The Union, Rye

Over the last, I don't know, ten or fifteen or so years - certainly since the expansion of the St John universe but also since places like Lyle's and the Sportsman and the Draper's Arms spread their wings - a kind of consensus has appeared on what constitutes a Modern British restaurant menu.

There will be a short list of tasteful snacks, usually involving anchovies or olives but also sometimes things like a house recipe Scotch Egg. There will be oysters - there should always be oysters - presented either with a zingy house dressing or just lemon and tabasco, shucked to order and presented on a metal tray filled with crushed ice. There will be a home made (or at the very least very locally-made) sourdough alongside a butter fused with something interesting like bone marrow or marmite. There will be a selection of strictly seasonal dishes of various shapes and sizes, comprising sustainable seafood, game (should the time of year allow) and one or two shareable large plates of steak or fish. There will also be dessert, usually one recognisable English classic (sticky toffee or bread and butter pudding) alongside whatever else the kitchen can dream up. There will be attentive, friendly service and you will pay 12.5% for it. You will go home happy.

The Union in Rye doesn't need to be anywhere near as good as it is. It's in Rye, for a start, a chocolate-box-pretty medieval town on a hill overlooking Romney Marsh and thronging with footfall both local and international all year round. They could be serving supermarket pizza and stubbies of Heineken and still be making a killing. Instead, I'm happy to report, they've settled on a Modern British menu of supreme taste and invention, served at prices that would be extremely reasonable anywhere up and down the country, never mind a low-beamed 15th century former inn in one of the most beautiful places in the world.

We started with cocktails (well of course we did), a pineapple pisco sour and something called Welcome to the Garden involving vermouth, vodka and fruit. Both were perfect. The wine list is heavily English, in fact not just English but heavily Sussex and Kent, listing bottles from the local producers Tillingham, Oxney and Gusbourne. We were pointed towards Ham Street Field Blend 21, a wine which uses a printout of the vineyard's soil sample as its label which was a nice touch. It was seriously drinkable and only 10% ABV which was probably just as well.

Oysters arrived first, great big Colchester rocks in fantastic condition, carefully shucked to retain plenty of nice saline liquor. There being half a dozen we each had one au naturelle, one with lemon and one with their house jalapeno relish, and both agreed the chilli hot, vinegar-spiked jalapeno relish was the best.

One of only one or two things that weren't perfect about the Union was the way they served their sourdough. It was toasted, which is a bit of a shame as if the original bread was in good enough condition I'd rather have it like that, and if it wasn't, then I don't want it at all. The onion butter was nice though.

Salsify crisps with seaweed powder were as moreish as they sound, dainty little ribbons of crunchy fried salsify rolled in a salty, vegetal seasoning. I seem to remember polishing off the leftover powder with my fingers.

House pickles were of a fine quality and variety. We particularly enjoyed the little florets of cauliflower dyed with beetroot, and the sticks of sweet celeriac.

Onto the larger plates, and a sliced fillet of venison draped in lardo (because I mean, why not) came with one of those lovely sticky, stocky sauces, this one spiked with myrtle berry. And no, I don't know what myrtle berries are either but they tasted fruity and sweet and pleasantly seasonal.

Then for the crowning glory of the savoury courses, a giant, gleaming "tranche" of halibut - think porterhouse steak, but from the sea - which was a good a bit of fish I can remember eating in a very long time indeed. With none of the mushiness or formlessness of some examples of this kind of thing (I've been served mushy halibut in some otherwise pretty fancy places), this example broke apart in clean, defined chunks - not flaked as such like cod, but perhaps closer to the dense, satisfying texture of perfectly cooked Dover Sole. And if that wasn't enough - and believe me this bit of fish would have been more than enough by itself - it was served with a completely giddying cod bisque, thick and sweet and rich, which I ended up drinking out of the little jug when I thought nobody was watching. Maybe I got away with it, maybe I didn't. To be honest, I don't care, it was worth it.

Dessert was never going to be anything other than tarte tatin, and very nice it was too. I admit to have been slightly spoiled on the TT front by the basically perfect version made at Galvin Bar and Grill at the Kimpton Fitzroy, but this was still incredibly enjoyable, and the whisky cream it came with added a lovely alcoholic kick.

