In with the new at the Vincent Rooms

The Vincent Rooms, 76 Vincent Square, SW1P 2PD

Two course meal with wine: £25 ish (we split the bill, some people had dessert)

Sometimes, when I want to escape to an imaginary world in which I have won the lottery and can afford a beautiful house in SW1, I go to Vincent Square. It's the perfect place to reflect on just how awesome it would be if I were ludicrously rich. It is quiet, it has a big playing field in the middle and the houses look like the sort of accommodation American film-makers imagine all well-to-do Londoners live in, complete with a Rolls Royce and a butler. Once a year, they even hold the London rum festival in Vincent Square; presumably so the wealthy folk don't have far to roll home. However, until recently, I have been missing out on one of Vincent Square's best attractions: the Vincent Rooms. Attached to the college that trained such luminaries as Jamie Oliver and (ahem) Antony Worrall Thompson, the Vincent Rooms lets one test the abilities of the current batch of chefs-in-waiting, and all at prices a mere mortal can afford. I only wish I had tried it sooner.

Maltby Street marvels

40 Maltby Street, SE1 3PA
Wine and lunch for two: £35

Aside from the important things - Mr F, my family and friends - I sometimes feel as if London is one of the great loves of my life. I don't feel that way all the time, particularly when it is grey and damp. However, on a sunny weekend such as this, I cannot imagine living anywhere else. When friends talk of their aspiration to live in the countryside, I find myself dreaming of a different, more urban sort of village. This weekend, it was Bermondsey village that caught my eye and, in particular, the unstated brilliance of Maltby Street.

The queue for coffee at Monmouth

Buen Provecho at the Zoo

Buen Provecho, London Zoo Lates or Lower Marsh Street

3 tacos: £6

There's only a week left to check out London Zoo Lates, the late night opening at London Zoo that sees drunken grown ups overrun an attraction usually reserved for family outings and dance like idiots at a silent disco. If like me, the idea of a looking at animals leaves you cold, then fear not - the delightful people at Eat.St have arranged a street food fantasia to reassure us that not all animals end up in cages. Some are destined for sandwiches.

Inconstant Italian

Zucca, 184 Bermondsey Street, SE1 3TQ

Meal for two: £85

Living in Dalston, I tend to think most other places are quite smart. I forget that it is normal to brush your hair and wear clothes that match; consequently, I am always vaguely surprised to find that most people choose to do this. Bermondsey, sleek, chic and stylish, is a welcome break from my home borough's scruffy charms.  On a quaint London village street complete with idyllic old church, Zucca embodies the upmarket but trendy feel that permeates this part of London.

All exposed concrete, open kitchen and well-judged art, eating in Zucca is like eating in the modern house of your parents' wealthiest friend: an intimate and charming experience that displays all the attributes of a great local restaurant. However, Bermondsey is not our neighbourhood, and it takes more than sharp design to entice me across the river. If the food had been consistently good, sustaining the quality displayed in the best dishes, I would have no hesitation in returning: for the cooking here displayed moments of real excellence. However, our meal was slightly overshadowed by inconsistencies, and it failed to live up to its stellar reputation.

Lunch at Dinner

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, 66 Knightsbridge, SW1X 7LA

Extravagant lunch for two: £240 (gulp)

Choosing Dinner as the place to celebrate our first wedding anniversary was a slight gamble. Back in December when I booked, there was eager anticipation but it was too early for hype: Giles Coren had yet to call it the best restaurant in the world, it wasn't particularly hard to get a table and no one, including me, had ever heard of meat fruit. Jump forward two months and the opposite is true. If anything, however, this made the choice of Dinner for a special occasion all the more precarious: massive expectations were raised, divorce was threatened if I tried to discuss the menu with Mr F for the fiftieth time and the chances of us getting away with my original plan of the affordable set lunch dwindled to nothing. Fortunately for our marriage, Dinner is as wonderful as we have been led to believe. Even the most hard-hearted super-foodie, determined to find fault with popular consensus would struggle to dislike it: so for mere mortals such as ourselves, it was a truly worthy treat.

