This is not, I have to confess, the kind of place I usually find myself in. As far as I can tell, Tower Bridge is where people who don’t really know London go for a bit of a day out, some overpriced dinner and a trough-load of artificial alcopop booze on a Saturday night. Just looking at the selection of eateries in this part of St Katharine Docks confirms this impression: Strada, Café Rouge… the usual suspects. But amongst all these depressing chain restaurants, there is a surprise to be had. In a good way.

The Living Room may not look like much – a slightly more snazzily lit All Bar One, with a grand piano – but once you’re inside, sheesh, are you in for a treat. The first clue that this isn’t the normal Stella and chips joint is the wine list, which is not only unusual and innovative but clear and well-priced too, with plenty of options by the glass. We plump for something I’ve never even heard of before: a South Australian blend of Gewurtztraminer, Riesling and Pinot Gris – Knappstein’s aptly named ‘Three’, at £24.15. It’s weird, but brilliant. You can taste each grape variety perfectly – each mouthful moving from minerality through gentle acidity towards a rounded lavender finish. Delightful, and unlike anything I’ve drunk before, I think.

And then the food. The menu is an odd combination of trad comfort food – scampi, lasagne, beef and ale pie, burgers, steaks, fish and chips – with a range of Asian influences: lots of seafood starters with sweet chilli sauce, tandoori sea bass, a couple of curries. It sort of seems like they’re trying to do too much, but given that every dish that we sampled was executed absolutely perfectly, perhaps too much is just about right.

I kick off by being difficult and asking for one of the ‘lighter meals’ as a starter. I’m accommodated with a friendly smile, and my pork belly, bok choi and noodle salad (£7.95) is excellent. Crisp, light, full of zing and zest and depth of flavour, it’s better than most of the Vietnamese on Kingsland Road that all the hipsters rave about. My companion – esteemed founder of the New London Cocktail Review – opts for  a starter of scallops, chorizo, potato and baby plum tomatoes (£8.25). It seems like a weird combination, but again it works: the flavours blurring and bouncing off each other expertly.

She orders more fishiness for the main course – mackerel with cod cheek, pancetta and leeks in a Pernod cream sauce (£11.75). This is the kind of dish that could go badly wrong – I mean, has anyone used Pernod since Keith Floyd snuffed it? – but again it works well, with everything executed expertly, and the flavours complementing each other gently. I go boring and order the rib-eye steak (£17.75). With excellent chips, tomato, salad, field mushroom and a choice of sauces (béarnaise for me), it’s a pretty sizeable dish – perhaps a little too sizeable. But the beef is flavoursome and cooked right (blue) so I’m not complaining.

Afterwards I’m persuaded into sharing the Eton Mess, which is great (although I didn’t taste much of the Pimm’s in the Pimm’s-soaked strawberries) and then we finish things off with a couple of cocktails. Even after all this I wasn’t expecting much, but they were both exceptional. My Negroni packed exactly the kind of punch that Negronis should, whilst remaining well balanced – with no single flavour dominating the others. With some choice tunes playing around us – Aloe Blacc’s ‘I Need a Dollar’ among them – it’s a surprisingly perfect end to a surprisingly excellent evening.

www.thelivingroom.co.uk

The usual formula for restaurant reviews these days is predictably tripartite: 1, the critic bangs on about his girlfriend/gout/celebrity pals for as many words as the subs allow. 2, the critic mentions the food. 3, the critic returns to his fail-safe subject – himself – in what he thinks is a neat and witty little structural about-turn.

Usually this works fine, and in fact writing about myself is probably my favourite past-time. But with Tamarind – the Michelin-starred Indian restaurant over in Mayfair – it doesn’t seem quite so appropriate. I was going to try and make an elaborately tenuous comparison between the restaurant, Tamarind, and the tamarind tree – which according to Wikipedia (and yes, that is the extent of my research these days) is “a long-lived, medium-growth bushy tree, which attains a maximum crown height of 12.1 to 18.3 metres”. I’m not sure why I decided not to bother with this – perhaps because it’s totally irrelevant – but I’m sure we’ll work it out as we go along.

