Not being able to eat wheat puts a dampener on enjoying food. All prepared food seems to contain wheat. Supermarkets these days have 'free from' aisles, which supposedly have wheat-free treats. Normally 'free from' means free from flavour. Now, the 'priced like Harrods' corner shop in my housing development have started selling wheat-free cakes; if only they were free from flavour.

Mrs Crimble's honey caramel cake is one of the most utterly repulsive foods it has been my displeasure not to have avoided tasting. I didn't even swallow it so totally repellant was it. The texture was dry and powdery and it tasted like the smell of kitchen cleaner; cheap perfume and soap. I am really disgusted that I can still taste it a couple of minutes after I spat it out. The word 'horrible' goes nowhere near far enough to describe this travesty of a cake.

Your could only enjoy Serge et Co. if you had a spoon fetish; they kept bringing them and taking them away with incredible frequency. For everyone else, it is a little restaurant of horrors.

When visiting Strasbourg for a night we decided to visit this restaurant as it had got good reviews and sounded like they were making interesting food. Indeed, they had recently been awarded a Michelin star, how could we go wrong?

The first suggestion that we could go wrong occurred when we pulled up outside in the taxi: The restaurant was hideous, Every wall was painted a different colour, lovely combinations of orange, grey and brown screamed out through the windows. We walked in and things only got worse: they had an incredibly tasteless ceiling duvet hanging from the roof and the vile walls were adorned with livid red 3D pictures. A veritable Australian's nightmare.

As Daniel was reading the wine list I asked him to wipe the look of horror from his face. He suggested that I look at it instead; seconds later he was telling me not to look so appalled. It was a shameful selection of wines for a restaurant in a great wine region. There was virtually no Riesling one would want to drink and we agreed there was only one red wine we could possibly choose.

The menu promised 'contemporary cooking' and we chose a five course, Euro68 menu which we hoped would get us back in the mood. We were to be not only disappointed by it but also personally offended.

The amuse bouche they offered us was a ravioli of ceps and foie gras in a cep broth. The pasta had clearly been cooking all day so limp and flaccid was it, with a watery, flavourless filling and the broth it was in was thin and totally lacking flavour. Oh dear.

The first proper course had sounded like an interesting take on foie gras, a maki roll of foie. This consisted of a lump of foie gras wrapped in rice which had been pan-fried sitting in some iced turnip water. The foie was nice enough, but the fried rice was pointless and the turnip water completely vile. “Why?” was all I could repeat on trying to choke this filth down.

We then moved onto sole with mussels, puy lentils and a mousse of what looked (and I dare say tasted) like grilled baby vomit on top of it. The sole managed to be both over-cooked and distinctly chewy and the mussels were tinned pieces of awfulness. The lentils were at least properly cooked, but again they were sitting in a watery, characterless broth. We shall pass over the grilled baby vomit mousse as this defied description, although Daniel dimly remembers having something similar, but far tastier, in a Findus frozen fish gratin, in his youth.

We chose two different main courses. I had venison with a little bolognaise of meat sitting by it. The venison was lacking any form of flavour that might have made it nice. The bolognaise reminded me of an ex-girlfriend's breath; she used to eat tinned cat food. Daniel had roast lamb that was tough, over-cooked and tasted of wool. With this came some play-dough-like gnocchi and, can you believe it, two edible things: a slice of lamb sausage and some choucroute with fennel. Two swallows do not a summer make, alas.

The first three courses had been actively unpleasant, so it was almost a relief to have a cheese course which was merely boring, if weird. Some brie sprinkled with truffle powder and wrapped in a thin sheet of pasta. With this waste of decent brie it meant that Serge et Co. had managed to turn France's three great treasures, wine, cooking and cheese, into shameful parodies.

The feeling of depression over our corner of the restaurant was now very deep, so we almost perked up when desserts came and they had ideas. Alas, the ideas turned out to be as hollow as Serge's cooking was nauseating. Daniel had a smoking cigar of chocolate with a vanilla cream filling served in a cigar ash-tray with vanilla and berry sauce to dip it in. It was shit. David had 'frites' of battered pineapple with some unidentifiable white foam to dip it in and a little toothpaste tube of red fruit ketchup. The ketchup was flavourless, the white foam can only be thought of in terms of its texture, far too reminiscent of jizz, and the frites were simply big fingers of grease. After these horrors we were convinced that Serge Burckel was a talentless poseur who could only have got his star by dosing the Michelin inspector's food with hallucinogenic drugs.

