At the beginning of October we are travelling to the Basque country. We have been there before and it is one of the best places for eating in the world. Whilst there are the glories of many-starred restaurants there, I have to admit the place I am most looking forward to going is rather more humble. Casa Nicolas in Tolosa is the site of the best piece of beef I have ever eaten. Pedro, the owner who is perhaps the least healthy person I have heard coughing their lungs up in a kitchen, grills stunningly brilliant ox chops slowly over a fire. The meat is incredible; very marbled and meltingly tender. I am greatly looking forward to visiting. It will be great food-a-go-go.

Guest columnist Peter Palmer laments the passing of a good breakfast at English bed and breakfast establishments.

Remember the days when a stay at an English Bed and Breakfast meant a morning feast that would leave you patting your belly with satisfaction, a smile on your face and thoughts of how to work it off in time for the next morning's binge? It's a treat that seems to have largely been consigned to faded memory. Maybe I am just a tired old git with nothing better to do than moan about how the World's going to pot and nothing is as it was in the glorious days of my own youth. But I think I've got a point. I'm now in Cornwall - a wonderful place in almost all respects. But the breakfast has been a bitter disappoint, and brought to my mind other similar experiences of breakfast bliss denied in recent years. Plastic sausages from the bottom of the deepest freezer in cut-price supermarket hell; bacon that tastes of nothing much except salt; eggs that taste of hardly anything at all; and extra-value orange juice at 17 pence a litre (is it really orange juice?). And this is one of the things foreigners once thought we did well. The numerous Germans here in Cornwall will perhaps be thinking that the English breakfast has gone the same way as the British motor industry. Or maybe they are thinking it was a fantasy all along. Anyway, Cornwall is great and well worth visiting. But if you want a good breakfast, opt for self-catering.

You can always try something new. In the fridge we had Serrano ham and in the freezer hash browns. I wrapped the hash browns in the ham and deep-fried them.

The ham went very crispy and tasted a tiny bit burnt. If I am ever so bored and stuck with the same ingredients again I might do them for less time. This is not sub-interest as it is very funny.

After a heavy afternoon's tasting we fancied going for a nice meal. Our choice of the one-star le Jardin des Remparts in Beaune was inspired. Not only did it have a very good, and reasonably priced, wine list but also the food was very high quality.

I was highly amused by the first course, melon with pepper. The melon had been made into a little egg yolk and was liquid in the centre; quite delicious and a lovely texture. I was blown away by the next course, which is one of their signature dishes: tartare of Charolais beef with oysters. I suppose some people might be nervous about eating oysters in the summer so far from the sea, but this was really terribly good. There was a pile of beef tartare surrounded by a carefully dissected oyster. Brilliant.

We then had poached langoustine with langoustine sorbet and cubes of coconut milk. I didn't really go for the coconut milk, but the langoustine and sorbet were a treat. Snails with morels followed, they were tender and full of flavour.

The piece of line-caught sea bass that followed was perfectly cooked, no hint of over-cookedness about it. This was served with sardine butter and seaweed puree which was a really good match. Foie gras is something I love and the escallop of foie was fried to perfection; a lovely crust and meltingly soft in the middle. Apple and goat's cheese came with this and the balance of flavours was superb.

The final course before cheese was a croustillant of ris de veau with shrimps. I am a big fan of ris de veau, but have never had them cooked in this way. They were quite well cooked so they developed a firm crust on the outside. It was delicious.

The service was excellent and they had a very pleasing terrace to dine on which made a hot evening's meal a lot easier to bear. The food was damned good. This is another place I'd like to revisit.

Contact: Le Jardin des Remparts, 10 rue Hotel Dieu, 21220 Beaune. Tel +33 3 80 24 79 41 Fax +33 3 80 24 92 79

When visiting Burgundy the one restaurant I cannot recommend highly enough is La Cabotte in Nuits St. Georges. I've eaten many good meals there and never left with an empty wallet. It is right in the centre of Nuits and is a great place for a relaxed, good-quality lunch or dinner.

On this visit I chose the most expensive menu they have, a steal at €45. We took along some of our own wines, but also got a couple of bargains from the list. Pibarnon rosé 2003 really helped to cool us off and the Mugnier Chambolle les Fuées 2001 was quite lovely.

I was amused by the amuse bouche, a test tube of tomato water, and really pleased by my first course, carpaccio of foie gras. The foie was removed of its nerves and served raw in very thin slices. This was followed by grilled shrimps with quite the most brilliant piece of pork rib I've had. It was meltingly tender and full of flavour. This was supposed to be served with langoustines rather than prawns, but the chef was not happy with the quality of the langoustines.

The main course was a perfectly cooked piece of sea bass with a sesame crust. Quite lovely. We then had a selection of very well stored cheeses, including one of the best pieces of epoisses I've had. I skipped dessert as I was stuffed, but people seemed very pleased with what they had.

If you are travelling to Burgundy and have business in Nuits you cannot go wrong with a trip to La Cabotte. It is a great place.