And so to Tamarind, and not wishing to beat about the medium-growth bush, the food is simply superb. I really can’t fault one single bit of it in any way, which, I’m afraid, is going to make for rather tedious reading. Oh well.

We’re sampling from the spring lunch menu, but this being a press jolly, we get to try everything rather than having to choose. There’s four starters, three of which are delightful, and one of which (a salad of black-eyed beans, cherry tomatoes, chard leaves and pomegranate with a lime and cumin dressing) is merely really good. There’s some excellent little kingfish cakes (with a belting chutney) and some great tilapia and mint chutney rolls; but the highlight at this stage is, for me, a perfectly balanced, zippily brilliant salad of duck breast, grilled courgette, rocket, avocado and – a stroke of genius, this – kumquat. It’s a confidently handled dish of both strength and delicacy: spring, personified.

From here to the mains, and again everything is flawless. We sample an amazing chicken tikka with ginger and honey; paneer with fenugreek leaves; meltingly delicious lamb cutlets; turmeric potatoes and broccoli; a yellow lentil dahl; and the most fabulously sweet-but-never-too-sweet Naan bread, containing a dark mush of date, coconut and poppy seed.

What stands out across every dish is the expert balance and use of spices. The heat brings a backbone – and in places some punchy bite – but it never crushes or dominates. As if with wings, this heat lifts the flavours upwards, taking the more delicate elements to rare new heights. Raw papaya, fennel, ginger, saffron, fenugreek: all these flavours dance around each other, intertwined, but all clean and individually traceable as themselves.

Desserts too are noticeable for the perfection of balance. Carrot fudge with melon seeds, raisins, pistachio and (a bit superfluously) silver leaf – is a firm, gooey delight, while strawberry and mint sorbet is a simple but perfectly apt conclusion.

From here alas it’s back to the office and another little Wikipedia factoid: “the tamarind does flower, though inconspicuously”. Ditto Tamarind – there’s not much show here, from either the décor (all muted golds) or the politely passionate owner, but the food truly sings.

Oh, and sticking to the formula, sadly I can’t think of a way of bringing it back to me. Just go to Tamarind – it’s so good it shuts even me up. And I can’t say much more than that.

www.tamarindrestaurant.com

You might not know you do, but you do. You know James Street. It’s that one that runs parallel to St Christopher’s Place, from Bond Street up towards Marylebone High Street, that one that tries to pretend it’s not in London but in some mythically wondrous pan-European city, where the bronzed and Brioni-suited sip espresso, the girls meet for cocktails, and grizzled old Monsieur stuff bulbous noses into their third carafe de vin rouge.  And it’s not even lunch yet.

Unfortunately this is London, so it always rains, all the restaurants are really expensive, and most of them are pretty average. Until now. OK, so it can’t change the weather, but Cocochan can change James Street. Billing itself as pan-Asian (with the kind of modern, minimal Orient-infused décor you’d expect) Cocochan offers a deftly selected edit of a range of dishes from across Vietnam, Thailand, China and Japan – perfect if, like me, you’re too much of a ditherer to decide what kind of food you want to eat.

What makes it even more perfect for dithering types is the emphasis on sharing. Of course you don’t have to share; there’s a concise but diverse selection of proper main courses to choose from – things like ‘bulgogi’ ribeye with wasabi jus (£18.50), miso chillean seabass with umeboshi (£15.50) and chargrilled lamb with kimchee (£15.50) all sound rather appealing (although that might just be because I have to ask what half the words mean…)

But we – that’s the founder of the New London Cocktail Review and I – decide to share. And boy do we get stuck in. We share a variety of dim sum (all around the £4-£5 mark): vegetable and duck spring rolls, “monks” vegetable dumplings. And chicken and waterchestnut gyoza. They’re mostly fairly straightforward, but neatly done and never overly heavy or greasy.

