This week Bloomberg’s Richard Vines turns his back on Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester and gets on the Eurostar to Paris to sample Ducasse’s Le Jules Verne in the South Pillar of the Eiffel Tower where he finds the chocolate brown décor looks like a nightclub.

Back in London Time Out’s Andrew Staffell gets to grip with "Spanish-Italian" restaurant Dehesa while the Evening Standard’s Fay Maschler raves about the new Michelin star at Indian-themed Quilon. Finally the Metro’s Marina O’Loughlin finds a restaurant Alan Partridge would be proud of.

Bloomberg, 30 January
Richard Vines visits Alain Ducasse's Le Jules Verne in Paris

There can be few restaurants in the world that are as exciting to visit as Le Jules Verne. You go to the South Pillar of the Eiffel Tower, your name is checked and within a minute you're in a private elevator heading skywards. For all its spectacular location, this is a difficult place in which to operate a restaurant. You can't cook with gas in the Eiffel Tower and it must be a nightmare trying to design a dining room where everyone just wants to look out of the windows. In its previous incarnation, Jules Verne was decorated like a disco, with everything black. It's now been taken over by the chef Alain Ducasse.

Time Out, 30 January
Andrew Staffell checks out Dehesa in London's Soho

Seek out the top restaurants in cities such as Sydney, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires or Cape Town – the cosmopolitan capitals of the New World – and you will enjoy cooking that mixes together elements of disparate culinary traditions with gay abandon. Many food writers are fond of the word 'fusion' to describe these mixed-up cuisines. It's a lazy, catch-all term which carries more than a hint of dismissiveness, reflecting a certain Old World scepticism towards the rule-breaking which these newer cuisines espouse as a first principle. So, we like to go to a Spanish restaurant. We like to go to an Italian restaurant. But a Spanish-and-Italian restaurant? Sounds less convincing, doesn't it?
Time Out review in full >> 

Evening Standard Magazine, 30 January
Fay Maschler raves about the new one-Michelin-starred restaurant Quilon

Whether or not the Michelin Guide to Great Britain 2008, launched last week, felt it should give one of its new stars to an Asian restaurant in order to stave off possible criticism of a French bias, I am really glad that it decided to choose Quilon. Travellers to India will know that, outside private homes, posh hotels are usually the best places to find fine Indian cooking. The big hotel groups such as Taj, Oberoi and Sheraton invest heavily in training schemes for chefs and managers and latterly London has felt the benefit.
Evening Standard magazine review in full >>

Metro, 30 January
Marina O’Loughlin at Park Terrace Restaurant

We're told that Park Terrace Restaurant has 'an elegant new look'. The decor, complete with Tiffanyesque glass roof, petrified butterflies, slightly scuffed breakfast bar and vast, camp statuary, clearly hasn't been touched since Jason King was considered a sex god. Our tiny waitress is unnervingly helpful: everything from the reasonably priced new lunch menu is 'lovely and delicious'. Actually, it's decidedly average.
Metro review in full >>

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