Banquet 88, St Katharine Docks

The St Katharine Docks are a very pleasant, picturesque and pedestrian-friendly part of London that deserves much, much better restaurants than they has hitherto been blessed with. Banquet 88's immediate neighbours are Café Rouge, Côte and Slug & Lettuce and though I can sense some of you bristling with indignant contrary defences of this particular rogues gallery ("The Côte lunch menu is actually pretty good value" ... "The Café Rouge steak frites aren't completely inedible" ... "I once ate at Slug & Lettuce and didn't die"), the fact is that being so close to one of the city's most popular attractions (the Tower is just through an underpass) means that the undiscerning tourist dollar is a considerable and ugly influence.

How odd, then - and pleasantly surprising - that Banquet 88 isn't a lazy proto-chain or timid tourist-friendly slop merchant but a vibrantly authentic modern Cantonese restaurant serving a menu so full of courageous and exciting dishes that it should have any Chinese food-lover (that's lovers of Chinese food, not food lovers who are Chinese, although I'm sure both are welcome) wanting to order from every corner of it.

So obviously, given the menu dares you to go as full Chinese Mode as you can, we tried not to disappoint. This is hand-pulled chicken with jellyfish, a dish that carefully balanced both the obvious contrasting textures - the bounce and chew of the jellyfish with the firmer strips of chicken - and lovely light flavours, with both proteins benefiting from a subtle sesame-vinegar dressing. With strips of crunchy cucumber and spring onion layered on top, this was an immensely satisfying and enjoyable salad (...type thing), very appropriate given the flag-cracking weather outside.

Hot and sour sesame aubergine came so fresh out of the fryer that we could barely go near them for about 15 minutes after they landed on the table, but once the searing hot sugar had cooled down a bit they were great, little gooey sticks all sharp and sweet with an addictive crunch and chew.

Banquet 88 are apparently known for their cheung fun, so we could hardly ignore that section of the menu. This is prawn with crispy red rice skin, which cleverly combined the sweetness and bite of fresh prawn with a layer of crunchy fried doughnut, all wrapped in a traffic-light red noodle wrapper that, we were assured, was not artificial but naturally coloured from the red rice used to make it. The chilli dip was great too.

More dim sum (Banquet 88 are pitching themselves as a kind of updated Yauatcha, with the whole menu available all day) came in the form of these pretty crab dumplings, containing plenty of fresh crab and having a nice just-firm-enough bite. Excellent of course - by this stage of the evening, excellent was becoming the norm.

Cantonese roast pigeon needed a very different skill set to the dim sum but was equally accomplished. The neat little portions each had a crisp, delicate skin next to expertly seasoned meat and was all distressingly easy to wolf down in record time. Perhaps if I'm going to be picky I would have liked some kind of dipping sauce for this, but there was still some chilli sauce and crispy chilli oil left over from the dim sum so that worked well enough.

In some restaurants you're lucky to get your seafood served in the right species of shell - there's been a worrying trend recently to present dressed crab inside scallop shells which is just... all kinds of wrong) but not many places serve fresh scallops not only in their shells but still attached to the very shell they lived in. So not only were these creatures served plump and fresh and dressed in a lovely garlic-vinegar sauce with glass noodles but you had the added joy of prying the meat from the shell, which lifted off in a single satisfying chunk. This is literally the first time I've ever had scallops served this way, and I'm very much hoping it won't be the last.

We did allow ourselves a couple of fan-favourite Cantonese dishes. Half a roast duck was extremely good - perhaps not as life-changing as the multi-course version served at Shikumen in Shepherd's Bush (currently, worryingly closed, though I hope just temporarily) but still mostly everything you could wish for, with another one of those delicately crunchy skins and good soft meat.

Even beef ho fun - something approaching a Cantonese staple - was the very best it could be, with big slices of smoky chargrilled beef, slightly pink inside, enveloped by giant lengths of soft noodles.

Finally from the savouries, a plate of pea shoots was a revelation. On the plate it looked like spinach or bok choy, attractive but familiar. But the taste was pure, summery, sugary pea, with a topping of crab roe to season and enliven it. I'm sure the kitchens at Banquet 88 can work wonders with whatever seasonal vegetables they can get their hands on, but this particular dish will live long in my memory of this dinner, one not short of highlights.

So far so brilliant then, and I'm tempted to ignore the sweet courses and leave on a high note, but it's probably worth wondering why I've never had a great time with desserts in Chinese restaurants. Two different dishes were brought out - a selection of mochi (I know, they're Japanese), and a mango pomelo sago pudding thing, and as expected I didn't much like either of them. The mochi, like any other mochi I've ever tried, were the texture of raw bread dough with all the personality of wallpaper paste, and the mango...thing had a decent mango flavour but a slightly off-putting too-firm texture. I've been lucky enough to eat at some very smart and high-end Chinese restaurants and I've never really understood why so often the wheels seem to come off after the savoury courses are done. But then maybe it's just me.

Either way, let's not dwell on the desserts (I certainly didn't). Banquet 88 had done more than enough to put it right near the top of my favourite Chinese restaurants in London before the mochi arrived and looking back over my photos a few days after I just want to go back and order all the other things I didn't get a chance to sample the first time - abalone maybe, or baked eel, or sake cherry foie gras. And although I didn't see a bill, and though it is possible to load up on some pretty premium ingredients (caviar features in certain corners, I noticed) a quick and dirty sum of the items we chose comes to a food bill of about £170 for 3 people - and we had leftovers. You will certainly pay more for a lot less in other parts of town.

