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.

Get Forked in Miami

When work told me that they were sending me to Miami for a week, it was a rare moment of sunshine in the oft-grey drudgery of my daily toil. In my mind, I would go and fill the breaks between meetings with seaside runs, I would find time to explore and I would extend my trip to spend a weekend eating the food of diverse cuisines - soaking up the culture of expatriate communities from Central America and the Caribbean. Unsurprisingly, this was somewhat ambitious. However, whilst my daily runs failed to materialise;  my trip, and Miami itself, were exactly as I expected them to be. The sky was invariably blue and the sun shone on beautiful people driving ostentatious cars.

Although principally there to work, my secondary aim was to eat as much as I could within a week. Food between meetings rather than exercise. My experience of the Miami restaurant scene veered from the sublime (excellent seafood served in view of the sea) to the mediocre (I visited a number of chain restaurants of the sort that will sell the unsuspecting diner vast quantities of generic, under-seasoned food). Somewhat disappointingly, in a week of Miami eating, I managed only a relatively small number of memorable food experiences. Fortunately, these were sufficiently brilliant to make up for the alternative: slightly generic American fare. 

February Fail

I have not done well with the Cookbook Challenge this month. However, this monumental fail is not my fault. I have several excuses:

1) I have been too busy checking out other people's burgers

2) Chinese Elvis gave me nightmares and I woke up too tired to cook

3) I spent so much at Dinner, I couldn't afford ingredients

So I can't really be blamed for failing so miserably, not with all that going on.

The Big D

Byron, 33 -35 Wellington Street, WC2E 7BN

Why is is that I only ever discover new things after they are no longer cool or just before they disappear? The Big D is a case in point. Three days before the end of February, I tried my first one. Available for one short month every year, tomorrow is the last day they will be on the menu. I had a giant burger two days ago. I am not ready for another one. But if I don't eat a Big D today, I will have to wait 11 months for another or buy my own Big D at O'Shea's (the home of this meaty wonder) and get all pyromaniac on it with an old grill pan and cling film over the smoke detector. The latter might work in the short term but will leave me and the entire contents of my little flat reeking of cow for a good week.

There's only one thing for it: double burger week. Good job I am off to the US next week. It's not like they are any good at making burgers or anything...

Eat a Big D while you can. It is a meaty, juicy marvel.

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.

Three ways with beef

East London Steak Co

Hawksmoor Seven Dials, 11 Langley St, WC2H 9JG

From time to time, I resolve to eat less flesh. This generally occurs when I read something written by a genuinely healthy person about wanting to eat sushi/salad/tofu because they feel fat from eating red meat. This triggers my deep-seated envy of people who actually want to have a well-balanced diet, forcing me to pretend that I too live that way and not, as is the reality, like some pre-historic dinosaur woman, chomping her way through meat-based meal after meat-based meal with no thought for vegetables. That said, eating my way through three different cuts of beef in one weekend was a bold move, even by my standards.

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.