My sister sent me three novelty types from Australian jerky. It seemed only reasonable to compare and contrast them all together in one session. The pictures show each packet with a few pieces of jerky on top. These are all described as ‘the great Australian taste’; just how great it is we shall see…

Kangaroo jerky

When opening this the slight aroma of rotting cardboard was released, which did not inspire confidence. This aroma was also coming from each piece of jerky; this did not make me want to put any in my mouth. But I did, and by arse did I wish I had not. It had the texture of wax-soaked cardboard and the flavour was much the same but with a strong character of decay. Chewing it was hard enough as it kept releasing more of the filthy flavour and as I was in company I didn’t feel I could spit it out. By arse, I swallowed something this grim; I felt sullied.

Emu jerky

This smelled even worse, not just rotting cardboard but also a quite pronounced decomposing meat character. This went beyond ‘well hung’ in terms of its off flavours to reach the awful heights of ‘horribly decayed’. With my stomach still churning from the filth kangaroo jerky putting a piece of this malodorous vileness in my mouth would be a challengingly nauseating experience. By freaking arse, the taste of this thrashed the kangaroo offering in terms of ghastly favours of total horrifying severity. My to my chagrin it was quite strongly flavoured; more than a tad irksome as the mouldy meat flavour was making my stomach churn with every second I had this terribleness in my mouth. I closed my eyes, pinched my nose, thought of England and swallowed

Crocodile jerky

There is no nice way of putting this, but it looked and smelled like congealed vomit. Congealed vomit that has gone more than a little rancid. I really didn’t want to taste this, not only because I didn’t want to hurl but also because I thought I lacked the necessary skills in derogatory language to accurately slag it off. However, I thought if I described it I may be able to prevent someone else from making the mistake of putting some in their mouth so I broke of a tiny piece and began chewing. By all that is repulsive and abhorrent the rotten taste of sick this possessed challenged the imagination with its revolting character. I’ve eaten some really horrible food in my time, that visit to the Quick burger joint is a good example, or anything from the Woolwich loony bin, but for as long as I have my faculties I shall avoid crocodile jerky like a dose of particularly colourful dysentery.

After barely any food yesterday and another drag of a night with insomnia I thought I’d cheer myself up with a tasty breakfast treat. Most of the breakfast establishments in Woolwich are just too horrific to visit, so I found myself in MacDonald’s. How bad can it be, I thought? I had no idea…

This was what MaccyD’s had the temerity to serve me under the pretence of it being breakfast:

This travesty of a dining experience consisted of a bacon roll with brown sauce and a hash brown. The roll itself was a flavourless piece of spongy pap; bread only in the very vaguest sense of the word. However, the appalling bread was not a patch on the utter horror that was the soggy, limp, strangely chewy and actively nasty bacon. I’ve had some pretty poor bacon in my life but this was a memorably ranking experience in the annals of vile food. The brown sauce? Well, it was brown. I’d like to dispense with the hash brown as rapidly as possible: it was a rancid lard-soaked conglomeration of fungal foot shavings. Only not so tasty.

I was staggered by how mind-bendingly nauseating this array of filth was. I could not bring myself to choke down more than a few mouthfuls. Even after a night of no sleep and little food there are some depths to which I cannot sink.

We had heard so many good things about Le Champignon Sauvage in Cheltenham that we had high hopes. A moment’s doubt crossed our minds when we saw the hideous dining room, but that wouldn’t matter as long as the food was all that we had been promised. It wasn't. Indeed, it was one of the most shockingly abysmal meals it has been our displeasure not to have avoided eating.

The menu was short and focussed, with a few interesting sounding dishes. As we read this they brought us a few amuses bouches. The cube of parmesan mousse dusted with chorizo powder was quite interesting. There was also a ball of deep-fried rice flavoured with cheese, this too seemed good. The final amuse bouche was a brownie tuile with basil cream which was staggeringly dull.

After we'd chosen they brought out a pre-starter of mushroom and coconut veloute with sage foam. The sage foam was pretty good, but the veloute really lacked flavour, it was bland. We would come to realise bland would be the best we’d get here.

