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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P Franco, Clapton

It was a warm and pleasant evening in Clapton on Saturday. I know this because for the first 40 minutes at P Franco I was sat on a bench outside waiting for a table to come free, and had it been raining or cold I may not have stuck it out for quite so long. And believe it or not I had it relatively easy - the couple behind us waited well over an hour for their spot, nursing their glasses of chardonnay and watching on patiently as a table of 6 who had been there since god knows when steadfastedly refused to pay up and leave.

This is the problem with P Franco - it is so good, with its extensive wine list and short, attractive menu of seasonal dishes served at extremely reasonable prices, that you do just never want to leave. And with a grand total of 12 seats and no reservations policy, that very soon adds up to a perfect storm of demand far, far outstripping supply. I don't blame that table of 6 for not wanting to leave, not at all - but it does make the place incredibly difficult to recommend at normal mealtimes if the promise of a feed, however good, comes with a lead time the length of a Hollywood movie.

So what kind of food will the residents of Clapton (and elsewhere) wait so very long for? Well, things like this chicken liver toast topped with pickled blackberries, two generous portions for £10 containing ethereally light parfait and excellent lightly toasted house sourdough. Dishes like this are the reason I eat out - even the most accomplished home cook would struggle with the techniques required to produce a texture like that in a chicken liver paté, and why bother anyway when someone would make them for you for a tenner?

Just as extraordinary were these raw beef and mustard leaf wraps, the beef tasting incredible (supplied by Warren's of Cornwall, like much of the best stuff is) and the leaves acting as a nice salady vehicle for the beef as well as providing a good hit of mustard. In contrast to the cheffy chicken liver toasts, this was more of an assembly of top-tier, tastefully chosen ingredients but still with the same kind of value - just £9 for these.

Next, neat cubes of chicken thigh, skins on, crisp and golden brown, came arranged on a bed of swiss chard and all soaked in an intense, salty chicken broth. In the centre of the bowl was an egg yolk to add even more richness and texture and a handful of girolles brought a certain buttery earthiness, but really this was all about the broth, one of those complex, concentrated liquids that probably took a lot of time and a lot of very good chicken to make. If you brave the wait yourself and find yourself with a table at P Franco, I recommend you get this dish along with a portion of the house bread - you're really not going to want to miss sweeping up the very last drops of broth with some nice sourdough.

And finally, mussel, squid and crab tagliolini boasted good firm pasta, plenty of nice fresh seafood and a buttery/citrus sauce that would have been worth the price of admission by itself. At £17 this was the priciest individual dish on the menu, but was still some way off what you'd expect to pay at even a rather modest local Italian restaurant; I shudder to think what they'd want for it at the River Café.

But of course, you can book the River Café, and although that doesn't quite justify the prices there it does mean your evening out is guaranteed a certain degree of stability. P Franco serves some of the best food in East London alongside one of the best collection of wines, staff are efficient and personable and the bill at the end of it all will most likely come as rather a nice surprise (ours came to £110 for two people, but we had, er, rather a lot of wine). All these things are certainly true. But you'll have to wait for it, and as autumn turns into winter the idea of sitting sipping on chardonnay in the freezing cold for as long as it takes for a space inside to come free looks increasingly unattractive.

Oh well, I suppose there are worst things than queuing for dinner, and in the case of P Franco, it most definitely is worth the investment. Certainly, once we'd paid up and skipped happily home it was the cosy embrace of the food and service that lingered in the memory, not the uncomfortable wait to get it. Whatever your feelings on no reservations policies, on every other aspect of the restaurant business P Franco are playing an absolute blinder, and eating there - once you finally manage to eat there - is a profound joy. Good things come to those who wait.

9/10

Bright, Hackney

As much as I am very happy to travel quite significant distances in search of a good meal, as the geographic spread of restaurants on this blog will hopefully indicate, I do sometimes wish there was a bit more going on in my own neck of the woods. Battersea, and the Lavender Hill / Northcote Road area in particular, is a weird wasteland of family-friendly coffee shops and tired throwbacks, with only the Vietnamese restaurant Mien Tay, and Donna Margherita (if you stick to the pizzas), worth visiting out of a good thirty or forty licensed establishments. Considering the number of people who live in the area, a good chunk of whom would surely pay good money for a decent feed, the absence of anywhere offering a decent product is baffling. And yes, I know about Wright Bros and Tonkotsu in Battersea Power Station but that's so far from Clapham Junction it may as well be Vauxhall.

So it was with a certain amount of trepidation I began my journey from SW11 to E8 on Saturday. Surely to goodness Hackney already has more than enough amazing restaurants? The single stretch of bus route from Old Street took me past the Clove Club, Sagar & Wilde, Morito, The Marksman and The Laughing Heart before dropping me outside Mare St Market, a huge and heavenly air-conditioned collective of bars and restaurants and record shops and much else besides which has just opened as if Hackneyites didn't already have enough to shout about. It would simply not be fair if Bright was good too. I didn't need yet another reason to make that bloody trek across town.

