The Company Shed and The Coast Inn, West Mersea

This blog has gone offshore, but only as far as Mersea Island, Essex, a paradise for watching birds, countryside strolling and eating seafood.

The Company Shed (Coast Rd) is a shed attached to the office of an oyster-catching company. Bring your own bread and water or wine and help yourself from the assortment of glasses on some shelves. The room is not opulent - just trestles and odd chairs and tables. There is no booking here: if it is full, you give your name and sun yourself outside on the patio chairs until a table comes free.

A seafood platter for two is around £17 and comes with various sizes of shelled and unshelled prawns, cockles, green-lipped mussels, a crab, smoked salmon and mackerel. I'm not a huge fan of seafood but this was very good, though could not bring myself to try the mussels. White meat in the crab claws was well worth the effort, being so sweet.

Later, supper at The Coast Inn (also Coast Rd). Homemade chicken Kiev with chips and salad and medallions of pork in a cream and mustard sauce and served with mash. Chicken so-so only, pork very good, mustard sauce really yum. Warmed brownie with toffee ice cream to follow. Around £28 with drinks, the latter being very cheap; had to ask the bar staff if they'd made a mistake when I was charged £3.50 for a pint of bitter and an orange juice and soda.

Cappuccino count: 7/10. Not super-dooper gastro but pretty good. Unsure about the mussels, but prices in The Company Shed are really rock-bottom. Mersea Island worth a visit anyhow and will certainly go back.

Maria's Market Cafe, Borough Market

How about this for fast food? A seasame bap, buttered and laid up with a slice of cheese, a slice of bacon, a splodge of potato bubble and a dollop of ketchup. Add a cup of tea, suspiciously brown in tone and with, by the taste of it, steri milk. Just delish. £4.30. Cappuccino count: Sling your 'ook, pal, we don't sell foreign muck. 7/10.

Simplicity, Tunnel Rd, Rotherhithe

A much-anticipated return visit and I'm going to keep belthering about this place in the hope that the people who read this site (yes, there are regulars, apparently) will go. Better yet, I'm actually going to put my money where my mouth is and try to go at least once a week for breakfast (most likely) or supper (less often).

The perfect refuge on a rain-soaked Monday evening and the chef-patron is chatty, knowledgeable - very - and devises the menus according to what he has bought and likes the look of. Cares about wine.

Starters: Cajun chicken with a mixed leaf and pepper salad; warmed goat cheese on mixed leaves with a pesto dressing. Wonderful charring and crusting on the chicken, which was firm and flavoursome. The salad was colourful and lemony, zesty but not in an overpowering way. The goat cheese and pesto were a revelation with tastes and textures coming in waves, unwrapping themselves. Excellent.

Mains: 80z Brazilian steak, rare, with sauteed potatoes, green beans, carrot batons and Bearnaise sauce; pesto-stuffed chicken breast roasted in ham and served with the beans and on a potato and carrot hash brown sort of thing. None of this could be faulted. The centre of the steak was melting, juicy, a good bite.

Dessert: lemon tart. Very short pastry and the filling was certainly lemony, though with more of a cheesecakey-type texture. A welcome departure from the lemon curd-like efforts which pass themselves off as lemon tart elsewhere. No hint of the dish being overloaded with sugar, the cause of that rush and burn in the back of the throat. My bet would be that this was made on the premises rather than being a "bought-in" pud. Berry coulis on the plate and a dusting of icing sugar were nice touches. Maybe a sprig of mint would help?

Wine: Malbec-Cabernet served in lovely big glasses - just a splash in the bottom so that it could start giving up its little treasures. Taste goes from sweet fruits to tartier berries and then a hint of pepper when the finish arrives.

£52 with coffees thrown in.

Cappuccino count: 9/10. Simple but importantly good food and Simplicity will succeed if enough people hear about it and go. They need bums on seats. There is branch in Manchester but I gather it is being sold on so that all effort can be put into this one.