In many ways, as I started off saying, the Union fits into the mold of many modern British restaurants that have - delightfully and rightfully - spread out across the country in the last few years. This means you sit down knowing more or less what you're going to order, how to order and - broadly - what it's going to cost. But of course that's just the start. To fulfil the potential of the template you have to know exactly what you're doing in the kitchen, and have a front of house capable of delivering it all smartly and efficiently. And the Union have all of that in spades. Add in the jaw-dropping setting of a medieval building in the centre of Rye and you end up with a completely unbeatable formula. Prepare to be smitten.

9/10

I was invited to the Union and didn't see a bill. However, totting up the above would have come to about £170 including service, about right for the amount of booze and food we had.

Rochelle Canteen, Shoreditch

Well, here we are again. Another brief gasp of freedom after another lockdown, another frantic opportunity to have as many meals out as possible before kitchens evolve back into makeshift field canteens, another half-assed set of contradictory measures that scapegoat restaurants, pubs and bars for a disease that is overwhelmingly and proveably transmitted mainly in schools, universities and care homes. The latest slice of nonsense is the Tier 2 "substantial meal" rule, meaning that to enjoy even so much as a half pint in your local you must order with it, well, nobody's quite sure - anything has been suggested from a £3 hot dog to a £25 steak and chips minimum.

It's hard to even know where to start with explaining just how unfair, unworkable and completely counterproductive this idea is. Firstly and most obviously, as mentioned above, there's no solid definition of what "substantial" means, so venues have been left to their own devices to decide how to enforce it. Some pub chains have insisted on at least a dish from the Mains section of the menu with each drink, a couple of places have brought in a special menu with things like £3 hot dogs to try and help keep the cost down. At least one pub I know of has a £2/head 'substantial meal' charge and will dump a large bowl of instant noodles on your table to accompany your entire night out. It's up to you whether you eat it or not.

The massive effect on food waste, is of course, the first obscenity. A walk through the open-air pubs and bars of Borough Market last week revealed groups of people sat next to giant piles of untouched boxes of food that they'd been forced to order with their mulled ciders, with no intention of being eaten. On top of this, the many drinks-led venus in London - and I'm not just talking about the pubs but also cocktail bars, craft beer tap houses, wine bars and the like - are having to choose between finding something - anything - to serve as food or to stay shut completely. Sitting outside, alone, in a beer garden, nowhere near any other human and being told you can't have a pint of IPA unless you order a burger to go with it is utter madness. None of it makes sense.

So for drinks-led pubs and bars the situation is critical. For restaurants, it's merely really, really bad. Nobody is having a great time of things in Lockdown Land but if you were lucky enough to be placed in Tier 2 or lower, have a nice garden to expand into, and - most importantly - are serving some of the best food in town, then you have a better chance than most of scraping through until the end of all this. And I am optimistic as it's possible to be about anywhere these days, about Rochelle Canteen.

Alongside a negroni - this was my very last lunch before Lockdown 2, but every meal out these days has a kind of desperate, end-of-days feel to it, as if it may all at any moment be suddenly swiped from under your nose like a stolen sausage from a naughty puppy, so I think starting each one with a strong cocktail is absolutely critical - we ordered most of the snacks including these neat little salt cod fritters, and a pork and rabbit terrine. Best of all of the snacks though was something described in that typical spartan St John way as "anchovy toast" but which turned out to be a gloriously salty and silky-smooth fish paste, mousse-like in its texture and utterly addictive. We had two of these - enough for half a slice each - but immediately wish we'd ordered many, many more.

Mussels were nice and plump and very enjoyable, but of course the main point of ordering mussels is to end up with a wine-y, seafood-y broth to dip sourdough into, and so that's what we did.

There was never any chance of my not ordering the only game bird on the menu, and the mallard was everything I needed it to be - tender enough but with a decent bite, skin beautifully bronzed and all of it sat on a mash that's best described as potato-flavoured butter. Perhaps I would have liked a somewhat more substantial sauce than the watery stock that surrounded it, but this is a minor niggle. It was still great.

I didn't manage to sample any of the roast pork before it all disappeared, but it looks decent enough doesn't it? Particularly that crackling which looks so light and brittle even looking at the photo I can clearly imagine the sound it makes when bitten into. Quite jealous I didn't, in fact.

