Higoi

I remember when Higoi first opened my thoughts ran as follows: A classy Japanese restaurant in the heart of Studentland? - I give them a month, tops. Tonight, twenty years later, I decided to go back and find out why they are still there.

The Japanese are masters of miniturisation and in the compact Higoi we were served a multitude of tiny dishes by a very small waitress. We went for the Kaiseki set meal at £27/head which seemed to cover a fair ammount of ground from the a-la-carte. The menu is somewhat cryptic, offering dishes such as "steamed food", "simmered food" and even "vinegar food." At our asking the waitress did attempt to elaborate, but sadly all the Japanese I learnt by watching Shogun could not help me.

The food is beautiful to look at, as you would expect. It's more interesting than the standard conveyor-belt, shopping-mall sushi that has become ubiquitous. But it's just too damn small. I saw a television programme recently which attempted to explain how to live to 100 years old. Apparently the Japanese have a tradition that one should "eat until you are 80% full" which accounts for their extraordinary longevity. Anyone who ate at the Higoi every night would probably live to 200, or perhaps it would just seem like it.

The vegetable tempura with the main course was probably the highlight, though the main dish itself was a thumbnail-sized piece of salmon. Dessert was fresh fruit and ice-cream, vanilla ice-cream. I mean, they could at least have gone for green-tea flavour or something a little bit different, but no...

£27/head was shockingly bad value for money. I am at a loss to explain their success.

Alan Silitoe at the Broadway

After Lawrence I suppose Alan Silitoe must be Nottingham's most famous writer so it was pretty much obligatory to go and see him in conversation at The Broadway followed by the film of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. At 80 he cut a sprightly and dapper figure full of good humour and interesting anecdotes.

The story of how Saturday Night and Sunday Morning came to be written was startlingly at variance with the image in my own mind. I had Silitoe scribbling by candlelight in a back-to-back Radford terrace after a hard days grind at his lathe. The truth is that he received a handsome pension from the air-force at the age of 21 and retired to Majorca to write among the orange groves.

It must be twenty years since I last saw the film and what struck me on this occasion is that I never previously noticed what a superb piece of cinema it actually is.