We also tuck into several of the small dishes – well salted chilli squid (£7.50); excellent vegetable tempura (£5.75) featuring an unusual but nicely judged selection that includes asparagus, avocado and sweet potato; and then the highlight – a Vietnamese salad of seared beef, with tomato, coriander, mango (I think) and some other bits and bobs. It’s £7.50 and an absolute delight – zingy, light, with splendidly raw beef and an unusual but expertly balanced combination of flavours. In fact, it’s so good that we order it again, with a good side of baby bok choi.

Having washed all this down with a zippy little £33 Gruner Veltliner – it’s good to see this alongside some carefully chosen Rieslings and Gewurztraminers on the wine list – we leave content and full. It’s possible that Cocochan is a little steep for what it is – in all our bill would have been around £90 for two – but that’s partly the way we approached it. You could sneak in, have a pad thai, one of the amazing beef salads, and a glass of wine and be done for less than £20. And on James Street that’s exciting news.

www.cocochan.co.uk

I go past Grand Union on Upper Street almost every day on the bus on the way to work, but for some reason I hadn’t got round to paying a visit until last week. In fact my first experience of the steadily expanding chain of bars was actually elsewhere – in the Camden branch, where I interviewed Victoria Williams and Polly Stenham just before they opened their wicked new arts space, Cob Studios & Gallery.

Anyway, back to Angel and the Grand Union, early(ish) of a Saturday evening. Upper Street is full of mediocre bars and little restaurants that all get inexplicably rammed on a Saturday night, and so the important thing for Grand Union is to set itself apart. Does it manage this? Well kind of.

Mainly it’s the décor that sets Grand Union apart, and neatly ties together the various branches with a kind of artfully mismatched boho vibe. The Upper Street bar is housed in what looks like part of an old pub or theatre – it’s a narrow, little room that, glimpsed from the street through curved glass and elegant wooden fenestration, holds a warm, gently exotic allure. Inside is all wooden floors, homely rugs, Victoriana light fittings, leather seating, comfort and charm – it’s definitely significantly more attractive than the competition.

The cocktail menu has the usual selection of Margaritas, Cosmopolitans and Mojitos as well as some house specials that all sound fairly appealing. Given that I’m in the process of developing a pretty tedious case of man-flu, I decide to opt for a Bloody Mary in the hopes that it’ll cleanse the old sinuses. Which it does rather expertly – this has to be the spiciest Bloody Mary I’ve ever had. Not to everybody’s tastes perhaps, but it sure does the trick.

Food-wise it’s pretty straightforward stuff, with a short but well-balanced range of burgers – classic, vegetarian and ‘global’ – as well as ’stacks’ (bunless burgers) and salads. The burgers, as is the vogue these days, are colossal, and held together with a big old cocktail skewer thing. With chips ordered separately a burger comes to about £10-12, which is perhaps a little steep but not too bad for these parts, and they are rather delicious. The chips and fries aren’t amazing, but are more than made up for by some flawless onion rings. After all this we’re pretty stuffed, and one shudders to imagine the kind of greedy guts that could put away the Grand Union burger known as The Gigantor.

Compared with the rest of the places on Upper Street then, Grand Union is rather excellent. I wouldn’t travel across town to get here, but with branches popping up all over London, I don’t have to. And did I mention it’s right on my journey to work? If only I could pop in for a quick 9am Bloody Mary the world would be a much better place…

www.gugroup.co.uk

What do you look for in a bar? For some it’s great drinks; for others a lively atmosphere. For me, I reckon, it’s somewhere I feel happy and comfortable – somewhere I can return to again and again, with friends, with lovers, even with my Dad after yet another disappointing trip to the theatre. Sometimes it’s somewhere for a quiet afternoon drink, sometimes somewhere for prolonged bouts of booziness, and sometimes somewhere to pop into on the way home for a final dose of sauce to shunt you close to blackness before stumbling home to snooze. The great bar, in my opinion, serves all of these needs. The great bar, in short, is a pub.

