Deborah Ross

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.

It’s my niece Daisy’s 16th birthday and after not quite having the courage to accept my initial gift offer, one I still think quite brilliant — that we go out and get her tattooed, possibly with ‘I hate dad’ on the knuckles of one hand and ‘I hate mum’ on the other, or even ‘I really hate mum’ just to really piss mum off — she suggests that I take her out to dinner and then put her into print. She would like to be in print, she says, although I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s so she can show all her friends during one of those rare instances when they are not texting, circling Topshop or eyeing up boys in Starbucks. Okay, I say, fine. If you want to be in print I shall put you in print.

One evening I saw Gordon Ramsay on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross plugging his latest cookery book, Gordon Ramsay Makes It Easy, which is readily available from most bookshops, unlike Ramsay Makes It Hard which, I’m guessing, is available only from those adult shops with beaded curtains. Anyway, every time Mr Ross mentioned the book Mr Ramsay added: ‘And it comes with a free DVD!’ which totally got my juices going. What an inspired idea, I thought. A recipe book with Free DVD! so that you could play it on your laptop while you cook. It’ll be like having Gordon — a brilliant chef, whatever else you may think of him — in the kitchen with you. Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?

I am taking my mother’s cousin Norma and her husband Harry out to lunch and I want them to have a good time, not just because I love Norma to bits but also because... nope, that’s it actually. She used to babysit us when we were little and would make us eat our supper backwards, saying if we didn’t finish our ice-cream there would be no main course, absolutely not, no way, and even though our bedtime was meant to be 8 p.m. we’d all still be up at midnight when she would shout: ‘All of you... time for... CAKE! And I mean IT!’ So I loved Norma then and I love her now. As for Harry, he seems very pleasant (only joking, Hazza!). Anyway, it’s not that easy taking Norma out for lunch.

I go abroad for a week and what do I find when I get home? That Ikea has been stormed by large chunks of Edmonton! I was absolutely livid, not least because I’m one of the people who, some time ago now, not only campaigned against the storming of Ikea, but also went on the march and attended several candlelit vigils which were really, really boring and chilly, but such was the strength of my belief. I simply do not agree with storming Ikea, even though I totally accept it has its problems. The nightmare queues. The basement bit where you are seduced into spending £789 on silly candles — as if you would ever consider going on another boring and chilly vigil again. The sheer choice, and all those veneers. Oh — so many veneers and so little time.

Off to the Gun, the Docklands gastropub. It’s a brisk walk from Surrey Quays station. Well, I say brisk but of course it is impossible to get anywhere briskly these days, what with the swarms of swarming immigrants swarming all over the streets and everything. They are everywhere. Everywhere! Indeed, just this morning I shook three out of my hair and if I’ve caught them, then you can almost guarantee the rest of the family have them too. So it’ll be off to Boots for that special stinky shampoo and then all that combing, combing, combing. Such a faff. I blame our son. Attending an inner-city multicultural school as he does, he’s always bringing them home.

Alas, half-term is over, my son is back at school, and I have the house back to myself during the day. Oh, how I miss him, or would do if I wasn’t so thrilled to get rid of the pesky old so-and-so. Oh dear, school today, I said on the first morning while pushing him out of the door, double-locking it from the inside and drawing the bolt. I did think about quickly moving while somehow forgetting to leave a forwarding address but then realised it would mean packing and that would be too boring for words. Still, it’s not as if I can forget him entirely during the day, as there appears to be a deadly smell emanating from his room. How best to describe it?

Hurrah! At last we get the MP3 player we bought our son for Christmas to work. Four adults, working in shifts, couldn’t get it to work on Christmas Day. The same four adults, still working in shifts — very ill-tempered shifts — couldn’t get it to work on Boxing Day. The instructions, provided by Hyun Won Inc., and most loosely translated from the original Korean, were not of much help: ‘Pause now you are in shortly, stop.’ The Internet site we bought it from had shut up shop until well in the New Year. We tried the people at PC World. Utterly useless, predictably enough. We waylaid anyone who had the look of a geek about them. (A well-thumbed copy of Lord of the Rings is usually a promising sign.) No joy.