Onglet had been simply prepared and simply presented, but by virtue of an excellent raw ingredient and the brave (and correct) decision to hold it for barely a passing moment over a heat source, it arrived addictively chewy and gloriously bloody. It's not a beginner's steak is onglet, it requires an honest appraisal of the relationship between man and cow, and a bit more effort in the eating, but is ultimately so much more rewarding than many much more expensive cuts.

Partly because we were enjoying ourselves so much, and also (mainly) because this was going to be our last lunch out in who knows how long and we wanted to squeeze every last drop out of it, we ordered the cheese course (two different cheddar-alikes which made up for lack of variety with a very decent taste and texture each), and a lemon pudding. And a chocolate pot. And a cheesecake. Oh, and a glass of Sauternes and two double calvados. And we regretted none of it.

It's about this time of year that normally I'd be thinking about which place to make my Restaurant of the Year. With a full four months where every food outlet in the country was closed, and with restaurants being very different places even when they were able to open, the decision has been made extra fraught this year; it seems a bit pointless to point anywhere out for particular praise when even simply surviving is an epic achievement. As I type this, London is back into Tier 3 - effectively lockdown - but with the vaccine not just theoretically "on its way" any more but actually already innoculating over 140,000 people there really is an end to all this in sight. And when we're allowed out again to eat and drink and be merry, it will be to places like Rochelle Canteen that will be waiting to welcome you, with a negroni, anchovy on toast and some potato-flavoured butter. Not long now, I promise.

9/10

The Gunton Arms, Norfolk

"Posh pub with rooms & food in deer park" is the short tagline that appears when you plug Gunton Arms into Google Maps, and sounds exciting enough, but the reality of approaching this extraordinary place in person is something else. A short vegetation-canopied walkway from the car park opens dramatically into a giant park populated by groups of red deer, the bucks snorting and bellowing in the late evening sun, and to the right in a separate field a herd of cattle. To the side of the main gravel road through the park stands the pub itself, handsome and stately in traditional Norfolk flint, fenced off to presumably prevent hungry deer wandering in and nibbling guests' dinners. There is a different way the animals might end up inside the pub, but we'll get onto that shortly.

Inside, the magic only intensifies. A maze of low-beamed candle-lit rooms are each decorated with astonishing items of modern art - a Tracey Emin signature neon in one, a Lucian Freud etching in another, a couple of Gilbert & George in the corridor outside the loos. In these Covid-aware times it's more difficult to move around the place and explore the full extent of the collection, which is frustrating, but on balance I think I'd rather I felt safe and looked after of an evening than stumble across a new collection of erotic Japanese photography. Certainly not before I've eaten anyway.

The menu is big, which can be a bad sign, but contains lots of things you'd want to eat, so in the end it's good. There's a load of gastropub classics such as pork belly with apple sauce, or cod, chips and mushy peas, but also a section called "From the Elk Room fire" which has a list of the various animals you may have seen wandering around outside, made into sausages or simply seasoned and grilled over a huge wood fire. From our cozy anteroom, which even with generous spacing between tables we had largely to ourselves that evening, we read the specials board by the light from the fire, and hoped the food could live up to the atmosphere.

It all did. Lamb sweetbreads, a generous amount of them for a starter portion, came with wild mushrooms (presumably found somewhere nearby) and spelt, all bound with an incredibly rich, sticky sauce, the kind of thing that probably took a day or two to make. Unpretentious despite the premium ingredients, and presented with a rustic honesty that just made the whole thing even more irresistable, this was a great start.

Mixed beets with blue cheese and pickled walnuts is perhaps a little more conventional, but more than made up for the established concept with excellent (local obviously) Binham blue cheese, fantastic pickled walnuts (we'd seen wet walnuts at the markets over the previous couple of days in places like Harleston so these could have come from similar batches) and some bold seasoning which lifted the whole thing into something extremely enjoyable.

Duck egg featured on a separate vegetarian menu, and though I didn't get to try it, it looked the part and from what I can gather went down very well indeed. Similarly a red onion tart, which was eagerly devoured but I didn't get to sample, partly because the vegetarian options on any given menu are usually towards the bottom of my list of preferences, but mainly because I was worried I'd need all the space I could get for my...