Castello, Jamaica Rd, Bermondsey

Main-street Italian eaterie where booking is the thing to do since it is very popular. Uniformed waiters and a charming and energetic maitre - elderly, dapper - who works the floor really hard. Kitchen visible over a counter top.

The order: mozzarella salad and melanzane parmagiana plus bread to start; pizza with artichoke, ham, olive, linguine punte di manzo and lasagne with a shared side salad as mains; strawberry melba and vanilla ice cream with chocolate.

I suspect everything is assembled and cooked to order as there was a suitably long wait for the courses to arrive. This is not at all tiresome as there is plenty to look at and listen too...conversations and lively behaviour from the other diners that would make one's hair curl (if one had any). Lovely presentation, particularly of seafood dishes, such as the mussels in spaghetti which were conveyed to many other tables.

Linguine was fresh and strips of beef just flashed in a pan for a few seconds to ensure tenderness inside. This dish came with a cream and wine sauce with mushroom which gave way to pepper. Egg plants in the melanzane had been very thinly sliced and charred before assembly: nicely done and something I shall try the next time I make it at home.

The bill for three, including water, coffee and four spritzers, was £63, so this really is value eating on the doorstep. The floor is tiled and there are no soft surfaces to deaden sound, so when the place is packed - it always is - the noise might be annoying.

Cappuccino count: 8/10. Very good for geezers, south London dames and learning how to say "forty fousand fevvers on a frush's froat".

Other reviews here.

Red Chilli, Great Portland St, Manchester

Great expectations after reading in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago that this was worth a detour, if only to look at the names of the dishes. Would you eat something called Mrs Spotty's Bean Curd, a confection devised, apparently, by a leper? You ought to - it's lovely. I could not bring myself to order His 'n' Hers Sliced Lung, however. The predominant flavours on the menu are Sichuan, but there's other stuff for less robust appetites.

To start: prawn crackers and spring rolls - both quite okay; shredded mange tout in a sesame dressing and shredded chicken in a sauce. The mange tout was wonderfully refreshing and the perfect foil to the sauce on the chicken which, on a first tasting, seemed almost like a Thai peanut sauce but then, after a few seconds, shot flame from the bituminous regions of hell, detonating pepper corns in the back of the throat.

Mains were the aforementioned bean curd, served with a minced beef sauce and with a side order of Beijing dumplings, both pictured, filled with meat paste and veg, and, for the girls, shredded chicken with peanuts, peas, beans and pepper. A little too spicy for them, but the whole thing was so nicely done and with such nice staff that they want to go back to eat something like sweet and sour battered chicken. £48 for three including soft drinks.

Cappuccino count: 8/10. Some like it hot. Lots of favourable reviews on the web.

The Angel, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

Eighteenth century grandeur in the town square and slap bang opposite the abbey ruins and the cathedral. Pictures show a building encrustulated with ivy, although most of it has been cut down. Still very grand.

A quick lunch: terrine of Suffolk ham with piccalilli served in a few leaves; rare tuna steak on green beans and skinned blanched peppers. My companion opted for mozzarella salad followed by beautiful little hand-wrought tortellini parcels with a cheesy filling. All delicious and beautifully presented, though this is another place where photographing the food would be to invite ejection.

£35 with a couple of drinks and a couple of double of espressos.

Cappuccino count: 7/10. A genteel experience. Food very good.

EV, Isabella St, Waterloo

Sorry there's no photo. I was so hungry, flustered and impatient that the plates were half empty before I realised. EV is in railway arches and includes a bar, deli and restaurant. Close by (20-minute walk in different directions) are branches of Tas, part of the same firm.

Started with a meze sampler with humus, kisir (crushed walnuts, oil, mint etc), dolma, tarama, kozda platlican (egg plant, tomato, garlic), felafal, some yogurty things, bit of bread. Followed with deep-fried squid in a sweet sauce and, slightly disappointing, koftie of lamb and pine nuts. But overall, very good and a lovely location. Just very relaxed.

Cappuccino count: 7/10. Staff really lovely but run off their feet on an unexpectedly busy Saturday afternoon. Will go again.