As you can tell, we didn't enjoy this at all. From the terrible decor, via the embarassingly poor wine list to the frankly horrible food this was a catalogue of shame. The only redeeming feature of the place is that the taxi they called us got there quickly, allowing us to leave this travesty of a restaurant behind us; but they can hardly be applauded for a taxi's promptness. We were truly amazed that the place not only had other clients, but was full; are the denizens of Strasbourg so keen to try novel cooking they are willing to put up with it being dire?

We are not going to give contact details for this restaurant as we would not even want our worst enemy to visit this horrible, horrible, temple of awfulness.

Daniel with his chocolate cigar:

David's greasy frites:

We are in France to pick up cheap Champagne and stopped off at the hamburger chain Quick for a much-delayed lunch. I thought I was so hungry I could eat anything, how wrong I was.

The food was totally, stomach-churningly, soul-meltingly vile. I can hardly bring myself to think about it again so utterly nauseating was it. I've had many nasty experiences in my life and this will be a memorably disgusting one.

I ordered a Supreme Cheese burger, that was wet, with meat that tasted vaguely of piss and cheese that stretches the definition of cheese to beyond breaking point. The bits of fried cheese they offered as a seasonal special were too vomit-inducing to eat more than the smallest mouthful one could foolishly ingest. They had 'rustic frites' as another special. These were slightly raw in the middle but tasted only of burnt potato skin. They, too, buggered the imagination as far as horribleness was concerned.

What I shall euphemistically call 'the meal' was a ranking depressing experience in recent years. To be honest, even the three day old wet sandwiches served up in the Woolwich loony bin have more claim to be edible than this shit. I felt personally offended by the total crap they had the gaul (ha!) to charge us money for. It was completely inedible. No, it was worse than that, it was the contents of the seventh circle of culinary hell. I've had more enjoyable kicks to the testicles than this offensive shite. Never, ever again. No way. Not on your nelly. Death is too good for the designers of the Quick menu, as far as I am concerned. Way below sub-interest, to be a bit briefer.

This Korean restaurant lives underground right next door to Holborn tube station. The decor and location are perhaps the most interesting things about it as on our trip we found the food to be woefully tedious.

We ordered a selection of meat, fish and vegetable dishes. The waitress tried her best to be informative, warning us that Yuk Hwae was raw beef and that one of the dishes we ordered was very spicy. The wine list was laughably poor so we ordered Korean beer. Sadly, when the food arrived it was as lack-lustre as the cold February night we were hiding from.

The Yuk Hwae was perhaps the most disappointing of the dishes. This is Korean steak tartare, billed as the world's best steak tartare. Strips of raw beef served with, in this case, sesame oil, grated garlic, an egg yolk and Asian pear. Not only was it served too cold, but it is was inadequately spiced with far too much pear. In this state it tasted of little beyond the pear. It needed more garlic or chili in order to perk it up and could certainly have done with far less pear. When it warmed up the beef had some taste, but it was still exceptionally dull.

The raw skate in chili sauce was the dish we had been warned was very spicy. I wish it had been. It tasted of little beyond sesame oil and the lumps of skate cartilage were distractingly chewy. Another depressing dish. We also ordered some a monk fish dish, which came with worryingly little monk fish for the fifteen pounds charged for it. Some hand-made pork dumplings were acceptable, but my local Chinese take-away does them better. The tempura-style prawns were also acceptable, but frighteningly expensive for only four, boring prawns. Another boring dish was some cold strips of squid that were reasonably tender, but seemed to have been cooked so as to remove all character.

We did get a selection of the Korean speciality pickled vegetables Kim Chee. These ranged from the incredibly dull (radish Kim Chee) to the actively unpleasant (cabbage Kim Chee). The first bite is with the eye, so it is said, so I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised these were awful as they looked like congealed vomit.

The food was so boring we couldn't bring ourselves to finish it all up; the staff looked rather surprised by this. They have had a number of good reviews recently so perhaps they were expecting us to wet ourselves with pleasure simply for getting a table. Sadly, the food was mind-meltingly tedious and so our moods deteriorated to 'stunningly depressed' as the meal progressed. By the end we were both incredibly eager to get out of there and even thought about going to a decent sushi place near by to cheer ourselves up. Unfortunately, the boring rubbish they called a meal was so frighteningly expensive that our budget for the evening was spent. The problem with this was not that it was bad, but that it was incredibly boring; I'd rather be offended than bored. It was a depressingly dull meal and I can only say that Asadal is deeply sub-interest.

David.