Of course, inevitably, Bright is not just good but brilliant, a shining new jewel in the crown of East End dining and more than enough reason to make a hideous hour-plus-long journey in the baking heat. A journey, by the way, which is instantly forgotten as soon as you plonk yourself down at the beautiful wooden bar and are presented with a cold glass of crisp Provence rosé. There's no (obvious) air conditioning at Bright, but huge floor to ceiling window doors at either end of the room provide a lovely natural breeze, and as long as you're not at the picnic tables out front in the sun (or indeed in the rain, hard as that is to imagine at the moment), you should find the setting every bit as charming as we did.

What separates a good from a great restaurant is not always obvious, or even quantifiable, but as good an early indicator as any is probably a menu that contains rare or unusual ingredients or dishes. Whether through lack of imagination or in an attempt to find as broad a customer base as possible, restaurant menus often tend to follow a certain formula - starters of steak tartare, burrata, mains of onglet and fries, sea bass, desserts of pannacotta, sorbet. And often there's nothing wrong with that; not everywhere has to reinvent the wheel. But when did you last see 'Scarlet prawns' on a menu? Perhaps only at top-tier Spanish restaurant Barrafina where they're slightly bigger and called Carabineros, so full marks to Bright for seeking them out, cooking them utterly perfectly so that the tail meat is bouncy and moist and the heads full of that extraordinary salty bisque so complex and rewarding it's hard to believe it could just be found inside the animal as-is.

Katsu, that is breaded and deep-fried pork (usually, or sometimes chicken) sandwiches have started cropping up all over London in recent weeks. I made a trip to Brixton to try Nanban's version, and very good it was too, available takeaway only served from a separate hatch around the side of the building in case you want to go and sample it yourself. The Bright sando is easily as enjoyable, with fluffy soft white bread cradling tender pork, a sharp tamarind dressing and that all important crunch of fried breadcrumbs.

It was Tomos Parry's restaurant Brat, above Smoking Goat on Shoreditch High Street, that introduced London to the Elkano-inspired charcoal-roasted turbot on the bone, and indeed you should definitely go to Brat if you get a chance - that's another restaurant which goes out of its way to find unusual seafood like spider crabs and john dory. But here's the thing, and I hope I'm still welcome in Shoreditch after this comment, but I actually prefer the turbot at Bright. With a glorious crisped-up skin that held an obscene amount of liquid fat, and boasting a blinding white flesh, this was an absolutely magical bit of fish, the result of top-end ingredients treated in exactly the right way. Incredible.

Quail wasn't quite as transformative an experience to eat, but then that's hardly much of a criticism. It was still a lovely bit of bird, robustly seasoned and glazed with garum - a fermented fish sauce favoured by the Romans - and gently pink inside. It's tempting to summarise Bright's cooking style as that Modern British restaurant cliché "good ingredients, simply prepared" and it's true that there aren't a bewildering array of techniques on display here. But there's nothing straightforward about cooking turbot as well as that, or managing to get those prawns to the absolute best state they could be. Simple does not mean easy.

Desserts had the same stripped-back confidence of the savoury courses. "Chocolate, coriander seed & sea salt" was three large pieces of good dark chocolate, seemingly shaped on a crinkled up baking sheet, with an interesting added floral note from somewhere.

And "amazake" (a drink made from fermented rice, like sake but lower alcohol) ice cream with sour cherries was the perfect summer dessert, good soft ice cream boasting clean, precise flavours.

So congratulations - again - Hackney, you lucky, lucky bastards. You didn't need yet another thrilling, dynamic modern restaurant on your doorstep but you've got one anyway, and if it means lazy Battersea-based food bloggers have to suffer the indignities of superheated Routemasters and ten stops on the Northern Line to reach it well, quite frankly that's their problem. And you know what, I will be making that journey again, even if it's 32C and the heating on the top deck is stuck to "on", because if this is the way restaurants in London are heading, with elegant wine lists and dishes of stark, simple beauty, then we have an awful lot to look forward to. The future's Bright.

9/10

Hide, Piccadilly

At one end of the Restaurant Ambition Scale you have a simple street food stall, where a small team - often just one person - tests the market with a highly specialised menu of variations on a theme; burgers, perhaps, or Korean-French fusion Yorkshire pudding burritos. Success at this level may lead to investment and expansion and - for the lucky ones - a nationwide chain of restaurants, but none of this happens overnight. Word of mouth travels slowly, and success has to be earned the hard way.

