Ida, Queen's Park

One of my dear late father's favourite aphorisms - which I always thought of, fondly, as his statements of the bleeding obvious - was to say to anyone who complained that they couldn't find something, "You always find it in the last place you look!" It never occurred to him that this was the case because having found something you cease to look for it, but I loved him too much to point this out.

Now, as my brace of regular readers will know, my pal Michael Ford and I have had a few hits and misses in our search for a restaurant that caters just as well to his vegetarian lacto-free diet as to my 'if it baas, moos or oinks, kill it, heat it, sauce it and serve it' approach to eating. But would you believe it, my dear old dad was right after all because it looks like we've found it in the last place we looked - right on newly-moved-to-London Michael's doorstep.

Banana Tree, Soho

I had to admire the chutzpah of the marketing guy who sent me, unsolicited, a pretty-generous gift voucher to spend at the newly-opened Soho branch of growing Indochine canteen chain Banana Tree. "We would like to invite you personally to come and try out our new restaurant in Soho!" went the accompanying email; "If you like us, blog it! - if you hate us - let us know, as we are all about improvement and value all opinions, especially yours."

Flattery will get you everywhere with me, and where it doesn't get you bribery usually will, so an offer comprising both was always going to be pretty compelling. If I felt the slightest hint of righteous indignation at so flagrant an attempt to curry my favour, it was swiftly dispelled by the mischievous knowledge that even if I did love the place I didn't have to write about it, and if I hated the place, I didn't have to not write about it - the very opposite of their desired outcomes and more fool them for sending out money willy-nilly. Talk about sticking it to the (marketing) man.

But such an expensive and potentially risky marketing strategy must have been backed up by as much confidence in the product as money in the budget and sure enough, Banana Tree was, well, pretty top banana. Conscious that readers might not take me at my word knowing that my presence there had essentially been bought, I took along my pal Nicola who, as a director of  a high-end hotel and restaurant group knows her stuff and would, I knew, not hold back with her opinions good or bad. Guess what? She loved the place too.

@SIAM, Soho

The @ symbol (or to give it its proper name, the 'at symbol') has had a number of uses in its 111-year lifetime. Originally conceived as accounting shorthand for 'at the rate of', with the arrival of email in the 1990s the humble @ came into worldwide(web) usage as an integral part of every email address. Since 2006 however, the sign has acquired a new prominence as the opening character of every Twitter username; other means of communication are old hat - these days Twitter is where it's @.

Don't go looking for smart new Thai restaurant @SIAM on Twitter though; the username does exist, but it's not them - in fact it's one of the thousands of dormant accounts which include, frustratingly, @hughwright, an Evangelical Christian in the US who's not tweeted since May last year. And not that you would, but don't go looking for it in Siam either - you'd have a job to, as no such place exists, the Kingdom of Siam having become Thailand for good in 1949. Do however go looking for it on Frith Street, slap-bang in the heart of Soho, where you will find it, especially if what you're looking for is some really very good Thai food at not-too-hideous prices.

I'll say now for the avoidance of doubt that when I say 'really very good' I only mean in my self-confessed inexpert opinion; whilst I absolutely love Thai food, I can't pretend to know a very great deal about it. When I was invited along to experience @SIAM (something else I'll make clear now for the avoidance of doubt) I did think about being a bit mean and taking my Thai friend so that he could be the judge of authenticity. Realising however that that would just make me look and sound like an arse, I instead invited my lovely friend Greg, whose expertise is as non-existent as mine. Both of us know what we like and what tastes good however, and I base this post entirely therefore on the degree to which we enjoyed what we ate.

Seated at a slightly-cramped-but-great-for-people-watching window table, we ordered a selection of vegetarian and fish dishes, Greg being one of those poor misguided souls who has forsworn the consumption of lovely meat. First came some gorgeous corn fritters, deep fried kernels bound in a red curry-scented batter served with 'aromatic syrup', a sticky, sweet chilli dip. Tom kha goong - a rich, sweet and sour coconut milk-based soup containing fat prawns - was creamy, zesty and luxurious, the lemongrass within not over-powering the other flavours.

