What the experts recommend

The Con Club 48 Greenwood Street, Altrincham, Cheshire (0161-696 6870)

Altrincham is rapidly becoming something of a “foodie enclave”, says Marina O’loughlin in The Guardian. And this latest addition to its crop of fine restaurants is a “bobby-dazzler”. The former Conservative Working Men’s Club, dating from 1887, has been reinvented as a light, airy, “bustling canteen hung with dramatic lampshades in copper or a kind of beetle-wing iridescent ceramic”. The food is not going to set the blogosphere alight with shows of “tortured, tweezered” refinement. But every dish that comes across the pass is impressive: arancini made with fine, al dente Arborio rice, and packed with woodsy, aromatic mushrooms; plump and perky mussels in cream, herbs and wine; a fine chunk of sirloin with just-right handcut chips and peppercorn sauce. And best of all, crisp-skinned yet “tender and rosy” duck breast on a bed of boozy lentils. About £30 a head for three courses.

Farang 72 Highbury Park, London N5 (020-7226 1609)

Seb Holmes, the chef at this buzzy Thai pop-up in Highbury, has already cooked at some “wildy-fêted-by-me Thai and Thai-ish places”, such as Smoking Goat and Som Saa, says Giles Coren in The Times. So I knew the food at Farang would be great: “fiery, colourful, distinctive, lavishly seasoned, modern, bright, fun, filling, rare and unusual”. And so it proved. Prawn and pomegranate bites were like “piles of sea jewels” on shimmering emerald leaves. Giant crispy wontons, hot and dry, split open to ooze sticky yellow bean and Asian vegetable curry. A “staggering”, bright red “jungle curry of fresh Cornish dayboat fish” mixed “glorious, fruity monkfish chunks with slices of salmon, pre-smoked by Seb”. Sounds weird; tastes “awesome”. This is the kind of heavenly nosh you can normally only get by “queueing outside, then sitting at a bar with loud music, being jostled by randy millennials”. Here you can have it in a grown-up, bookable restaurant. “Bullseye!” About £45 a head.

Le Cinq Four Seasons Hotel George V, 31 Avenue George V, Paris (0033 (1) 49 52 70 00)

When I decided to splash out on a meal at the Michelin three-star restaurant at the George V hotel in Paris, says Jay Rayner in The Observer, I had assumed chef Christian Le Squer’s food would be “whimsical, and perhaps outrageous. Never did I think the shamefully terrible cooking would slacken my jaw from the rest of my head.” In terms of value for money and expectation, Le Cinq supplied “by far the worst restaurant experience” of my 18 years as a critic, and some of the dishes – priced from s70 (£60) to s140 (£120) – were, frankly, “the stuff of therapy”. A small gel globe popped in the mouth to release ginger-tinged stale air – “like eating a condom that’s been left lying about in a dusty greengrocer’s”. A dish of gratinated onions was “black like nightmares, and sticky like the floor at a teenager’s party”. A dessert of frozen chocolate cigars was fine except for the flap of milk skin “draped over it, like something that’s fallen off a burns victim”. The “older gentlemen with their nieces” on the few other occupied tables didn’t seem to care about all this. I, by contrast, suspect I may be scarred for life. Meal for two with “modest” wine, s600 (£510).