Contact: La Cabotte, 24 Grande Rue, 21700 Nuits St. Georges. Tel +33 3 80 61 20 77

David

It was Daniel's birthday last Sunday; cannot be avoided, we all have to get older once a year. We wanted to go for a relaxing meal with some good wine and our knowledgeable hosts in Burgundy suggested Ferme de la Ruchotte. This was sold to us as a farm house dining establishment where one eats what the farmer slaughtered that week. "Brilliant!" we thought.

Describing the owner as just a farmer is selling him short. Frédéric Menager is a very skilled chef who has an impressive list of restaurants on his CV. I had sampled his food before at the Castel de Très Girard in Morey St. Denis and was impressed. He moved on from there to start the farm where he breeds rare breeds of animals prized for their flavour. Then kills and cooks them.

It was quite a drive beyond the Côte to find the place; many tiny, twisty roads that would have deeply worried me if I was driving. It is quite a beautiful location once you get there. We parked and went into the dining room, which really was the farmhouse dining room with one large table and a smaller table in it.

There is no menu to choose, you eat what he is cooking that day as listed on a chalk board. There is a comprehensive wine list, which is not over-priced considering there are some gems on it.

The first course was a poached egg with duck gizzards in a soup of nettles and tarragon. The egg was one of the best I have eaten, clearly his chickens are from a pretty serious breed, and it was soft-poached perfected. I hoovered up the gizzards with great speed as I love them. The soup had a really good flavour. This was a very pleasing starter.

We were then presented with a côte de boeuf. This piece of meat looked marvellous, great marbling and perfectly cooked (ie. quite rare). It was served with sautéed new potatoes. The potatoes were quite lovely, slightly crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside. Everyone was impressed with the quality of the meat and we soon finished it up. It was excellent.

We had some home-made goat's cheeses to help mop up our remaining red wine. These were very good, flavoursome and pleasingly lacking in goat sweat character.

I had a different dessert to everyone else as I am off wheat at the moment, it was an excellent duo of very eggy creme caramel. Everyone else had a rather baroque looking cake which seemed to slip down a treat. This is us before attacking the cake:

The meal was very reasonably priced, we paid €40 per head plus wine (note: some of those wine we brought along ourselves, thanks to brilliant negotiation by our host). It was an excellent, relaxed meal in charming circumstances. I hope I get to visit again.

Contact: Ferme de la Ruchotte, 21360 Bligny sur Ouche. Tel +33 3 80 20 04 79 Fax +33 3 80 20 03 29

David

Bentley's Oyster Bar Review

I suppose I could be a bit more lenient on Bentley's as we dined on a Sunday but I'm not going to: it was terrible.

It is not a bad dining atmosphere in the oyster bar, but it began to drag a bit as we were sat there with nothing to eat or drink for an age as the lack lustre staff ignored us. Our neighbours also were waiting for an unacceptable period and they were clearly dissatisfied as well.

We finally got to order and the food seemed bearly good enough to start with. The squid dish seemed to have been killed twice so rubbery was it. Once the starters had gone it was another interminable wait, punctuated only with them bringing a different bottle of wine to the one we ordered. This was remedied with the same degree of sloth that our orders were taken.

We were served an incorrect main course, and yet again there was huge delay in fixing this. The main courses were perfectly edible, but by no means did they make amends for the hopeless service. It was a great disappointment and I really don't see the need to return there.

Contact: Bentley's Oyster Bar and Restaurant, 11-15 Swallow Street, W1B 4DG. Telephone 020 7734 4756.

David

Sushi-Say review

When I was asked to book a sushi place for Sunday lunch I was a tad surprised; Sunday hardly seems like the best day to be seeking the freshest of fish. Fortunately, my fears were unfounded as this turned out to be the best sushi meal I've had in London.

As a South London kid, it is a bit of a trek to get to, right at the Nothern end of the Jubilee line in Willesden Green. It was worth it. Sadly we appeared to be the only people willing to make this journey on a Sunday; we dined with only the staff for company.

We ordered sashimi and sushi. The sashimi was a tiny bit cold so the flavours were initially a bit hard to discern. I suppose this is the price one has to pay for dining at a quiet time. The fish all seemed to be of high quality, the fatty tuna (toro) and salmon especially so.

The sushi was a real step up. Served at the correct temperature it really showed itself to be a step above that which I had eaten in London before. The ratio of rice to fish seemed pleasingly low, with large pieces of fish on each piece of sushi. Tuna, salmon, sweet shrimp, yellow tail and squid were really quite impressive in terms of quality. One of the clam sushi pieces I had was a bit tired, but again I see this as a reasonable price to pay for eating on a dodgy day.

The prices were perfectly reasonable for the quality, expect to pay around £30 a head, and the service was great. Heartily recommended.

Contact: Sushi-Say, 33b Walm Lane, NW2 5SH. Telephone 020 8459 2971.

David

Yauatcha review

Yauatcha is quite an impressive looking place in the middle of Soho. Upstairs there is a tea room with little cakes on offer, downstairs is the main restaurant which is the site of the best dim sum meal I have ever eaten.