It is, then, and after all, possible to run a restaurant with style and heart in the heart of Touristland, and although I'm not holding my breath for a world-class Southern Thai specialist to open on Leicester Square or for Westfield Stratford to get a Bob Bob Ricard, the point is that maybe we shouldn't be so surprised when somewhere with integrity opens so close to so many places without. And we should be very, very thankful that they have because it's places like Banquet 88 that make London one of the most rewarding and exciting places in which to eat on planet earth. OK so maybe I'm biased. But I'm not necessarily wrong.

8/10

I was invited to Banquet 88 and didn't see a bill.

Can Koya, L'Escala

I'm acutely aware that a review of a (hitherto) obscure restaurant in a small town in Spain isn't going to be one of my most read posts of the year. Back in the days when I was doing 6 or 7 posts a month, slipping the odd leftfield location in now and again just made things a bit more interesting for me - perhaps if I was lucky would provide some kind of inspiration for one or two readers, but it would soon be followed-up by somewhere a bit more Central London and I wouldn't lose too many of you along the way. More recently though, with my new routine of one or two posts a month, these "extra" reviews carry a bit more weight, and run the risk of shedding even more of my dwindling readership.

So in deciding to write about Can Koya, a relatively new Japanese restaurant in the Catalonian seaside town of L'Escala, I've made the judgement that despite its decidedly non-London location, its hardly groundbreaking approach to Japanese cuisine and the fact that the vast majority of the people reading this are extremely unlikely to ever cross its doors, it's so utterly brilliant that it deserves whatever tiny scraps of publicity I can throw its way.

Believe me, I was as shocked as anyone it turned out so good, although perhaps I shouldn't have been. There is a fairly long tradition of serious Japanese food in Spain - Barcelona has a number of very well-regarded sushi joints run by skilled ex-pats, and if the only other barrier to top Japanese food is the availability of top-quality seafood then, well, Spain's got that covered and then some. These are Guillardeau no.2 oysters, served naturally and presented perfectly, plump and fresh but zingingly lean - not a hint of that unpleasant creaminess that can occasionally appear in the summer months. I quite fancied some lemon to go with the second one but they brought out a homemade yuzu sauce which was exceptional - amazing to think this dressing wasn't even on the menu and they'd magicked it up on request.

Also exceptional is Can Koya's tempura game. There's very little place to hide with tempura - the batter has to be light and greaseless enough to create a crunch but substantial enough to coat all the ingredients (in this case a medley of early summer vegetables) thoroughly. I've only been to Japan once but I don't remember anywhere doing a better version of vegetable tempura there or anywhere else - this really was the best of Japanese technique applied to top Spanish produce, to stunning effect.

One of the constantly astonishing things about eating out in Spain is how often top-tier ingredients are served at prices that would barely be a cover charge in the UK. This tray of sashimi moriawase consisted of 4 chunks of toro (fatty tuna), 4 of akami (lean tuna) and a neat little pile of salmon, and is yours (well, was mine) for €24. I probably should have ordered another.

And on that same theme, this is a langoustine maki roll, boasting huge chunks of soft, sweet langoustine inside fluffy, body-temperature rice - a complete sushi masterclass. As with everything else before (and everything to come), there was that perfect marriage between serious Japanese sushi technique and the finest available Spanish (or in this case, probably Scottish) produce. Again, I could have happily polished off another portion of this, and probably another after that.

Yakitori scallops were off-menu, €4 each and an absolute delight. Like any Japanese restaurant worth its salt, the kitchen at Can Koya is nimble enough to work in any extra bits and pieces of top seafood come in that day, and these were absolutely belting, presented unashamedly and confidently straight-up, with no dressing or flummery (although we did still have the ponzu dip from the sashimi to use).

Finally, bonito tuna tataki, probably the most unexpected and quirky dish of the evening but just as impressive as anything else in its own way. Some attractively frilled and gently seared chunks of tuna came arranged next to a kind of ajoblanco sauce and a little clump of glazed vegetables. This was Japanese-Spanish fusion food done literally, but to great effect - an intelligent, seasonal dish marrying local and Japanese aesthetics. Very clever stuff.

With a bottle of cava to wash it all down the bill came to just under €55/head (about £47) - an insanely reasonable amount of money for even a middling Japanese restaurant, never mind one so thoughtful and accomplished as this. As soon as it was all over, I made plans to return, and did, only to find it closed. Another thing I should have known is to never trust Google Maps opening hours in Spain. But I'll try again, because restaurants like this, and value like this, deserves to be enjoyed as often as possible.

So you may find yourself in l'Escala looking for a Japanese bite to eat, and you may not. But a wider point about eating out in Spain stands - that I doubt there is anywhere else in Europe where the quality of ingredients is matched with such incredible value - and this applies to all levels of dining from the most modest tapas joint to the multi-Michelin-starred gastro-temples (of which, you may have heard, there are also quite a few). At the risk of sounding like a spokesperson for the Spanish tourist board (eating out in Spain tends to do that to you), you have to be extremely unlucky (or be in an airport terminal) to eat badly in this part of the world. I may never leave.

9/10