...giant slab of red deer rump, delightfully charred and smokey from the wood fire, presented Hawksmoor-style, honestly and simply on a plate with a little tub of rowan jelly. The flesh had a gentle, dark crust and inside was perfectly medium-rare, tasting of a live well lived and full of strong, gamey flavour. It was fantastic, but a slightly bittersweet experience as it only made me wonder what the other dishes from the Elk Room could have been like - the venison sausages, for example, or the 28-day hung Aberdeen Angus beef. Maybe one day I'll find out. Meantime, the venison came with goose fat roasties, with a serious crunch and as smooth inside as buttered mash.

Despite all that, we did somehow find room for a treacle tart which was served with clotted cream and what treacle tart isn't made better by being served with clotted cream, I ask you. And to round everything off I should mention the service, which as well as being masked-up and Covid-compliant was also personable, attentive and very pleasant. Easy enough to achieve when we were the only people in the room but still, commendable.

The Gunton Arms is quite unlike any other gastropub I've ever visited, not perhaps measured by kind of food they're offering - the Elk Room dishes apart, this was a well-executed if tried-and-tested gastropub menu - but for the louche, clandestine character which managed to be as comfortable hosting local families and regulars as the (I'm told) occasional aristocrat or rock star that wanders through its doors. It's hard to put your finger on exactly why it's so special - clearly filling any old building with hundreds of thousands of pounds of modern art would not automatically make for success - but however carefully curated the atmosphere, the result is a fairytale ideal of a country pub, filled with intrigue and wonder, that just happens to serve some excellent food into the bargain. Long, in these troubled times, may it thrive.

8/10

La Trompette, Chiswick

For all the stick Twitter gets, quite rightly in some cases, it does occasionally provide some genuinely heartwarming and valuable moments. "If you could go to one London restaurant before you emigrated," asked the food writer Kay Plunkett-Hogge, "which one would it be?". The replies from the London food world are a list of some of the very finest restaurants in town, a timely reminder that whatever the world throws at us, this city really does know how to eat.

Before lockdown, my own answer to that question could have been the Ledbury, a world-class fine dining place that has given countless showstopping moments over the years but sadly couldn't survive the pandemic. Its memory will live on, though. Or perhaps as so many others have replied, Quality Chop House, whose unpretentious approach to bistro food belies a genius-level mastery of technique and relentless search for premium ingredients. Or even Tayyabs, whose trays of mixed grills are tied up with so many happy memories now that eating there is now an exercise in ghee-soaked nostalgia. These, and many other restaurants I have been lucky enough to visit over the years, could be my definitive, final London meal. They'd all live up to the moment, I'm sure.

Following a languid, boozy reunion with old friends in Chiswick last week, I've decided to add La Trompette to that list. Now, full disclosure time, for various reasons this was not a rack-rate La Trompette experience, lovely though I'm sure that is. One of said friends' boyfriend was serving our table, and thanks to a list of special occasions that had built up during lockdown (two birthdays, the completion of a PhD) and general glee at being able to do normal things again, we were treated to a somewhat "mates rates" pricing structure that didn't quite reflect the amount of food we managed to plough through, or indeed the number of glasses of wine. But at the same time, operations like this can't be faked or feigned - you can't just conjure up food this good only when you happen to know who you're serving, or spot a blogger's camera. La Trompette is, genuinely, a world class restaurant. Be absolutely sure of that.

Part of my enthusiasm is pure selfishness - the menu at La Trompette is like someone's found a list of all my favourite things to eat and written them down for safekeeping. So there's game, of course, not just the more obvious things like quail and venison (though they are they too) but guinea fowl and grouse and even hare which I think I can count on one hand the number I've times I've ever spotted on a menu. For seafood there's oysters and scallops but also cockles and turbot, ingredients that require a bit of thought and effort and intelligence to make the most of. It's a restaurant-lover's menu, created by people who love restaurants.

Anyway enough waffling; to the food. Oysters came dressed with tosazu, apparently a sauce made of vinegar, soy, mirin and - most interestingly - bonito stock, which added a sweet umaminess to go alongside the briney shellfish. I've been eating a lot of oysters recently. I like oysters.

