Deborah Ross

First off, I should say I’m no great expert when it comes to Swedish food. First off, I should say I’m no great expert when it comes to Swedish food. Yes, I’ve been to Ikea — so many veneers, so little time! — and, yes, I’ve had the meatballs in the café but, judging by the taste and texture, I think even they were MDF with a meatball veneer. I probably should have opted for the mushroom umlaut, but there you have it. However, having figured it might be silly to judge all Swedish food by Ikea meatballs and the sad little herrings in the refrigerated display, I think it might be worth giving Upper Glas a go.

Look, first off I’d just like to say that what follows has nothing to do with not being either hip or edgy. Look, first off I’d just like to say that what follows has nothing to do with not being either hip or edgy. I am hip and edgy. Some days I’m so hip and edgy that’s all there is to me: hip and edge. ‘Wow, look at the hip and edge on that,’ people have even been known to gasp when I pass them in the street. I just wanted to get this absolutely straight so you wouldn’t think I just wasn’t hip or edgy enough for his week’s restaurant; that I failed it rather than the other way around. That would be preposterous. You can say what you like about me, but you can’t say I’m neither hip nor edgy. No way.

My son and I are out for a night in the West End. This is unusual as he is a teenager and, usually, he wouldn’t be seen dead with me, not even after I’ve given him my word not to do funny dances in front of his friends or kiss him just as we’re passing the local gang of hoodies or appear at the school gate wearing leather and a push-up bra. Can you get fairer than that? I don’t think so. But he has his own social life now, which seems to involve going to somewhere called ‘the top field’ quite a lot. What do you do at ‘the top field’? ‘Stuff,’ he will say. What sort of stuff? I will ask. ‘Just stuff,’ he will say. What sort of just stuff? I will ask. ‘JUST STUFF!,’ he will say.

Pasha describes itself as a ‘Moroccan oasis in the heart of Kensington’, which you would do well to remember, as who hasn’t, at some time or other, found themselves in the heart of Kensington thinking, ‘I do so wish there was a Moroccan oasis around here’? It is just round the corner from the Albert Hall, on Gloucester Road, at the end of a small parade of chi-chi boutiques and bakeries so artisan that the price of a loaf of bread is pretty much up there with the cost of the average car. It’s the kind of place where you don’t so much buy a cake as take a mortgage out on one. Still, I do like Pasha, from the off. It’s just so OTT.

I try to make a booking at Dans Le Noir?, the new London restaurant where diners eat in total darkness and are served by blind and visually impaired staff, although I still don’t think I’ve quite worked out what the point is exactly. Anyway, I call and speak to a very nice-sounding Frenchman who asks if he might call me back. ‘Iz just that I cannot find ze bookings book just now.’ When he doesn’t return the call, I email via the restaurant’s website. No reply. I am beginning to think that this is why blind people, on the whole, don’t make especially good restauranteurs. However, this doesn’t mean I have anything against blind people. God, no.

The Michelin-starred French restaurant Roussillon has just launched a ‘Mini-Gastronome’ programme. This means that on the first and third Wednesday lunchtime of every month children aged 11 and under get to eat a free seven-course menu designed to introduce them to top-class cooking while ‘exciting their palate and their eyes’. To be perfectly honest, I think most children are enough of a pain without excited palates and eyes, but it might be worth a shot. However, what child to take? I can’t take my own son because he is now a big teenager and much too busy slamming doors and leaving wet towels all over his bedroom even though returning them to the bathroom would involve what? A walk of almost three yards? (And it’s downhill!

After writing about how difficult it is to find a truly great steak in London, my friend Robbo calls to suggest the Guinea Grill in Mayfair, if it is still there. He says he first went to the Guinea in the 1960s, for a celebratory dinner funded by richer, more sophisticated London relatives — he is from somewhere called, I believe, ‘Leeds’; have you heard of it? — and was astounded: ‘I’d never seen anything like it. On the way in there was this crushed ice display with strawberries on it, and the strawberries were huge, the size of avocados. And the avocados? — the size of melons! And the steaks were fantastic. I’ve never, ever forgotten it.

The restaurateur Oliver Peyton’s latest project is the National Dining Rooms at the National Gallery. It is situated in the Sainsbury Wing, although as Tesco has more or less blasted Sainsbury’s out of the water in every way you can think of in recent years, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before Tesco takes it over, moves it out of town until everything in town goes bust, and then moves it back as the Tesco Metro Wing. Supermarkets. Aren’t they just so evil? Last week my car was broken into, window smashed and everything, and while I’m not one of those people who likes to blame supermarkets for all that is wrong in all the world, I do think it was Asda’s fault all the same.

Is it just me, or does everyone have a bit of a problem warming to Gary Rhodes? I know, I know, all celebrity chefs have their annoying shortcomings: Jamie’s wet lips; Nigella’s sloppy eating habits (sucking her fingers, juices dribbling down chin); Delia’s full-on, aproned bossiness; Rick’s silly dog, Chalky; Ainsley’s just about everything. And Gary? There is just something quite chilly and rather sinister about him. It doesn’t help, I suppose, that as time goes on he looks more and more like Freddy Kruger, possibly via a spring onion, what with the stupid hair. I don’t know what I’d put down first, Rick’s silly dog or Gary’s stupid hair.

I ask Egon Ronay, the man who first put the rosettes into British cooking and who has just published his 2006 guide to the best restaurants in the UK, if he’d care to have lunch, show me how he judges a restaurant, maybe teach me a thing or two. (As if I needed it! Pull the other one!) He agrees and suggests we try Rules — ‘London’s Oldest Restaurant’ — which is fine by me, as I’ve never known whether it is simply a kind of top-of-the-range Angus Steak House for dimwit tourists of a dim-witted, touristy nature or properly good, genuinely worth going to. He doesn’t know either. He’s had letters about Rules: some good, some not so; maybe it should be in his guide, maybe it shouldn’t. Let’s go.

It’s a Sunday and as our son doesn’t have any sporting engagements for the first time in 657 years my partner proposes a Family Day Out, a simple enough phrase always promoted in newspapers — The Best Family Days Out; Great Days Out For The Family — but one which always strikes terror in my heart. What amuses one family member often does not amuse another. The one who is not amused sulks. The one who would otherwise be amused sulks at the one who sulks. The one who was initially indifferent sulks because everyone else is sulking and in no time at all the Family Falls Out and the drive home is of the utterly silent type bar the odd pinch and consequent shriek (and that’s just the parents).

‘Most of us are asleep most of the time,’ says Jamie Oliver in the new Sainsbury’s television commercial, possibly recorded before he went off to Italy with a film crew and production team for his much-needed break from the cameras. ‘Even when we shop we are sleep-shopping,’ he continues, ‘filling our trolleys with exactly the same things week in, week out.’ Christ, I thought, you’ve got a point there, James. That’s exactly what I do. I can go to the supermarket absolutely determined to not buy any of the stuff I usually buy but I still somehow manage to come home with all the stuff I always buy. ‘There’s a million meals to choose from so why eat the same ones again and again?’ Why indeed?

The newly released Zagat survey has just named the top ten most popular London restaurants and put Wagamama, a cheap noodle bar restaurant, at number one. So how come I’ve never been? Especially when you consider there are now 50 of them worldwide, 24 of which are in London, and a new one appears to open every ten minutes. Go and answer your door and there’ll probably be one in your living-room by the time you get back. I think it’s possibly because I have always equated Japanese food with sushi and, while I know sushi is very fashionable and an art form and all that, I’m afraid I just don’t care because I don’t like it.