Next we enjoyed Pla Hoi Shell, seared scallops served in a cleverly-spiced dressing with enough heat to exhilarate without masking the sweetness of the flesh. Shards of crisp green apple on top added a pleasantly contrasting texture. Also very clever was a dish of steamed sea bass with chilli, served with braised lettuce in a salty, citrusy broth consisting of lime, fish sauce and sugar - a textbook example of umami. Soft-shell crab, bathed in a sticky sauce ('a light chilli jam' according to the menu) was excellent too, none of its flavour lost in the frying process and complemented by a crisp, bright salad.

Perhaps surprisingly, the only duff dish of the night was that most ubiquitous of Thai specialities, green curry; for many diners this would be the default choice, hence our ordering it to see if it passed muster. As it was, it was disappointingly bland, with no discernible taste of the advertised sweet basil, but perhaps this was due to the presence of tofu, which as we all know exists only to stop vegetarians dying from protein deficiency. Or perhaps it was just that everything else had been so exciting and complex that our palates, already dancing with so many joyful flavours, could no longer discern or appreciate subtlety.

Washed down with a bottle  - OK I'll confess, two - of a peachy, floral Gavi di Gavi, it was an excellent meal which had we not been guests of the restaurant would have come in at about £50 a head, or without the wine about £30 - great value for such high quality in the heart of the West End. It was made even nicer by very pleasant surroundings - the room, although basic, has been carefully designed with some attractive touches including a huge, ornate Buddha  - and attentive, nothing's-too-much-trouble service from which every table was benefitting.

I can't let it pass without comment that, for a restaurant with such an apparently contemporary name, the very use of the @ symbol suggesting that here is a business that is embracing the digital age, their website - every modern business's shop-window on the world - is fairly terrible. Music blares unwarned and unwanted from the speakers the moment one lands on the homepage, typos abound ('comtemporary' anyone?), navigability is next-to-non-existent and there are even factual inaccuracies - sorry, @SIAM, but you are not 'The only Thai restaurant in Soho', not by a long shot. Such inadequacies don't do what is in fact a very good little restaurant justice.

This notwithstanding, I'd certainly encourage any fan of Thai food, or indeed of good food generally, to give it a go. But by-pass the website, and head straight for the restaurant itself; if you don't enjoy it, I'll eat my h@.

@SIAM, 48 Frith Street, London W1D 4SF Tel: 020 7494 4511 http://www.atsiam.co.uk (though as above, I wouldn't bother if you value having normal blood pressure)

Gauthier Soho

After the unmitigated disaster of our recent experience at Les Deux Salons, I wanted my next meal with fashion-and-now-food blogger Michael Ford to be really special. In a recent conversation about places with a good reputation for their vegetarian offering - Michael being sadly afflicted by that mercifully rare condition which causes its sufferers to forbid themselves lovely meat - newly-Michelin-starred Gauthier Soho cropped up as being somewhere that we were both keen to try, and although only one indicator of quality, Bibendum's having chosen the restaurant to receive his five-pointed favour was enough to persuade me that this was somewhere we could be guaranteed a good time.

And 'good' it most certainly was, at times very good indeed, but I knew before I'd put down my fork at the end of the seventh course that it was going to be a challenge to write up. For one thing, Michael and I both had the tasting menu and as his was vegetarian and mine wasn't, between us we racked up about a dozen different courses - that's a lot of food requiring a lot of adjectives. Or it would be, if it weren't for the second problem, namely that everything was so uniformly...nice that a dozen synonyms for that would do the job, albeit without making for remotely interesting reading.

But write it up I must, or I would not be a very good blogger (bitch-slap to the first person who says "No change there then") so, it being a very good place to start, let's start at the very beginning. Gauthier Soho occupies a largely-unmodified Georgian townhouse on Romilly Street in Soho, formerly known as the Lindsay House and home to Richard Corrigan's signature restaurant until he decamped to Mayfair a couple of years ago. It's an attractive if impractical space for a restaurant, with no one main dining room but several rooms of various sizes over its three floors. The decor is don't-scare-the-horses luxe; warm neutrals, soft lighting and softer carpets.