Wednesday's child is good to fry

Masters Super Fish, 191 Waterloo Road, SE1 8UX

Fish supper and beer for one: £15

Occasionally I try to resist the fact I am slowly turning into an East London stereotype: I cycle everywhere, my shoes are always flat and, if ever further confirmation were needed, I have become hooked on blogs - including my own. It is fair to say that I am a fan of the East. Which makes it all the more disappointing that, in one respect, the East End has failed to live up to my pre-Dalston conceptions: the restaurants. 

It is not that the East is lacking in the culinary department - far from it. Without a doubt, we have some of the finest Turkish, Vietnamese and Pakistani restaurants in the capital. What it lacks is the food of its more distant history. Finding good old-fashioned British food in the area is harder than it might seem. Having already established that the best fried breakfasts in London are to be found in Pimlico, it is with a small measure of sadness that I confirmed what others have already reported: the best fish and chips are in Lambeth.  

More Meat

#Meateasy, Goldsmiths Tavern, 316 New Cross Road, SE14 6AF

Bar Boulud, Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, 66 Knightsbridge, SW1X 7LA

If I were to open a new bar in London, I imagine that deciding how to set it up would be a fairly swift process: 

1) Unexpected location, preferably in something not originally intended to be a bar e.g. shoe shop, hotdog stand or pet shop? Check.

2) Cocktails in jam jars / petrol cans / anything but glasses? Check.

3) Subtle but diverting speakeasy quirks evoking downtrodden decadence of prohibition era? Check.

Even simpler would be the process of designing the menu, for what self-respecting hotspot could overlook that trendiest of food stuffs: the burger. Despite its humble associations, the burger continues to capture London's foodie imagination; with everyone from East London dive bars to the big names in grilled meat jostling for the crown of London's Best Burger. With such great variation between the offerings, comparison is almost impossible. Nonetheless, here goes my take on what makes a good burger: the big hype versus the big name.

Breakfast with a Westminster classic

The Cinnamon Club, 30-32 Great Smith Street, SW1P 4BU

Breakfast: £13 on a special offer

Located in the former home of the Westminster Library, the Cinnamon Club has an inordinate amount of old world charm: beautiful architecture, walls lined with books and thick, white linen tablecloths. For ten years now, it has been a fixture of the Westminster culinary scene, serving up refined Indian food to journalists wooing politicians in the hope of an insight into the latest intrigue. Being neither hack nor expenses-fuelled parliamentarian, I had to wait for a Time Out special offer.

Back to the old stomping ground

The Fox and Hounds, 66 Latchmere Road, SW11 2JU
Meal for two with beers: £38

When Mr Fork and I moved to London, we started off in Battersea, and spent several happy years familiarising ourselves with the area's culinary offerings: the enduring brilliance of Pizza Metro Pizza, along with a couple of great pubs and a few  fairly generic places serving crumpets and slightly overpriced salads, in family-friendly surroundings. All too predictably - such is our luck, since we moved north and east, several reportedly great places have opened, such as the Draft House and Mien Tay. Returning to Battersea for the first time in a while, I was, therefore, hoping to try one of these relatively new places. Instead we found ourselves back in a favourite old haunt: the Fox and Hounds on Latchmere Road.

Jerk off!

Peppers and Spice, 40 Balls Pond Rd, N1 4AU

J.M. Victuals, Strutton Ground, Victoria

I have an inordinate amount of respect for the good people at Time Out. They provide an invaluable source of information on the affairs of our city. However, sometimes they seem to feel the need to be unnecessarily provocative. Articles such as the list of best burgers that included Gourmet Burger Kitchen and the review of Caribbean takeaways that seemed to have been written by someone with an absurd phobia of South and East London read like they were designed to provoke readers into hurling the nearest heavy object at the screen of their computer in frustration. I am not alone in this weird, inexplicable food rage; such was the reaction to the last piece that Time Out felt the need to clarify their motivation for writing the article, excusing their imposition of a Caribbean takeaway exclusion zone over most of London by arguing that the article was intended as a Carnival piece. 