Then things got really bad. We both ordered seared scallops with pig's head carpaccio and pear puree. It looked like a poorly-maintained compost heap. The slice of pig's head tasted fine, slow cooked but a bit mushy. The scallops, oh dear the scallops. They had not so much been seared rather used as a re-entry shield for the last space shuttle mission. Never have we eaten such leathery, dry and generally overcooked scallops. This was a shockingly, mind-bendingly bad starter and we should have walked out at that point.

My main course could have been served at any crap boozer in the country. There was a piece of utterly flavourless lamb (which at least was not overcooked) with a miniscule portion of tedious goats’ cheese mash and pointless grilled spring onions. The sauce it was smothered in was hackneyed, clichéd and trite: not so far away from pissy pub gravy.

Their attempt for Daniel was a random collection of things that had just been thrown together without any thought as to whether any matched. His piece of cod was overcooked and flavourless, there were some hellishly crunchy squid which they also must have started cooking in a thermonuclear-powered oven last week. There was a nice part to this dish, which was a slice of pork belly, but when you've been served a plate of mostly filth a slice of half decent meat does not really excite. It was all so bland. So very bland.

We didn't order dessert. Would you want more of this appallingly prepared, dull food? Not for us.

The wine list was dull, not the most expensive we have seen, but the shocking dreadfulness of the food and the horrific design of the dining room are more serious problems with this little restaurant of horrors.

Such a disappointment, we were so looking forward to it. We were prepared to give this place the benefit of the doubt if they had any slight misses, but it was far, far too horrible to do anything but hate it. I suppose it was pleasing that the restaurant was half empty. It is a bit of a mystery how supposedly reliable people can rate this shit, it was clearly sub standard.

Contact details Le Champignon Sauvage, 24-26 Suffolk Road, Cheltenham GL20 2AQ. Telephone: 01242 573449.

Some people have a good idea and then fail to have the successive good ideas that make the first one work. This is very much the case at Viet Baguette in Charlotte Place: making Vietnamese sandwiches (banh mi) was a good idea but it needed to be backed up with further ideas like having good ingredients or employing competent staff.

OK, I am not going to fart around here: this lunch establishment had so many problems we may as well get down to them. The staff were hopelessly dizzy, drippy farts who tooled around even though the queue was just getting longer and longer; when we got to the cash desk the poor dear seemed so confused that the prices she charged were effectively random.

But, if the food is good, who gives a tinker’s cuss about the hopeless staff? Sadly the food was boring. It lacked all of the fresh, tangy, savoury, fiery, delicious characters you want in a Vietnamese sandwich. The chilli sauce lacked any form of flavour, the chillies they  used were too mild and you had to repeatedly ask for more of them in the hope of getting a bit of heat.

When they are good, banh mi can be powerful, flavoursome entities of raw intensity. But Viet Baguette totally failed to deliver any of this pleasure. They were dreadful sandwiches of raw depression.

I’ve said where they are in London, but don’t, just don’t go.

Right, so you’ve got a bit of Vacherin Mont d’Or and the bloody ‘priced like Harrod’s’ corner shop has no bread. So, the cunning idea arises to buy some crackers. And for the very best part of three quid I get a 150g box of The Fine Cheese Company’s Wholemeal Crackers. They are filthy pieces of horribleness.

I suppose some people might like the rough, sandy texture of these biscuits, but I could feel them abrading my teeth. This is something I rarely want to experience. As to the taste, it seems to be a taste which is very similar to the smell of cardboard tubes one finds in the centre of bog roll: dry, tough and associated with toilets.

What I want to know is why the hopeless shop Couture have to sell crap like this. Sure, it may say that it is organic, free-range, or other varieties of leftist shite, but that doesn’t necessarily make it taste nice. It’d be great if Couture could carry some things that you actually need to buy at reasonable prices rather than baroque, over-blown ephemera at stratospheric prices.

The Hix Oyster and Chop House would be a lovely destination for those who don’t mind what food they eat, how it is served or how much it costs. Everyone else will feel let down.