The restaurant itself it quite stylish, with plenty of room between tables and a reasonable number of helpful staff milling around. It suggests you are going to have quite an expensive meal. Looking at the comprehensive dim sum menu the price for most of the dishes seemed very low. This led us to order multiple plates of the same dish. A bit of a mistake.

When your food arrives, and it does so promptly, the mistake was plain to see; portions are quite large with multiple pieces of dim sum per plate. I would recommend than even if you are very hungry four plates each would be plenty.

The dim sum was excellent. Char sui buns were as light as clouds and filled with tasty, rich pork. Sesame prawns on toast were delicious, made with a whole large prawn. The duck spring rolls were a delight, stuffed with flavoursome duck meat. All of the little dumplings we ordered were lovely, perfectly cooked and filled with flavour. There was not a single disappointing dish.

For a change, we didn't bother with wine; the Chinese beer was perfectly acceptable to eat with a large meal. Thanks to our ordering it was a very large meal and I ended up happily stuffed.

Due to our heroic ordering the price was a bit high, but if you order less enthusiastically a meal should set you back at around £30 a head.

I cannot recommend Yauatcha highly enough; if you like dim sum this is the place to go in London.

Contact: Yauatcha, 15 Broadwick Street, W1F 0DL. Telephone 0870 780 8265.

David

My lunch today was Sillfield Farm Bury-style black pudding. These are sold as whole sausages that you can slice up and fry. Jolly good they are too. They have a reasonable content of grain and fat, but stuffed with rich, cooked blood. This is the best black pudding I've had, and I heartily recommend that you head off to Borough Market or go to Sillfield Farm's website and pick some up.

David

La Brasserie Ma Cuisine Bourgeoise review

Yes, I admit it has an awful name, and the outside looks frankly hideous, but we dined very well.

The menu has loads of French Brasserie favourites, so many recognisably fun things that the choice was difficult. Daniel and I ordered a different starters each and swapped half way through. The little crispy cake of pig's trotters I had first was very rich and strongly flavoured, really very good, but blown away by the other starter. This was pan fried foie gras with lentils. The foie gras was cooked to perfection, a good crust and melting soft in the middle. Excellent.

I did not try the main course of our guest, but she reported the lamb with merguez and beans was perfectly cooked and flavoursome. Daniel and I can rarely resist ris de veau when they appear on a menu and so we both went for this option. It was perfectly cooked and the capers and celeriac surrounding it added a bite to the rich Sauternes sauce it was presented with. This was a truly excellent dish.

The main wine list is a bit pricey; it is really lacking anything one would wish to drink. They have a fine wine list which has some better offerings, but the prices are quite steep. Our bottle of 1998 Macon was getting a bit long in the tooth, but the red Vosne-Romanée 1995 from Rene Engel was excellent.

The food made this worth the trek out to Twickenham, so it was a bit of a shame they only had one other diner in that night. They deserved to be full.

Contact: La Brasserie Ma Cuisine Bourgeoise, 2 Whitton Road, Twickenham TW1 1BJ. Telephone 020 8744 9598.

David

I cannot believe how debased the art of baking is in this country. Don't get me wrong, there are a few decent bakeries in London, but if you go into even quite an up-market supermarket they will have a wide selection of breads with all kinds of flours, flavours and seeds all of which are utter shit. Going into a branch of the ubiquitous Gregg's is to suffer a fate worse than death. Somehow, between them this unholy alliance has managed to rid themselves of all other competition thus leaving us with little choice but to accept their pap.

Food can not get any simpler than bread, yet few things are more delightful than sinking one’s teeth into a fresh baguette, bloomer or boule. As the inheritors of 7000 years of civilisation, we have a right to expect fine, properly made bread to be easily available locally, daily and affordably. In Britain this seems to be far too much to ask.

If you you are lucky enough to live near, don't mind either travelling for hours, or eating stale bread I suggest you try the Exeter Street Bakery (15 Exeter Street WC2E, 1b Argyll Road W8, or selected branches of Waitrose). Degustibus is also worth investigating, they have a shop in Borough Market.

Daniel

A recipe that is great for a light summer meal: Hot and sour beef salad. Don't worry, there is not that much of the dangerous lettuce in it. You will need per person.

A thickish piece of fillet steak (roughly 200g)
Four lettuce leaves
One shallot finely chopped
One red chili finely chopped
Two dessert-spoonfuls of Thai fish sauce, Nam Pla
Two dessert-spoonfuls freshly squeezed lime juice
A teaspoonful of sugar

Fry the fillet steak for one and a half minutes a side at the hottest temperature you can get a pan up to. Whilst frying that arrange the four lettuce leaves on a plate. Mix the fish sauce, lime juice and sugar in a small vessel. When the steak is fried it should be incredibly rare. Slice the steak into thin strips and arrange these on top of the lettuce; there should be the thinnest of crusts on each side of the steak slices, with a big rare stripe down the middle. Sprinkle the chopped shallots and chilies over the top and pour over the fish sauce/lime juice mix.

It should all look like this:

If you get really fiery chilies it is alright to scrape some of them off the meat to leave them, but really this is a dish to make you sweat and feel good over the summer. It is light, themed on meat and very invigorating; what more could you ask for?

David