But if there’s one thing the pub, alas, cannot do; it’s the cocktail. In this day and age we’re used to delicious food in a pub and of course we’re used to delicious ales, but a cocktail? It’s just plain wrong. This is when one needs the bar. And it is this rationale that explains why I shall be returning to Bar 92 on Wigmore Street, despite its rather glaring faults.

The first and most obvious is that it’s completely empty. And I don’t mean quite empty or pretty much empty; no, we – that is, New London Cocktail Review founder Kina Lillet and I – are, from 5pm on a Saturday afternoon until we leave at not much before 7pm, the only customers in the entire bar.

This could be overlooked if the place was differently laid out, but with tinges of ‘50s diner it’s clear that this is bar design by committee – conceived to offend nobody (and consequently appeal to exactly the same). On the mitigating side, the place has only just opened and they haven’t got a very prominent sign outside yet so it’s pretty easy to miss. But still…

Right, so whinges aside, and to the reason we’re here: cocktails. And by Christ they’re fantastic; quite unlike anything else I’ve had in London. The capital at present divides into two groups – the brilliant classics (nowhere does a Negroni quite like Flemings) and the eccentrics (dry ice, micro-distillation and molecular tomfoolery courtesy of the likes of Purl and Colebrooke Row) – but Bar 92 is very much doing its own thing.

I kick off with a Ginger and Thyme Sour – vodka, lime and sugar muddled with ginger, egg white and shot through with thyme’s fragrant punch. Light and fresh, it’s probably not ideal for a chill January, but, so delicately balanced, it’s a gentle and alluring delight.

I then plump for the house special, the 92 (which, frankly, has far too many ingredients to remember) whilst Kina goes for the Yellow Magpie, a rum-based concoction with fresh ginger and lychee. Again both drinks are characterised by their great sense of poise, with no one flavour leaping out or trying to dominate. These are careful, sensitive creations, but they’re not precious about it – I mean they are just drinks after all.

And yet…the highlight is yet to come, and appropriately it’s the simplest sounding drink on the menu. After Hours consists of just dark rum, amaretto, mango juice and coconut cream. It might not sound like much, but it’s incredible. Sweet but soothingly so, fruit-laden, smooth, gentle: it’s like a rich colonial sunset – cool and warm and utterly, utterly right.

As much as my purple prose may suggest otherwise (for which I apologise), there’s nothing elaborate about Bar 92. There’s no headline-grabbing presentational weirdness here, but then nor does the menu cater to the unadventurous. Everything on it is unusual, but doesn’t feel the need to shout about it. Bar 92 may not be a pub, but what it does is cocktails, and what they are is quite divine.

Cocktails are funny things – get them wrong and they’re simply an overpriced waste of some perfectly adequate booze. Get them right though, and you can have something truly wonderful on your hands. Well I’m happy to say that the recently launched cocktail bar at Flemings Hotel, Mayfair is doing something very, very right.

The décor may not be to everyone’s tastes – all theatrical turquoise, amethyst, jet and jade tones, with plenty of mirroring, bold lines and shapes – but it’s certainly comfortable: the kind of place that provides a camp little sanctum from rush hour’s belligerent bustle. The menu is similarly idiosyncratic: it tempts you to “enter the secret garden”, where the drinks are “luscious”, “voluptuous”, or “served straight up for your pleasure”.

While we’re there – we being the founder of the New London Cocktail Review, Kina Lillett, and I – we’re looked after by the brilliantly helpful Colin Exton, Director of Hotel Sales, whose baby this theatrically revamped bar so evidently is. We’re served a selection of quite fantastic canapés – an artichoke and prosciutto concoction is a highlight, alongside a slice of smoked salmon, humming with truffle oil.

But the drinks, the drinks! Well, they say the best way to really test a cocktail bar is to order the simple and the classic. That way, no amount of umbrellas, fruit, dry ice or sundry other extravagances can distract one from the matter at hand. In short, there is nowhere to hide. Bearing this in mind, Kina goes for a dry gin Martini – they use Sipsmith gin, we’re informed, and it shows. This is a seriously classy drink – punchy, but smooth, just as it should be. It’s boozy as hell but with none of the grit or grime that even quite good makers of the drink somehow can’t seem to avoid.

