Mei Mei Bā, Borough Market

Right then. Where was I?

Last thing I remember it was late March, I was getting ready to head to Cornwall for a long-awaited long weekend, much like we used to back in the Before Times. Then as the date of the trip grew closer, world events grew increasingly fraught. Non-essential trips cancelled, restaurants and hotels shut down for the foreseeable, an entire population asked to shelter indoors and hope for the best against an invisible enemy that, through the sheer chaos of symptoms (or, more worryingly, occasional complete lack thereof), seemed impossible to predict much less contain. For four months, life became an exercise in hanging on, of existing, and of living with the guilt that so many countless others - an unimaginable amount - wouldn't be so lucky.

With now, finally, a light shining at the end of that long, dark tunnel, and the hope - and it may be little more than a glimmer of hope but it's all we've got and I'm running with it - of the worst being behind us, it feels like you're performing some kind of civic duty to eat and drink out again. Restaurants and bars, still adjusting to the New Normal, crippled by social distancing measures and further battered by a depressing spike in no shows (read more about the #NOMORENOSHOWS campaign here) need our support more than ever, and anyone attempting to launch a brand-new Asian-fusion tasting menu concept at the tail end of a global pandemic deserves all the support they can get.

So Mei Mei Bā, from chef Elizabeth Haigh, whose career I've followed with intense interest since she first won Pidgin a Michelin star all the way back in 2015, is nothing if not ambitious. It's ambitiously - as in, insanely reasonably - priced, £45 for 8 courses putting it in that exclusive and ever-shrinking group of sub-£50 London tasting menus, paid for in full on booking so on the night itself there's little extra to worry about other than the odd beer or cheese course. The matching wines are an equally reasonable £35, all natural and full of personality, generous in number and top quality, thoroughly recommended if you want to make the most of your evening. And the food? Well, it's great, of course.

It all begins with this milk bun, an immediate and comprehensive reassurance you'll be in good hands. A very fine piece of baking, sticky and soft and sweet, presented with a brown butter so light and fluffy that it almost disappears into mist as soon as it's spread. This is topped, because why not, with a sprinkling of caviar salt, Mei Mei having clearly decided that nothing isn't improved by a dollop of caviar. More on that, too, later.

Chicken satays, carefully and precisely cooked over charcoal, had just the right amount of colour and crunch, and came with a lovely chunky peanut sauce. Not perhaps wildly different to any chicken satays you might have had before in a proper restaurant but look, sit me down with chicken satays grilled over coals and I will never not be happy.

Next, Haigh's signature fried chicken with white miso mayo, and optional (HA!) Exmoor caviar. After four months of lockdown the £40 supplement for a 20g tin of real caviar was about as "optional" to this giddy restaurant-starved blogger as the table it was eaten off, so clearly each bit of chicken - crunchy and spicy outside, with bright white, soft flesh underneath - was enjoyed with a generous dollop of black gold. Oh and a special mention for the dark reduced stock sauce lurking at the bottom of the bowl, which added even more chicken-y intensity.

Then something of a palate-cleanser - heritage tomato salad, lifted with fresh basil and a beautifully fragrant "Hainanese chicken vinaigrette", indicative not only of a confident use of fusion flavours but also presumably an efficient desire to put as much of the chicken to use as possible.

Lemon sole, served on the bone which I always think is more fun, came with a sharp tamarind sauce and an unapologetically slimy mound of okra. I am slowly, ever-so-slowly, getting used to the idea of okra naturally having the texture of warm saliva, but I will be the first to admit I'm not quite there yet. So yes, the vegetable element of this dish had me slightly discombobulated. But I still ate it.

I sometimes think that if I just had one faultless pork broth recipe under my belt, I wouldn't feel the need to eat out half as much as I do. Maybe I could just pay for Mei Mei to make me a gallon drum of the stuff, and I could freeze it as required for use throughout the year. It could see me through many a long winter, or even (heaven forbid) another lockdown. What I mean to say, in not so many words, is that Mei Mei's pork broth is brilliant.

White park beef, hung dramatically over charcoal from its own scaffolding in the corner of the kitchen, filled the air with tantalising rich beefy aromas even as we sat down to the bread course. It was finally now time to try it, presented cleanly and simply as two medium slices, generously tipped with fat, in a clear aromatic sauce, and did not disappoint. Some nice grilled peppers, blistered on the coals, added a bit of greenery and smoke.