Even though I have now found peace with this particular article, I decided to visit the Caribbean takeaways in my corners of East and South London to ferret out any the places that would have featured in a more balanced piece. Here are my first findings.

Peppers and Spice on the Balls Pond Road is a perennially popular choice amongst Dalstonites. Having waited in the queue snaking out of the door into the night, classics such as jerk chicken, rice and peas and patties are always available plus a daily menu including oxtail, cowfoot and curry goat. The jerk chicken was sticky and spicy with a thicker, glossier sauce than the standard offering. Rice and peas are perfectly stodgy with a hint of coconut and the patties are marvellous, combining crisp, flaky yellow pastry with an unusually spicy filling. As with most of its competitors, Peppers and Spice is amazing value with a meal for two incredibly greedy people involving jerk, curry and patties costing roughly ten pounds.

On the other side of the city, JM Victuals is a small stall selling Caribbean favourites to the lunchtime crowd in Westminster and Victoria. In what was once a culinary wasteland, it is one of a number of stalls recently opened on Strutton Ground selling decent food to crowds of Channel 4 media types and downtrodden public servants. The menu is small but covers more than you might expect from a market stall. As well as the obligatory jerk chicken, there is usually ackee and saltfish, oxtail and some sort of curry. The jerk chicken was closer to the traditional dish but the rice and peas lack some of the flavour of their Hackney counterpart. The absolute highlight, however, is the homemade hot sauce. Bright yellow, slightly vinegary and fiercely spicy; it lifts everything it is poured on into the sublime. The bad news is that the man who makes it has recently left this company to start up on his own. I sincerely hope his new business model includes this sauce. 

Naturally, I am conscious that there are still whole swathes of London left to explore; that there is good Caribbean food to be found in Tottenham and Brixton if only I make the trip. I had better get cycling.

Peppers and Spice on Urbanspoon

I heart the Regency

The Regency Cafe, 17-19 Regency Street, Westminster

Breakfast for two: £12

Returning to the Regency is like stepping back to a bygone age of cooking.  It evokes rosy feelings of an earlier time when people drank tea and ate dripping on their toast - even if that time pre-dates your own birth by a good 30 years.  There's no dripping on offer now but they will make you a liver sandwich.

Even if you have never been, you would recognise the Regency.  The white and black exterior and the plastic tables sitting under half-curtained windows have featured in advertisements and a film (Layer Cake, if you are interested). Indeed, the tea at the Regency is actually made in the same type of oversized metal pot that features in the scene.  Its famous history neither adds to nor detracts from the Regency's charm.  It has its own character and appeal that make it possibly the finest cafe in London. 

Food is ordered from the counter, which is usually manned by a formidable lady with an impressive vocal range who shouts the orders as they come out.  Beware if she appends "going cold" at the end of your order, it is a sign that you have been too slow to collect your food, marking you out as a newcomer to the Regency.  The familiarity of the staff with many of the customers suggests that there are plenty of regular visitors. On the morning of our last trip, we spotted taxi drivers, office workers from nearby Government Departments, local builders and a handful of tourists.

We were there for breakfast - a rather large affair that involved black pudding and bubble alongside the standard fare.  It was good.  The eggs were soft, the sausages herby and meaty (not those fairly meatless pink things that turn a uniform shade of brown when cooked) and the whole thing swam with baked beans. It was not the best cooked breakfast either of us had ever eaten (the jury is still out on that one, although Medcalf on Exmouth Market is a current favourite) but it was enormous, tasty and pretty cheap.  In short, everything you could want from a proper greasy spoon.

The only downside is that it keeps slightly inconvenient opening times: it closes at seven in the evening during the week, at noon on Saturday and does not open on Sundays. So, unless you happen to live or work in the area, it seems like a lot of effort just for a cafe.  That said, I think it is probably worth it. To experience a small part of London's culinary history, if nothing else.