We order two other cocktails (house specials) which were also very good – although in truth I can’t remember more than that. What I can remember (and probably will never forget) is that the real show stealer is my Negroni. I’ve elsewhere described the ideal Negroni as “crisp, bitter and persistently ginny” and this, well, this is exactly that. Served in an elegantly hefty William Yeoward tumbler, this Negroni positively zings with medicinal booziness. And yet, its balance and poise are really quite exceptional. I’m often accused of hyperbole, but genuinely, this, and I’ll lay down the gauntlet here, is the finest Negroni in all of London. Here’s a challenge to every bar in town: make me a better one, and I’ll…I’ll…well, I’ll drink it. That’s what I’ll do.

www.flemings-mayfair.co.uk

Reviewers of the Swan at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre must all be sorely tempted to indulge in a Bard quotation or two with which to kick things off: “’Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers,” for example, or perhaps “Unquiet meals make ill digestions”. I of course would never stoop to such obvious tactics. And besides, our meal at the Swan is anything but unquiet. In fact it’s really rather delightful.

On the Friday evening that we visit, the downstairs bar is positively jam-packed – and I have to say,  off-puttingly so. It’s all rather clangy and noisy in there, but upstairs in the restaurant is another matter entirely. It’s cosy, calmly chic and utterly charming. Dark wooden floors are leavened with wittily winged contemporary light fittings. Behind the bar are shelves of old books (as well as bottles of boozy goodness) whilst in prominent position stands a wooden sort of serving area, laden with breads and cheese and other assorted deliciousness.

I quite quickly decide I’m rather fond of The Swan. We’re seated at a nice little wooden table, and look out through leaded windows onto a lovely view of the Thames, all a twinkle with lights and life in the darkness. The staff are also delightful – helpful and attentive without ever overdoing it. Basically, it feels like home. If, that is, home were a restaurant on the banks of the Thames. Which, alas, it isn’t.

The only slight drawback is the food. And that’s not to say it’s bad at all – it’s just I think that, what with the décor and the staff and a couple of glasses of a zippy little Grüner Veltliner (£31 for the bottle) I might have got my hopes a bit overinflated. Or we may well have just ordered oddly.

My starter – a special of Atlantic cod pate – was a highlight: all light and fresh with dill and pickled cucumber. My companion, New London Cocktail Review founder Kina Lillet, opted for the wood pigeon, lentil, mushroom and black pudding salad (£7.50), which sounded rather exciting but didn’t feel perfectly executed. The black pudding and pigeon seemed to fight slightly against each other and the lentil base was rather over-salted.

For mains, I opted for the Cashel Blue and leek macaroni cheese (£12) which was appropriately hearty and warming – perhaps it wasn’t quite as good as Canteen’s version, but then what is? Meanwhile Kina went for roast lamb, served with kidneys, and a thyme and haricot bean sauce (£18). Again the combination of meats felt like an odd one, and the sauce was extremely salty. So much so in fact that we felt compelled to order another bottle of wine – this time a seriously classy German Pinot Gris (£36).

I really liked the presentation of a selection of puréed vegetables (hidden away inside a little pumpkin house) and pudding of apple and pear crumble (£5.50) was lovely – although we were rather too full by this stage to do it justice.

Saying our goodbyes and pottering off home across Millennium Bridge, I look back at the Swan really rather fondly: forsooth, n’uncle I’d return post-haste if my coxcomb didst depend upon’t. Or some such Bardy twaddle.

www.swanattheglobe.co.uk

There are various phases to the eating of a 1kg Tomahawk rib-eye steak at JW Steakhouse. There’s the initial excitement – mixed with fear and trepidation – as the colossal cut of meat arrives at the table, a foot-long swoop of bone protruding upwards and outwards. This gives way to greedy delight at the first taste or richly pungent beef, its manly aroma tempered by a surprisingly delicate texture. For a cut this size – and served bloody and blue as requested – the texture is astounding. About half-way through you begin to feel you’ve made a mistake. But pride forces you on. You can’t be beaten by beef. Never! The last mouthfuls, in all honesty, are a real struggle but I’m nothing if not stubborn (or disgustingly greedy depending n your point of view) and eventually the victory is mine – Pyrrhic as it may be. Ha! Take that cow! I ate a whole herd! The rest of the day, needless to say, is a complete write-off.