Alongside the beef it's probably worth mentioning a couple of interesting sides; one endive & parsley salad, soaked in a sweet soy dressing which perfectly balanced the bitter leaves, and "nasi kerabu" - rice coloured sky blue with butterfly pea flower - which I must admit was a first for me.

Dessert was an apple and rhubarb donut thing, fluffy and warm straight out of the fryer, and a dollop of teh tarik ice cream which neatly bookended with the glass of pandan tea we'd been given as an aperitif right at the start of the meal. Like so many good tasting menus, one or two of the same flavours keep cropping up in different forms here and there throughout the evening, which if it helps reduce waste I'm all in favour of. Part of me's quite pleased we only had one go at the okra, though.

Anyone reading this will most likely be wondering about more than just how good the food is, but how safe and "normal" it feels, eating out in these strange times. I was, too, before my dinner at Mei Mei but truth be told, once you're sat there, and had it explained to you to keep your cutlery when sensible and use hand sanitiser on arrival, all the little New Normal details really do fade into insignificance. Admittedly, this is a very good and professional little outfit, and perhaps a visit to Subway or Pizza Express would be a little more fraught, but it's struck me how quickly restaurants and customers alike have adapted and how it's still perfectly possible to have a lovely evening out.

And thank God for that. Because a world without restaurants, without Quality Chop House (open last week), Hawksmoor (gradually opening all sites as we speak), Zedel (open again) and yes Mei Mei and the like is just not a world I'm interested in. Not one bit. And I hesitate to end on too much of a positive note, because there are still plenty of dark clouds on the horizon and I'm way too superstitious to make any grand claims about the future, or even near future. But look, Mei Mei Ba exists and is taking bookings, and that should be enough news to rejoice at for now.

Oh, and that Cornwall trip? Rebooked for the end of September. Anything could happen before then, it's true. But if we haven't got a bit of hope for a good dinner in the near future, what else have we got?

8/10

Freak Scene, Soho

In a city as large and diverse as London, with a population eager and willing to spend their money on whatever latest food obsession flares up, whether it's pasta or burgers or steamed Taiwanese buns, it's perhaps surprising that genuine blue-sky experimentation, no-holds-barred eccentricity, sheer boggle-eyed madness, is still a relatively rare thing. Yes, in these uncertain times you can understand why familiar comfort food would be an easier sell to investors than anything too, well, weird, but as Londoners avant-garde experimentation and counter-culturalism forms part of our very identity. So why not restaurants? How many places can you point to that are genuinely unleashed, and where nothing has come between the practicalities of running a profit and the sheer unrestrained bedlam of an unconventional chef's raw ideas?

To find the shortest journey between the blueprint and the result, and where the product available to buy is as close as possible to whatever crazy concept the creators first came up with, it's a good idea to turn to street food and popups. Only in the anything-goes environment of the popup, where the stakes are low and failure very much is an option, would anyone discover there was a market for blobs of water thickened with agar, or a pitch-black grilled cheese sandwich made with charcoal bread and Ilchester black cheddar (coloured with carob, apparently). These things are just as likely to leave you with permanent psychological damage than going back for more, but how nice that we live in a city where they're allowed to exist?

One look at the Freak Scene menu and you can see why this place started life as a popup. I can't think of many investors that would be happy to rent a prime central Soho location (where Barrafina used to be, no less) and turn it over to a group of people serving "Caramalised[sic] Foie Gras Lettuce Cups" and "Salmon sashimi 'Pizza' with truffle-ponzu", but it's thanks to the popularity and success of a stint in Farringdon that they now find themselves here at their first proper permanent site, with a mandate to be every bit as unhinged now as they were then.

The first thing that arrived - "Miso Grilled Black Cod Tacos with Sushi Rice and Scorched Red Chilli Salsa" - was an early indication that the needle would be set firmly on "WTF" for at least some of the evening. Individual elements of the dish were fantastic - bubbly-crisp taco casings, top quality miso-glazed black cod (as you might imagine from the man who spent years as the head chef at Nobu), fluffy room-temperature sushi rice you'd be delighted to be served elsewhere under a slice of raw fish. Together, the textures fought rather than complimented each other - particularly the soft fish next to the rice which made them both feel disconcertingly under-cooked - but I'd be lying if I said I didn't find enough to enjoy. Even just for the novelty factor.