The Gauthier of the name is Alexis Gauthier, erstwhile head chef of Michelin-starred Roussillon in Pimlico; in February 2011, barely nine months after it opened, Gauthier Soho won its first star while Roussillon's was taken away. Gauthier describes his style of cooking as 'cuisine by intuition and instinct', proudly relying on his experience and understanding of ingredients and technique rather than recipe books and tradition in order to create his dishes. It's also been described, uglily, as 'vegecentric', meaning that the focus even in meat dishes is on the vegetable.

You'd think then that there'd be more than two vegetarian dishes on the à la carte menu, especially one that is divided into five sections from which diners are invited to choose three, four or the full five plats. On the contrary; it's very meat- and fish-heavy and vegetarians wanting more than two plats are obliged to opt for the seven-course gout du jour. In fairness, that had always been our intention, but it seems rather an odd state of affairs. As indeed is the fact that I've still not told you anything about what we actually ate.

I had foie gras with crisp, thin slices of baked apple (very nice), langoustine with ginger and fennel (happily substituted by the kitchen for the advertised celery, to which - restaurateurs please note, poisoners please don't - I am allergic), black truffle risotto with parmesan and veal jus (very luxurious, quite tasty, but a bit wet), seared rose veal with...I don't remember what, something polenta-y I think (nice, although the searing was more like light cooking, rendering the meat a smidgeon tough) and then rhubarb with rhubarb sorbet (a lovely, zingy, reviving facial slap of a dish) followed by Gauthier's signature Louis XV, a chocolate and wafer confection with a thick, viscous chocolate coating and a shaving of real gold leaf on top. It was, you've guessed it, very...nice, like a Michelin-starred Twix Fino. Cheeses, French bien sur, were terrific.

If I'm not at all enthusiastic about any of this, I'm certainly not critical of it either; there was nothing wrong with any of it, nothing whatsoever, but in seven courses only one mouthful really made me sit up and take notice (the rhubarb) while the rest was just so polite and refined that I found myself wishing that there could be just a little spice here, or allium there, or contrast somewhere to liven things up a bit.

All the niceties of fine dining were present and correct and certainly added value to what, at £68 for seven courses (£60 for the vegetarian version which Michael has eloquently written about here) was certainly excellent value for money. Amuse-bouches were lovely (I particularly liked a truffled quail's egg) as for the most part were the petit-fours, although one bite of an as-bad-as-it-sounds basil truffle had us both screwing up our noses in distaste and leaving the rest.

Inexplicably, there's no matching wine flight available or even suggestions for wines by the glass to accompany the tasting menus and the sommelier wasn't on hand to assist so I had to make a noble stab at choosing something from the lengthy list that would work, or at least not clash, with everything; an Argentina Villa Vieja Viognier at £27 did the job for the savouries while a glass each of Plessis saw us through the desserts. When another table's bottle of wine was erroneously emptied into our glasses - another reason to let diners do it themselves, dear restaurateurs? - another bottle was opened and the exact amount of ours that had been wasted was replaced, then a top up given. Good service recovery, but the initial slip-up isn't the sort of thing you expect at this level.

Other little niggles worthy of note: in what I can only imagine is meant to be a mark of respect to the building's townhouse past, guests have to ring an old-fashioned push doorbell for entry, and the loud peal annoyed the living hell out of me as it went off every few minutes throughout much of the epic four hours that we were there. It would be irritating enough even in a busier, buzzier place, but slight gripe number two is that Gauthier Soho is otherwise strikingly, monastically quiet; I'm not a fan of muzak in restaurants - though who is, for that matter - but because of the mish-mash of small dining spaces no one room can ever build up the elusive atmosphere that makes a restaurant somewhere you enjoy being and would want to return to.

Which leads us to the big question, I suppose, which is would I recommend Gauthier Soho, and indeed I would - my body-double Bibendum rates it worth a visit and so do I, but with some caveats. Come if you want to experience good food, prepared thoughtfully with obvious technical expertise and care, in surroundings well-suited to contemplation, at not excessive prices. But if you're after more of a thrill, something to amaze and delight you and serve up a side order of excitement with your spectacle, then this is probably not the place for you.

My search for somewhere which caters really, truly, exceptionally well for my vegetarian Michael goes on. Suggestions are most warmly invited.

