Mem Saab

Mem Saab is one of the new breed of Indian Restaurants. Out has gone the chinz, the flock wallpaper and the tremulous Bollywood soundtrack. In has come minimalism, cocktails and artfully illuminated Javanese Buddha heads. Unfortunately the Indian Restaurant plays such an established role in the British social environment that these refinements have not succeeded in setting them apart from their traditional role as a late-night venue for crowds of pissed-up, lager-quaffing yobs.

Mem Saab (which is huge) was half empty on a Tuesday night when our group of four arrived. For some reason we were guided to a table adjacent to a huge group of raucously drunken international cricketers. For all I know about cricket it could well have been the entire English team celebrating an Ashes victory (have we lost yet? oh, who cares?). Perhaps the restaurant imagined that we would feel privileged in our proximity to celebrity. But as far as I'm concerned, one group of drunken yobs is much the same as another and after our starters we asked to be moved. The waiter had to go and ask permission from the manager to move us - I think some staff empowerment may be called for!

The food was excellent. Even the chutneys that you get with the poppadoms were really individual and unusual. Maybe they are out of a jar, the same as in every other curry house but if they are then it's a better class of jar for certain.

Our main dishes were not out of a jar. The chicken was fragrant with fresh cardomom and ginger and the lamb was rich with garlic and had that strange quality of tasting of chilli, while not being too hot. How do they do that? I judge a good Indian Restaurant by their breads. You can buy nan breads ready made from a wholesaler but the real thing is so much better. Mem Saab nans come roasting hot from the tandoor (the Indian clay oven) and dripping with ghee - superb.

We didn't take deserts on this occasion but I have had them at Mem Saab in the past and they are excellent - proper authentic Indian deserts such as I have eaten before only at the kerbside in Rajasthan.

Mem Saab used to advertise that their chef had "cooked for palates as discerning as those of former US president Bill Clinton." Since it is well known that Bill's idea of a romantic dinner for two was to treat Monica to Kentucky Fried Chicken served out of a bucket, I'm not sure what sort of recommendation that really is. Those KFC buckets amaze me. The time surely cannot be far off when you will enter an American fast food establishment to be confronted with a row of huge American arses, their owners on all-fours, eating at a trough.

Mem Saab could be the best Indian restaurant in Nottingham. But they need to develop a bit more front-of-house gravitas - something at any rate which will keep the yobs at bay.

Various - Nottingham

A weekend of grotesque indulgence

Well I suppose it was bound to happen after my last post eulogising the standard of contemporary British cusine. I went out to eat three times in a single weekend and was disappointed three times in a row. Perhaps I was a bit jaded after a week's gastro-cruising abord the Anjodi in the south of France. If you want to see what this is like, watch Rick Stein's French Odyssey on BBC2 tomorrow, but as you can imagine I stuffed myself senseless.

Lunch at World Service on Saturday was dismal. I had the baby plaice (Can this be legal? If you want an insight into the insanity of EU fishing policy then I heartily recommend "Trawler" by Redmond O'Hanlon). The plaice was cooked plainly in flour and came with an absurd brown sauce which to be honest tasted exactly like gravy. Not the wonderful gravy that we make for our Sunday roast at home but the appalling, sludgy, school dinner gravy of yesteryear. I can't imagine what must have gone wrong, World Service is normally so reliable.

Dinner at Punchinello's (Punchinello's does not have a website) was very mediocre. They have been in business forever and have only recently changed their formula in an attempt to bring themselves into the 21st century. The food is basically the same but they make more of an effort to arrange it artfully on the plate and they drizzle the sauce over it instead of drowning it. These days when I order a side salad I expect something more than a few pieces of veg, chopped up on a plate. I can do that myself so I expect the restaurant to add a bit of value to the process. But that is all you get at Punchinello's - though my steak was nicely done, rare as ordered.

They forgot to bill us for two bottles of wine and for some reason I had a sudden attack of morality and told them so. In recognition of our honesty they only charged us for one bottle though the waiter felt the need to add that they were clearing the cellar out anyway and would have been glad to get rid of it. Thanks a lot.

On Sunday we headed into town for brunch, our number having grown to five. Fat Cat was half full, mainly with spaced-out twenty-somethings gabbing on their mobiles, drinking lager and smoking fags like there was no tomorrow. I ordered a steak brunch - the perfect hangover cure. The "steak" was actually a piece of shoe-leather, frazzled to a crisp but topped with a nicely runny fried egg. They redeemed themselves with the cheesecake desert which was a genuine in-house production and which was truly excellent.

Now I need a month of blameless vegetarian abstinence.

Various - Madrid

Jacques Chirac, the president of France has recently been outspoken on the issue of British Food. When you bear in mind that Chirac's only experience of British food is at Buckingham Palace his criticisms seem uninformed at best. Of course there was a time when British food really was awful compared to what you could get on the continent, but those days are long gone.

It's still possible to eat dreadful food in the UK, but if you know where to go it's getting more difficult. The untold story is how bad some of the food you get on the continent is - if you don't know where to go.

I've just returned to my hotel from that uniquely miserable experience, the solo business dinner in a strange city. Marooned, late at night, in the Spanish holiday season, in Madrid's ghastly business district, I picked an Italian restaurant called Carpaccio more or less at random.

Equipped with a poorly translated menu (with no prices) I decided to go for their signature dish, a Carpaccio Parmesana. The Carpaccio was a single molecular layer of raw sliced beef, smothered in shaved parmesan. It tasted of nothing. No, that's not quite fair - it tasted of shaved parmesan.

For the main course I decided to be adventurous and try grilled baby octupus with a garlic dip. When it arrived I realised that I had been imagining at least an adolescent octopus - at any rate a single octopus rather than an horrific genocide of hundreds of miniscule octupi in a pyramid, accompanied by three boiled potatos and some slivers of boiled onion. Yuck! It tasted of nothing. No that's not quite fair - it tasted of garlic dip.

Last month I had a croque monsieur in a very fashionable area of Paris. I knew that croque monsieur is French for cheese on toast but for €13 I was expecting something a little more interesting. But it was just cheese on toast - "One cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad" as Mr Chirac would say.

So now I am back in my hotel room, raiding the minibar, watching CNN and waiting for the Easyjet flight that will take me home to Nottingham where I can eat well, in the company of friends.

OK - so I did eat good food in Madrid as well. I had a night out with colleagues in the old city where there are wonderful tapas, scandalously cheap fine wines and beer and great company but let's hear no more about how awful the food is in the UK. You just need to know where to go - hence this blog.