Chilli Crab and Avocado Wonton 'Bombs' were relatively more normal insofar as crab and avocado is a tried-and-tested combo that you'd have to really go out of your way to mess up, and the little crisp parcels actually made a perfect delivery system; you just ate them with your fingers like you would cheese on a cracker. Spritzed with fresh lime juice and spiked with red chilli, there was plenty of crab and plenty of flavour, a bit of Asian-fusion fun.

The house chips were intriguingly subtitled "A Thousand Leaves", and turned out to be a kind of Quality Chop layered confit style, and incredibly moreish. I would have preferred a thicker jalapeno mayo - it was a bit difficult to get any kind of coating on the potato which was frustrating - but even so, a lot of work had gone into these and it's basically impossible not to enjoy sticks of flaky potato cake.

Hangar steak tataki salad was the least crazy of the dishes, and probably the most enjoyable. With soft strips of rare-seared beef, coriander, lettuce pomegranate seeds and crisp garlic flakes all soaked in a wonderfully sharp dressing ("onion ponzu" on the menu but I imagine that's not the half of it), it had all the fire and flavour of something from the kitchens at Kiln or Smoking Goat, and as anyone who's been to those places will tell you, that's quite the compliment.

But soon enough we were back in Bonkersville. I think the best way of describing my reaction to it is this: While I do like the fact I live in a city so experimental and diverse a restaurant feels able to sell a dish of hot pork belly and cold mussels wrapped in lettuce leaves, and I'm glad that someone somewhere feels that a dish of hot pork belly and cold mussels wrapped in lettuce leaves is something that should be served, I'm afraid I am not the target audience for a dish of hot pork belly and cold mussels wrapped in lettuce leaves. I just think hot pig and cold seafood should be kept a certain distance from each other. They shouldn't touch.

Finally, and somewhat in contrast to the rather bijou portion sizes up until this point, "Chicken-fried chicken" was a huge leg and thigh portion sat on top of a pile of nuts in a soy-based sauce, and we struggled to finish it. Not because it was inedible, though parts were a bit cotton-woolly (they'd used some kind of double-cooking method, first confit-ing then frying, which I think reduced the moisture content somewhat) but just because there was so much of it. As with much of what had come before, it danced a fine line between exciting and baffling, between experimental and just plain odd, and we found ourselves veering between enjoyment and uncertainty with each mouthful.

But isn't that the point of operations like this? Wouldn't the world be a boring place if there weren't chefs like Scott Hallsworth willing to throw every trick up his sleeve at once into one of the most wilfully esoteric and barmy menus in town, and to hell with what people think? And because of this approach, and even despite it, you'd still have to have a heart of stone not to get something out of Freak Scene - for every challenge like hot pork and cold mussels there's crab wontons or beef tataki salad to retreat back into and calm the nerves. It's all part of the fun.

So although I definitely had issues with Freak Scene, and you're more than likely to have the same, like the raindrop cake or the black cheese toastie surely we can at least be glad this odd little operation exists. A singular vision from an eccentric and fun-loving team, its arrival on Frith Street makes London a more bizarre, and more exciting place, qualities in these uncertain times that are, sadly, increasingly hard to come by. It's not perfect, but it is unique. And more than enough to be proud of.

7/10

I was invited to Freak Scene and didn't see a bill, but a bit of maths tells me it would have been about £40/head with a bottle of wine.

The Dysart, Petersham

Richmond is a very posh part of London. It is for this reason I was worried about accepting an invitation to eat there, because as you may have noticed, posh parts of the country and good restaurants do not often mix. When was the last time you had a decent meal in Hampstead, for example, or Chelsea? Or further afield in Beaconsfield or Weybridge? Henley or Harpenden? With very few exceptions (there is Bray, I suppose, though that's largely the work of one man), high property prices and good dinners out don't go together, whilst conversely the parts of town that show up blue on the house price heat maps boast some smashing value restaurants - Camberwell, Peckham, etc.

The only other time I'd been tempted on the 65 bus out to Richmond was when Petersham Nurseries (still the most famous restaurant in these parts) took on a new head chef and invited a bunch of bloggers/journalists to try it out. It wasn't bad, if you don't mind eating a lot of artfully arranged vegetables in a greenhouse, but I am never going to be in the target market for a £20 bowl of salad, nor the £4,000 chest of drawers they saw fit to attempt to flog in the same room, and so I never felt the desperate need to return under my own steam.