When we arrived we both thought it looked like a knock-off of Saint John. The menu looked quite similar too, filled with interesting sounding meaty goodies. The wine list was cheekily priced, but they had an excellent beer and cider list. At this stage we thought we would do well; unfortunately things went down-hill from there.

The first thing that became abundantly clear was that the service was shocking. People who arrived after us were served whilst we were still waiting, and a couple of tables who were there before us had to wait even longer than us. One table was served their main courses with the plates from their starters still on their table. Our pre-starters, which involved opening four oysters and toasting a piece of bread, took half an hour to arrive.

Daniel’s pre-starter was Watt’s farm asparagus on toast with Gorwydd Caerphilly. Both ingredients are favourites of ours, but pairing them added nothing. Whilst we were waiting for them to toast the bread my Helford spring native oysters were just sitting on the service counter for half an hour. These were the best dishes of the evening, and they took least effort to prepare.

We then moved onto the starters. Daniel ordered something called Heaven and Earth; potatoes with apple sauce and black pudding. The entire texture of this dish was wrong; it would do for toddlers or other dentally-challenged people but slimy black pudding, mash and apple sauce is not for grown men. Once again, the flavours were not well-matched or distinctive enough. No thanks.

The best bit of my starter was the part that ruined it. It sounded great on the menu, lamb sweetbreads with bacon and leeks. However, after these ingredients had been fried they were briefly boiled in some broth. The broth tasted lovely, but it totally ruined the texture and flavour of the other ingredients. Daniel had recently had the exact same ingredients served at Saint John; they could cook it whilst Hix could not.

At this point we were not happy and hoped they could not cock up our main courses which sounded like easy things to prepare. How wrong we were. Daniel’s fillet steak was served on the bone, with at least one third of it being bone or connective tissue. What is the point or ordering fillet steak if it is not a piece of the very best meat with nothing worth discarding? Considering there was bugger-all meat on it they really went over-board with the amount they charged (£34.50 for 300 grams, bones included). What little meat there was was a bit wet and lacking in flavour even though it had been grilled well. Hawksmoor serve better beef for less money.

My main course reminded me of the Iams pouches our cat loves so much. I don’t love them. They were supposedly barbecued beef ribs, but this was some strange definition of the word ‘barbecue’ which seemed more like braising to me. They tasted stunningly boring, with a distasteful texture and a worrying sauce soaking them. Our side-orders followed the ‘not particularly good’-pattern with dried-out chips and fried asparagus and wet green tomatoes in grease-soaked batter.

The dining room had a neon sign in it saying ‘Fucking beautiful’ (which cannot have been a reference to the cooking or the service) but this was positively tasteful compared to the soft-porn pictures adorning the toilets (two of which are reproduced at the end of this review).

The food was dull at best which seemed irksome as they were not afraid to charge for it (£70 a head for three courses including two bottles of beer/cider). After feeling so positive when reading the menu we felt cheated and unhappy. I’d avoid going if I were you.

Their website is here, but why would you want to visit it?

Here are their toilet decorations:

Classy, eh?

I love fish and chips, a fantastic meal which suits the requirements for a quick lunch very well. With mushy peas, obviously. Yesterday my local establishment, the Fish and Grill on the market square in Woolwich, shocked and appalled me with the shit they had the temerity to serve.

I've been there before and had some good stuff, but this time there was a new moronic, rancid fool doing the cooking and as soon as I gave him my order for the fifth time I knew things would just be awful.

The bloke before me in the queue ordered kebab meat and chips. Moron food fryer pours the contents of the kebab meat container over the chips, flooding them with filthy water. At this point I just wanted to run.

I got my fish, chips and mushy peas and so impressively bad at cooking was the food fryer that he even managed to cock up the mushy peas. He had over-cooked them so they had a worrying, tough, dry, green layer on top. The fish was so badly over-cooked that it was in dry lumps, with quite terrifyingly greasy, fat-soaked batter. The chips were also soaked with this filthy grease, and had the consistency of something that had been lightly steamed rather than fried.

I wanted to vomit.

I will never go there again. The bastards.

The partner is just back from Finland were they sell the most appealingly-named soup you could wish to try:

Red soup

Yellow soup

And, most thrillingly, white soup. Yum.

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.