JW Steakhouse is a strange place. Attached to the Grosvenor Hotel on Park Lane, it’s a massive, cavernous room, decked out like those dreadful tourist-baiting steak places places round Leicester Square – or at least I imagine it is, I’ve never actually been to one of them. The décor is largely bland and soulless, the light fittings completely out of place, and the fake chalkboards adorning the walls seem just lazy – how hard would real chalk be? One of the chaps tells us that the atmosphere at night is much better, and I’m sure it is, but for who? My guess is that this is a place that attracts the kinds of people that Abercrombie & Fitch pretends to be aimed at: wealthy, polo-shirted American jocks who down steaks for fun and get drunk on a single can of lager.

This impression is compounded by the portion sizes. Yes I know I ordered the most stupidly big steak in the world, but everything here is jumbo-sized. We were pretty much full after the starters. Only my massive, insatiable greed spurred me on…

All of which is a shame because the food here is genuinely, surprisingly, delicious. We kick off with a hearty haddock soup (the kind of thing you wish your mama used to make) and delicately battered calamari (£10). These were accompanied by a really excellent Pouilly-Fuissé, although probably a smidge overpriced at £35.  And then, to the steak…

JW Steakhouse has a frankly bewildering array of different cuts, sauces and things. After some dithering and discussion with the extremely helpful staff, my elegant blonde companion goes for a  10oz USDA Fillet ‘Oscar’ – topped with lump crab meat, asparagus and béarnaise sauce. Whilst that may sound like overkill, it’s actually completely lovely – but then at £39 it probably should be. Sides of green beans, onion rings and mash may be superfluous, but man, they’re good too – the onion rings in particular have to be seen to be believed.

One of the waiters recommends a couple of glasses of Malbec, which are an excellent match and not too bad at £8 a glass – in fact the whole range of wines by the glass is pretty impressive, if unsurprisingly biased towards the New World. We also guzzle a cheeky bottle of Prosecco in lieu of pudding – after all that beef, we need something to inject us with enough energy to leave. Fizz thankfully works.

JW Steakhouse then is great for what it is – purveyors of wonderful steaks, and other hearty treats. But if I were in charge I’d gut the place, and go for an intimate clubby vibe with low lighting, dark Chesterfields, dogs, wellies and Sunday papers. I’d also halve the portions and the prices. And then I’d stuff myself here every single day.

I love cooking. By which I mean I love other people’s cooking. In theory, my flatmates and I take it in turns to cook for each-other once a week, but it rarely happens that regularly. I think it was my turn this week, and last week, and possibly even the week before that. Rather than serve up my finest crumpet recipe (tip: toast them for ages and drown them in the fattiest butter you can find) I thought it’d be nice to try and do something good.

If you’re in a similar situation – ie need to cook for someone but are completely incompetent – then may I suggest a rather excellent weekly event taking place every Thursday afternoon in the North Hall of the Covent Garden Market Building, from 30th September onwards. “But,” I hear you cry, “what be this marvellous event?” Well, if you just hold your horses for a second, I’ll tell you.

The fine folks at Caprice Holdings have enlisted some of their best chefs – including Gary Lee of The Ivy and Richard Kirkwood of J Sheekey – to give free demonstrations to members of the public (that’s you, and indeed me).