The Dysart though is a different prospect entirely. The menu contains a great big list of all my favourite things to eat, from veal sweetbreads to duck for two to crème brûlée; alongside the usual wine matching menu they have an option to try matching beers instead, which is pretty forward-looking; and there's an astonishingly reasonable set menu for around £20/head. It even has its own bus stop. I was convinced.

Of course I didn't actually ask for the £20 menu, I mean I'm not travelling an hour out of my comfort zone to do things by halves, so obviously we had the tasting menu, but the point is the £20 menu is an option, should you want it.

A tray of neatly lined-up nibbles kicked things off - from memory a little cheese/tomato biscuit, a deep-fried porky nugget topped with chilli, a surprising mint/lemon/polenta cube (refreshing and smooth) and (celestial fanfare) scallop nigiri topped with freshly shaved summer truffle. No prizes for guessing which my favourite was.

Next, bread (yes bread, that's a photo of some bread, just go with it), and this was really something. A soda bread of sorts, we were told, but I've never had soda bread quite like this, with a dark, biscuit-y crust encasing a moist, cakey inside. We did our best to leave some to accompany the next couple of courses but after barely a few seconds our resolve crumbled and we polished it off.

Charred mackerel with braised daikon, ginger and champagne married a lovely technique (I have never not enjoyed a soft piece of mackerel fillet with a smoky, crispy skin) with some clever Asian flavours. It was very pretty, too - just imagine something approaching the opposite of how my photography makes it look.

Local cep mushrooms were the main ingredient in this risotto of sorts, packing some deep, foresty flavours and bound with a silky sauce that I think might have involved chicken. It was very well presented, and miniature sprigs of "golden" oregano added a remarkably intense herby note, but it was all let down slightly by very underdone rice - not just slightly al dente but pretty crunchy. Still, you can see where they were going with it, and the rich flavours were enough to make up for the technical error.

Wild sea bass, crispy skin, bright white flaky flesh, everything as it should be, came in a very interesting "spiced curry leaf sauce", shocking deep green with a dense, earthy texture. Bok choi and kohlrabi kept the Asian fusion theme going, and it all added up to a hugely enjoyable dish, hard to fault at all.

The next course, beef in miso mustard sauce, was nothing if not experimental. Individually, all the elements were very impressive; a pink fillet of fine aged beef; a sticky, shiny puck of slow-roasted cheaper cut; swirls and curls of colourful heritage carrots. But though I loved the miso mustard sauce in of itself, it was way too powerful for the beef, and completely smothered the delicate meat with a blanket of vinegar and umami. But then having said that, I still enjoyed both the beef and the sauce, just not on the same forkful. Perhaps it would have worked better with a stronger, gamier protein like venison - who knows. Still, you have to admire their imagination.

Local damsons with peaches were full of colour and the joys of summer, even if my photo makes it look like something left over from a surgical procedure. Damsons, like gooseberries or elderberries, can't be intensively farmed, so it's always worth choosing them if you see them on a menu.

Desserts made sure the meal ended on a high - or rather, two highs. Valrhona chocolate and praline bar with miso salted caramel ice cream, well, you can imagine how good that was. The raspberries lined up neatly on top had a brilliant flavour, probably grown locally, and the chocolate "bar" was much lighter than it looked, containing a mousse-like, nutty interior. And pineapple and brown butter financier was hot straight out of the oven, golden crunchy brown on the outside and soft and moist inside. Blobs of cardamom jam added that Asian twist, as the miso did with the chocolate dessert.

As you will have probably concluded by this point, the Dysart is a very good restaurant indeed. Fusion food has the potential to be a muddled disaster in the wrong hands, yet on this menu the odd Japanese touch here and there often only accented and enhanced the modern classical cooking, only occasionally proving a distraction. And then again, even when, as in the beef dish, the Asian seasoning was slightly heavy-handed, it only made an interesting mess, not a complete failure. And while it's easy to pick fault with things like undercooked rice, so many other things went right - and not just right, but stunningly well, that in the end it was impossible not to be utterly charmed with the place. On top of all that, £60 for a tasting menu and £18.50/£22.50 for a set menu is a hugely reasonable sum for cooking at this level. All of a sudden, Zone 4 seems a perfectly reasonable distance to travel for dinner.

8/10

I was invited to review the Dysart