoning, a brined but not in the least bit 'hammy' flesh, some excellent crisp fries that held their structure and flavour until the last bite, and a supremely crunchy, fresh salad. Perhaps it wasn't quite the same level as the Turner & George chicken from the Knave, for an almost identical price (salad and fries are extra here, but included at the Knave) but was still worth the journey.

We also found space for some nice cheese from Mons cheesemongers up the road, a gruyere style from Ireland which was a perfect temperature. Which didn't help our £72pp final bill but as I say, most of that was wine, whether we wanted it or not.

I'm in two minds about Norbert's. On the one hand it is perfectly acceptable chicken for not a huge amount of money and it's an unpretentious little addition to this corner of East Dulwich. On the other hand the whole business with the wine left us wishing the whole experience had gone differently, and yes it doesn't compare well with a certain other rival rotisserie spot in Shoreditch doing things a little bit better for pretty much the same price. I think I know where's more likely to get my repeat custom.

6/10

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The Knave of Clubs, Shoreditch

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.

9/10

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The Parakeet, Kentish Town

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.

7/10

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.

7 Floor Malaysia Tea Room, Holborn

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.

So yes I'll take a point off for the rather uncomfortable dining arrangements, but this is otherwise a spot doing deeply authentic and enjoyable Malaysian classics that deserves to be enjoyed again and again - and I almost certainly will given I work just over the road. Good things, it seems, come in small packages.

9/10

Whole Beast, Blackhorse Road and The Friendly, San Diego

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.

But the Friendly have a couple more additions to their $8 (yes, really) 'Dirty Flat Top Cheeseburger' - firstly a dollop of soft butter-braised onions - no crunch from these, thank you, it's all about the caramelised flavour - and a layer of homemade aioli just under the top bun. The combination is extraordinary - you get the crunch from the toasted buns and the beef, and the single square of cheese is just enough to provide that gooey dairy classic cheeseburger feel in the mouth. But the combination of the onions and the ethereally light aioli above all that provides this incredible floaty flavour bomb, like the beef and the cheese are being draped in a velvety, garlic-onion mousse. That, and the fact that its low, flat profile is perfect for holding in your hands, makes it one of the great burger experiences. There's nothing else even close to it in San Diego, probably the world.

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.

Overall though, Whole Beast is worth the journey to this corner of NE London, even for those of us who live at the other end of the Victoria line. Where it matters, the food is knowledgeably crafted and intelligently cooked, with a genuine enthusiast-level of attention to smash burger detail, and a pleasingly liberal attitude to inspiration to fill out the rest of the menu. I should also mention the sauces, my favourite of which was the treacly, rich pork fat BBQ, an excellent foil for the crinkle-cut chips. There really is something of note across the board.

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.

Whole Beast 8/10
The Friendly, San Diego 10/10

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.