As an extremely thorough sort of hack, I thought I’d better investigate. And what better way to do this than in the kitchens of Le Caprice with Lee, and Iain Graham, Executive Chef at Urban Caprice? Oh, and bucket-loads of champagne…

Graham kicks things off with some amazing canapés: a lightly zippy carrot and lime mousseline tartlet and some expertly balanced scallops with sauce vièrge, pea purée and crispy bacon. Trust me when I say they’re delightful – I eat canapés basically every night of my life. From here we sample a beltingly flavoursome spiced crab with shrimp and pea shoot salad, before Lee takes over to present his sumptuous, exotic (but potentially quite simple) Moroccan spiced rump of lamb with fattouche and houmous. It’s genuinely incredible. Things are finished off with a light, fresh and very delicious blush peach and almond tart.

Throughout the demonstrations, the chefs are funny, entertaining and clearly hugely knowledgeable. But they also make the process of cooking such amazing food a fun and approachable one. They don’t patronise, or, worse, drone on too long. To be honest they’re actually quite inspirational – maybe I could even cook one of these things for my poor, starving flatmates? Or maybe that’s just the champagne talking. Yes, crumpets it is. Again.

www.coventgarden.uk.com

Whatever one’s views about the gradual transformation of Spitalfields Market and its surrounding streets, there’s one indisputable upside. And that is the fact that, if you happen to find yourself around there at lunch-time, there’s an almost infinite variety of places to eat. As an indecisive sort however, the sheer number of options available is faintly intimidating – lucky then that I’ve already arranged to visit the latest instalment of small pizza group Fire & Stone. At least that’s one decision out of the way.

Fire & Stone’s schtick is that the pizza menu is arranged by global location – so there’s sections entitled Asia, Europe, Africa, Australasia and The Americas. Each section then has five or six cities available, each with a vast array of ingredients involved: like Koh Samui – which features Thai yellow coconut curry sauce, roast sweet potato, shallots, mozzarella, red chilli, mangetout, baby sweetcorn, basil and toasted sesame seeds – or Sydney, comprising smoked bacon, egg, ham, mozzarella, tomato sauce, basil and chives. Oh god, more decisions!

But before we even get there, it’s starter time. We opt for pitta bread with a selection of dips (feta and red pepper, black olive tapenade, tzatzki) and calamari. Both are really nice – light and zingy, and a good introduction to the lunch ahead. Other options include chorizo, bruschetta and the like, and with prices ranging from £2.95 for garlic pizza bread to £7.45 for a full sharing antipasti platter, it’s all perfectly reasonable.

On to the pizzas then, and at around the £8 mark these too are well priced. One minor criticism of the menu here is that, even though there are loads of options for vegetarians, a lack of distinctive mark (combined with quite lengthy descriptions for each pizza) makes things a tiny bit tricky. For those who don’t feel like pizza (what’s wrong with you!) there’s a decent selection of pasta and salad dishes (Caesar salad and Nicoise, bolognaise and that sort of thing). But we opt for pizza. My lunching companion pays a trip to Melbourne with one featuring butternut squash, red onions, brie, mozzarella and toasted pumpkin seeds, whilst I pop across to Athens with red pepper sauce, mozzarella, tomatoes, spinach, feta, pesto and pine nuts.

Both are delicious – crisp of base and loaded with fresh, tasty and innovatively combined ingredients. The Melbourne was a tad sweet for my tastes (but I’ve never been a fan of the vogue for caramelising everything) and the Athena a mite underseasoned, but really I’m nit-picking. These are great pizzas, and unlike I’ve had anywhere else. My companion, having worked in a Pizza Express for years and therefore something of an expert on such matters, declared herself an instant convert too.

Unfortunately by this stage we’re both far too full to sample dessert, although the people at the adjoining table had some kind of ice cream and waffle extravaganza, which looked pretty darned good. We sat outside in the market bit, where you can see the chefs doing their thing, but inside is nice too: modern, clean, quirky and comfortable – with pleasantly off-kilter lighting, and a calmly relaxing atmosphere. With a decent wine-list as well as cocktails and smoothies, this is actually somewhere you can imagine settling into for the afternoon.

There also seems to be a lunchtime offer taking place from Monday to Wednesday with pizzas for £4.95. This is ludicrous value for pizzas this nice – get down there before they see sense!

www.fireandstone.com