This was the aformentioned hare dish, all pink and tender and lovely. It was amazing how they'd managed to cook this tiny fillet as you would a rare sirloin, with just a touch of raw in the middle of each slice and yet still with a nice dark char on the edge. They came with a little pile of soft grains soaked in a completely knockout game jus which obviously won yet more points, and then as if that wasn't enough the whole lot was showered in truffle. Oh, and that on the side is a little cluster of hen of the woods mushroom, crisp on the edges and with a firm, meaty texture in the frods which helpfully soaked up more of that sauce.

Venison - sorry, "fallow deer" tartare came with an interesting twist on the classic recipe, using elderberries and pickled walnuts instead of the usual capers and cornichon. Also, full marks for using straw potatoes on top, a trend I'm still patiently waiting to catch on in London's burger bars. Everything is better with straw potatoes, but particularly burgers, trust me.

The difference between a merely good restaurant and a great one is its ability to both suprise you with something new but also make that experience enjoyable and rewarding. I'd never come across the combination of sweetcorn and cockles anywhere before - I suppose the nearest equivalent is a Southern USA seafood boil which involves corn on the cob and seafood in the form of crayfish - but this was something genuinely new, the dairy of the velouté, smooth and rich and buttery, studded with little sweet, bouncy cockles. Very clever stuff.

Before the mains, a little extra course of giant Cornish (of course it had to be Cornish) scallop with kohlrabi and a frothy miso butter. This was an exercise in presenting this fantastic bit of seafood in a way that merely enhanced its inherent loveliness without confusing or overshadowing it, and the miso butter was a perfect way of doing that.

Now obviously I went for the grouse, and it was literally perfect. Just funky enough, cooked pink and tender, with a little dollop of bread sauce as a nod to tradition, and a dressing of elderberries for a taste of the hedgerows. In place of game chips, smoked potatoes, which were incredible things, crisp outside and creamy within, with a subtle smokiness and just as addictive in their own way as the straw potatoes.

The other main was turbot, a huge, meaty chunk of it, with fluffy gnocchi and a kind of herby sauce spiked with marjoram which again was one of those flavour combinations I've rarely if ever seen before but worked very well indeed. To be honest, I was still a bit distracted by my grouse, but I didn't hear any complaints from the other side of the table.

We had four desserts. Look, if you can't finish a 5-course lunch with matching wines on a random Friday in September by ordering all the desserts from the menu at once, then when can you, in all honesty? They were all great, but particular mention should go to the apple crumble soufflé and buttermilk ice cream, which was a perfect texture (not too eggy, or dense) and the muscovado custard tart which right up there with the Marksman's brown butter and honey tart, which anyone who's ever tried it will tell you, is quite the compliment. The fourth dessert, by the way, was a bitter chocolate pave with raisin and milk ice cream. All the ice creams were smooth and creamy and light, a masterclass in the form.

I was always likely to enjoy La Trompette, being from the same stable as Wandsworth's Chez Bruce, Kew's the Glasshouse and yes, the Ledbury, and also given that anywhere with a fondness for unusual game and modern British cooking is going to tickle quite a few of my personal fancies. It is, as I've said, a restaurant-lover's restaurant, with a solid pedigree and years of practice in capable and friendly service, a polished, happy operation that you'd have to have a piece of your soul missing not to appreciate. If the food had been merely decent, we still would have had a whale of a time that afternoon, because in places like this, it's practically impossible not to.

But add into that alchemy some of the very best food I've been served in the capital, well then you have the makings of something truly special. Experimental when it wants to be, using unusual ingredients and fancy techniques always in a way that delights rather than confuses, that surprises rather than shocks, it is a friendly neighbourhood restaurant to those who want it to be no more than that, but it is also, crucially, a special-occasion destination for the food-obsessed (guilty) where you can indulge your craving for game or seafood or and be absolutely reassured that what you'll be served will be the absolute best it can be. And I intend to do just that, as often as I possibly can.

10/10

The above bill doesn't include some of the wines, including an introductory round of champagne, or the scallops, or the extra dessert, but probably isn't a million miles off a realistic bill if you read it upside down and squint.