Gauthier Soho, 21 Romilly Street, London W1D 5AF Tel: 020 7494 3111 http://www.gauthiersoho.co.uk

Bonnington Cafe, Vauxhall

Atrocious photograph courtesy of R.B. Swift

For a couple of reasons, the validity of which I'll leave it to you to judge, I don't have a very great deal to say about the food at Bonnington Cafe.  First of all there doesn't seem much point, as the menu at this moderately famous, co-operative-run vegetarian restaurant in Vauxhall changes every day depending on which co-op member is taking their turn as chef. Because of this, what was on offer when I visited will bear no resemblance to what might be available should you go - as I hope you will - other than that it will be vegetarian or possibly vegan. Secondly and more typically, is that being BYO, the seven of us who ate there recently brought and drank so much of our own that my memory of what was bought and eaten is slightly impaired.

There's plenty that I can tell you however, most importantly (and I hope usefully) that I liked Bonnington Cafe very much indeed and that it's a terrific little place. What started as a squat cafe in the early 1980s is now a respectable - but not too respectable! - commercial enterprise, funding the work of the local community's Bonnington Centre of which it occupies the ground floor. Gastropubs and brasserie chains everywhere pay designers thousands of pounds to recreate something approximating the decor of Bonnington Cafe, with its mismatched furniture, candles in jam jars and eclectic artwork, but this is the real deal, organic, the product of evolution and hands-on community involvement over many years.

While it might be possible to replicate some of the interior elements, no smart consultancy or marketing wonk could hope to recreate the atmosphere of this place. Being so deeply rooted in the community and true to its co-operative values, Bonnington Cafe welcomes everyone and as a result attracts a very diverse crowd. So, on the night of this visit as well as our table of noisy, expensively dressed thirtysomethings popping champagne corks there was also a group of very intense, patchouli-scented, bindi wearing groovers, a cute couple on a date and a table of arty-looking chaps with immaculately waxed moustaches. Oh, and there was an accordionist playing, not that it was a French-themed evening, just y'know, parce que. It all makes for a very warm, inclusive, comfortable place which more 'professional' restaurants could learn a lot from.

I suppose at this juncture I should say something about the food, or at least what I remember of it. My starter (there are two choices for each course, chalked up on a blackboard) was listed as 'Spanish tapas' and further described by our waitress as being 'sort of nuts, some beans and spices, in like a tomato sauce' which prompted the couple on the next table to chip in "It's nicer than it sounds!" The dish which I received resembled nothing I've eaten on my extensive travels in Spain but was nonetheless a very tasty bowlful, nicely seasoned and very nourishing. The alternative was pea soup; it was a bit heavy on the parsley for my liking (though in fairness, any amount of parsley is too heavy for my liking) but perfectly good as soup goes and an enormous helping too.

For main courses (and this I'm afraid is where the liquor starts to affect my memory) there was a 'Cuban platter' or some sort of pie; I had the former and liked it very much. Along with some spicy, rich veggie mince came some golden savoury rice, along with - oddly I thought, but if it's typically Cuban, mea culpa - a baked banana. It was filling and moreish, the mince as hearty as any meat-based ragu I've tasted. The pie...well whatever it was I know no-one complained about it which gives the chef a perfect 7-out-of-7 for customer satisfaction if not for memorability. For pud there was a choice of chocolate or peanut tart, the latter vegan (I'll take their word for it that the cream-ish swirl it shared plate space with was dairy-free). Both were good, and as with everything cooked with love and served in generous portions for the price.

Ah yes - the price. A final clincher, if you weren't already tempted to give Bonnington Cafe a whirl, is that starters and puds are three quid each and mains are all seven pounds, so a good, filling, ethically-conscious meal can be yours for just £13. In fact not all of us had three courses so the bill for seven of us came to a ridiculous £85; we rounded it up to £100 only to have our gorgeous French waitress run after us as we staggered off into the night crying (assume your best 'Allo 'Allo! accent for this), "You 'ave left faaar too motch monnay!" We very happily told her to keep it.

Bonnington Cafe, 11 Vauxhall Grove, London SW8 1TD Bookings are made directly with the chef; check website for their numbers: http://www.bonningtoncafe.co.uk