At the other end of the scale, there is Hide. Occupying three floors of an imposing tower block in the heart of Mayfair overlooking Green Park, consisting of a basement bar, ground floor bistro and mezzanine fine dining restaurant, there is nothing about the place that isn't lavishly, indecently confident bordering on downright reckless. As most of the London restaurant industry prepares to batten down the hatches and prepare for the long, dark Brexit winter of the soul, Ollie Dabbous and his Russian investors have decided to throw caution (and a few million quid) to the wind and open by what is by some distance the most impressively kitted-out bit of foodie real estate in W1.

Outside, it's fairly discreet - austere, even, with tinted windows only hinting at activity within, and a large unmarked entrance of dark panelled wood. Inside, though, you can see where every last penny of the £millions went; a glorious stylised wooden staircase looking like something from a Guillermo del Toro movie is the obvious centerpiece, but lovely design details lurk in every corner and it's worth factoring in a good ten minutes into your evening schedule just to make time for gawping in slack-jawed wonder at it all before turning your attention to the food.

Mind you, the food served at Hide deserves just as much slack-jawed wonder as the surroundings. The artist's eye and attention to detail that made Dabbous such a roaring success is even more amplified here, and even this cynical, restaurant-weary blogger saw several moments of genuine, game-changing innovation. Even the bread course was pretty much perfect, all of it oven-fresh and beautifully done, particularly a "foccacia" so insanely delicate it practically dissolved in the mouth - pure buttery, flaky joy.

Simmental (there's that name again) beef tartare came wrapped in cute little nasturtium leaves secured with mini clothes pegs, and despite the leaves being slightly wilted and past their best, still made for very satisfying little morsels. I couldn't detect much of the advertised 'tobacco' flavour but perhaps that's for the best.

Cornish mackerel tartare was served with one of those clever Pacojet-made snows, flavoured with eucalyptus. I don't know if you've ever had mackerel and eucalyptus before - I very much doubt it - and I still haven't, as I didn't get to try this one, but I am reliably informed it worked very well. And who can resist a moat of seaweed and dry ice, to lend a creepy B-movie atmosphere to proceedings?

At this point, my camera battery died, so I'm afraid from here on photos will look like they have all the life drained out of them, as the iPhone in low light tends to do. So just imagine how vibrant the colours were in real life on this dish of raw red prawns, and how a cool, clear shellfish consommé brought a refreshing spritz of the ocean.

Chicken liver parfait was actually nowhere near as weird and grey as it looks here; it was in fact a very attractive pink-bronze, smooth and light and perched proudly on the top of a clever bit of custom tableware, as if nestled in the caldera of a sunken volcano.

Under normal circumstances a single "sweetbread" may sound a bit of a stingy portion for a main course, but this thing was huge - not overwhelmingly so, and with a fantastic light texture, but plenty enough to satisfy. It was presented with angular spears of various pickled herbs and vegetables, and over the top was poured one of those dense, meaty sauces that you just want to order a dozen gallons of and bathe in. Actually, maybe that's just me. Sorry for the mental image.

Octopus was right up there with the version served at Holborn Dining Room, which means it was pretty much perfect. Beautifully tender and darkened with charcoal smoke, it was like sitting on a Mediterranean beach next to a wood fire at sunset. Alright, maybe not quite like that, but it was a very good bit of octopus.

Even the more straightforward dishes were never anything less than impressive. Herdwick lamb, presented in three neat sections, was perfectly cooked and boasted a texture firm yet so yielding it could almost be cut with a spoon. It was clearly excellent lamb - the attention to detail, from everything from the very obviously flashy presentations to the more subtle efforts in areas like sourcing - was quite something to behold.

We could hardly leave without seeing what magic Hide could bring to desserts, and "warm acorn cake" turned out to be a kind of rum baba, where smoked caramel was poured over the cake, itself soaked in a generous measure of your choice of rum. Whether by accident or design, our waiter left the rum bottles on the table during dessert, and it's probably only fair to point out we may have snuck a couple of extra measures before the meal was done.

I didn't see the bill - I was lucky enough to be treated to dinner on this occasion, and though this wasn't a PR invite I thought I'd mention it anyway. But it's worth saying that, really, for food of this precision and skill, in such blindingly attractive surroundings, in this part of town and presented by a team so relentlessly lovely and enthusiastic about the food and drinks they serve you feel a bit mean for not inviting them to sit down and enjoy it with you, well, I think the £100/head or thereabouts feels like something even approaching a bargain. Certainly there are far worse, and far more expensive places to eat within easy walking distance (*cough* Novikov *cough*).

So I can wholeheartedly and unreservedly recommend Hide. It hits every single restaurant pleasure point with a bullseye, and if you have the means, and enjoy eating lovely food served by lovely people, then it's hard to see why you'd leave the place any less impressed than I did. And I was very impressed indeed. So thank you Ollie Dabbous and team - it's reassuring that in these difficult times, there are some people willing to aim big, and have their lofty ambitions realised so perfectly.

9/10

Wellbourne, White City

Despite never having been to White City Place before, the vibe of the place felt eerily familiar. Originally a collection of BBC buildings, the writing was on the wall for them remaining so as soon as the price of a two-bed flat in Zone 2 spiked over £750,000 and so today they've transformed into yet another one of those wipe-clean reimaginings of a public space, still technically public domain but heavily stacked with lots of lovely investor-friendly residential blocks. See also: Battersea Power Station, Stratford Olympic Village, and so on.

Of course, though billions are to be made in residential housing, not even an absentee Saudi landlord would want to own property in a windswept concrete jungle with only a branch of Tesco Express and a Pret for entertainment, so more often than not these developments offer a sweet rent deal for half-decent restaurants, so they can pretend to be a normal functioning neighbourhood at least for as long as it takes to flog the apartments above. So Battersea Power station boasts - for now - a (very nice too) branch of Wright Bros, Stratford Olympic Village has Darkhorse (which hosted a popup by Henry Harris while he was between Racine and Coach, Clerkenwell stints) and now BBC Media Village - sorry, White City Place - has Wellbourne.

Wellbourne is, objectively, a nice restaurant. True, at first glance the menu appears to be rather unfocused, with various French, Italian, Spanish and Middle Eastern elements vying for attention, but anywhere serving Ibérico secreto and veal Holstein clearly have a bit of ambition about them, and with a Josper-style charcoal oven in the kitchen they've at least been able to spend some money on equipment to - in theory - make the most of it.

All of which may even have not been enough to tempt me to W12 were they not able to offer a type of cow I'd not seen on a menu before - 50-day-aged "Simmental" beef from HG Walter, a butcher already in my good books for supplying the astonishingly good burgers served by Harris at the aforementioned Coach in Clerkenwell. So with that, I hopped on the Central Line.

Before the steak though, some vol-au-vents. Every restaurant needs a USP, and it seems the team at Wellbourne (including the most affable Michael Kennedy who was in the kitchens the evening of my visit) have pinned their hopes on the humble vol-au-vent making a comback. And why not, because these were perfectly lovely little things, boasting good buttery casings and intelligent, well-seasoned fillings of lamb shoulder and mustard, salt cod, and (my favourite) broad beans, sheep's cheese and mint.

That I enjoyed my steak as much as I did is testament mainly to the quality of the raw ingredient, as I had various issues with the way it was presented. By all means serve steak on the bone - it's my preferred cut - but if you're going to cut it off said bone before serving, do not then re-grill the steakless bone (!?) to remove all trace of nice pink flesh, and do not drape the filleted beef over the bone on the plate, like it had all been dropped from the ceiling. Added to this, there wasn't enough of a crust or colour on the steak itself, which ended up looking a bit sad and flabby.

But! But. It still tasted great. This was clearly very good beef, and despite all the indignity it had suffered in the cooking process still managed to boast a dense, rich funkiness that only the most carefully-aged cow can. Simmental, interestingly, are mixed-use cattle that can be used for dairy or beef, much like the Galician breeds you find in so many trendy Spanish steakhouses these days (Lurra, Sagardi) and I don't know whether it's just a happy coincidence that this happens to chime with exactly what I'm looking for in a steak, or there's something about ex-dairy cattle that makes incredible beef, but I was more than impressed.

Veal Holstein was also a good example of its sort, carefully and prettily presented, tender veal schnitzel seasoned with good strong anchovies. And at the risk of repeating myself, how nice that a new bistro like this is making the effort to do something a bit unusual rather than filling the menu with burgers and Ceasar salads as I'm sure they could easily have done.

Oh yes, chips were very nice - neat and golden brown with a good crunch - though I preferred dipping them in a red wine jus than something called "bois boudrin" which had all the personality of cold Doritos salsa.

Fortified by good meat, as well as a glass of very good Napa red from their Coravin system, we felt comfortable enough to stay for desserts. "Dolce[sic] de leche" ice cream sandwich was excellent, soft inside without a trace of crystallisation, and with a nice salty crunchy biscuit. So too, lemon leaf sorbet which had loads of citrus punch and a smooth texture. The less said about the attempt to pair the ice cream with a dry manzanilla sherry, though, the better - a sweet port, hastily substituted, soon put things right.

Overall, then, there was enough to enjoy, and though clearly I can't be giving top marks to anywhere serving steak like that (if you like, see how different it looks on the restaurant's own website - wait for the 3rd slide), the quality made up for some of the texture and you can still do a lot worse for the same price elsewhere. Whether it will survive in this strange, lonely spot once the rents go up - we were one of two tables taken all evening - remains to be seen, but it's probably no safer than anywhere else in London at the moment, Saudi investors or no Saudi investors. So better just make the most of it all while we can.

7/10

I was invited to Wellbourne and didn't see a bill, though I imagine all of the above would have come to about £50/head or so.