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The Michelin-starred Petersham Nurseries Café in Richmond, Surrey, has denied industry rumours that head chef Skye Gyngell has left.

The restaurant and garden centre, which first opened in 2004, insisted Gyngell was on a sabbatical but would be returning.

A spokeswoman for the Petersham Nurseries Café said: "Skye is currently on a sabbatical, such as she takes every year. However, she has not left."

Gyngell has been head chef at Petersham Nurseries Café since it first opened and last year gained a Michelin star for her cooking. She has published three books and is a regular contributor to the Independent on Sunday, Vogue and Delicious.

In 2009, Petersham Nurseries was granted a mixed-use planning application, after it won a four-year dispute with Richmond Council over parking and the level of traffic around the site.

Dabbous, the first restaurant from former Texture head chef Ollie Dabbous, has wowed the London food critics, with both the Evening Standard and Time Out scoring it a perfect five.

Located in Fitzrovia, Dabbous is a joint venture between the chef and mixologist Oskar Kinberg, who previously managed the Cuckoo Club, with a menu of small plates with seasonal produce and light, clean flavours at its heart.

The Evening Standard's Fay Maschler loved her experience at the restaurant saying Dabbous really understands eating pleasure and claiming it is a restaurant that changes the game.

Meanwhile Time Out's Guy Dimond says thanks to its stark design it is not an immediately lovable restaurant, the food is as cutting-edge as you'll find anywhere.

Writing in the Sunday Times, AA Gill visits Chinatown in London's West End hoping to find a decent restaurant. But after eating at Manchurian Legends, he leaves spectacularly disappointed.

"I haven't actually been defeated by a restaurant for ages. It was spectacularly, triumphantly awful," he says.

The Observer's food critic Jay Rayner has a hit-and-miss experience at Viajante, where he says deliciousness is too often forced to give way to cleverness 

The Independent on Sunday's Lisa Markwell says Soho institution Quo Vadis, where former Blueprint Café chef Jeremy Lee has just taken over the kitchen, is a foodie favourite for a reason.

Finally the Metro's Marina O'Loughlin says the food at 34, the latest addition to the Caprice Holdings' stable, is almost excellent but adds that it is a restaurant designed for the privileged.

Time is running out to enter the 2012 Roux Scholarship, the prestigious cookery competition organised by the Roux family. 

Now in its 29th year, the Roux Scholarship is open to chefs working in full-time employment in the UK and aged between 22 and 30.

Entrants have until Friday, 3 February, to submit a recipe for four people using two 400g spring chicken, 300g of veal heart sweetbreads and featuring two garnishes, one of which must be cauliflower-based and the other using a green vegetable of their choice. The dish should also be accompanied by a sauce.

The regional finals will be held on Thursday, 8 March in both Birmingham and London. Judges include Michel and Albert Roux and their respective sons Alain and Michel Jnr, Brian Turner, Gary Rhodes, Andrew Fairlie, David Nicholls and James Martin from the BBC show, Saturday Kitchen.

The winner will receive a three-month stage at a three-Michelin-starred restaurant anywhere in the world, all expenses paid, plus a number of unique prizes all related to food and hospitality.

John Lanchester visits Za Za Bazaar in Bristol, Britain's biggest restaurant at nearly 1,000 covers, and finds the all-you-can-eat buffet fares well against its casual dining competitors.

"The choice is numbing, and it would obviously be daft to assess the food as if it were trying to be fayne daining," the Guardian's food critic says. "Instead, Za Za Bazaar is pitched against the high street alternatives at around the same price point, and at that level does a pretty good job."

Writing in the Sunday Times, AA Gill says that the relaunched Restaurant Tom Aikens in London's Chelsea is one deep breath away from being one of the best dining rooms in the country. However, he adds that while Aikens "is still one of our most talented chefs", he needs to "trust his ingredients more and rely on his craft less".

Meanwhile Fay Maschler is less enthused by Tom Aikens in her review in the London Evening Standard, finding the food and interior a bit hit and miss.

The Metro's Marina O'Loughlin says that Mishkin's, a kind of Jewish deli from the Polpo/Spuntino label, may not be kosher but it is better than the real deal.

Although he enjoys the food, the Independent's John Walsh suggests the owners of the Crooked Well in south London, should reconsider the atmosphere, while the Sunday Telegraph's Zoe Williams enjoys the weird and sometimes wonderful world of Hedone.

Finally the Observer's Jay Rayner says although the owners are clearly very nice, 20 St John in Norwich is a place that hasn't worked out how to do the thing it wants to do.

Multi-Michelin-starred chefs Sat Bains, Claude Bosi and Jason Atherton (pictured) are to cook together for a Singaporean-inspired evening held at Pollen Street Social next month.

The chefs, who have five Michelin-stars between them, are coming together for the event on Sunday 26 February, following their four-day tour to Singapore, where Atherton recently opened his restaurant L'esquina.

The dinner is in collaboration with the Singapore Tourism Board as part of the Chef Exchange Programme, which aims to encourage creative ideas between chefs from different cultures.

Atherton says: "I am delighted to be hosting this evening with two extremely talented chefs; Claude Bosi from Hibiscus, London, and Sat Bains from Restaurant Sat Bains with Rooms in Nottingham. It gives me great pleasure to share Singaporean cuisine with UK consumers and I fully support what the Chef Exchange Programme is aiming to achieve."

Pollen Street Social is now accepting bookings for the event, for arrival on the Sunday evening between 6.00-8.30pm, and for parties up to a maximum of eight guests. The special tasting menu will be £85 per person, with optional wine pairing in addition.

Londoners' favourite restaurant in 2011 was Jason Atherton's Pollen Street Social, according to eating out guide Square Meal which awarded its BMW Award for Restaurant of the Year to the Mayfair eatery.

The first solo venture from former Gordon Ramsay Holdings' Maze chef director Atherton, the Michelin-starred restaurant was praised for offering top quality food, good value and impeccable service.

Meanwhile, bad service is the biggest bugbear for restaurant diners in the capital, according to the 2012 Square Meal Complaints Survey.

Grumbles over poor service in restaurants amount to 45% of all complaints and way eclipse the second-largest area of upset, which is ambience and décor (19.5%), reports the survey.

The restaurant guide's annual look at the industry, based on the opinions of about 8,000 London restaurant-goers, found that rude staff, slow service and unknowledgeable staff as well as the practice of automatically adding service charge to the bill, contributed to ruining guests' dining experience.

Complains about atmosphere are up 39% from last year, with disappointing décor, lack of ambience and too much noise topping the list of grievances.

Also on the capital's list of annoyances was disappointing or overpriced food, although this has remained steady at 18.5%, with diners enjoying set menus at high end restaurants and other offers.

Roganic named best new restaurant by Square Meal >> 

Two-Michelin-starred chef Hélène Darroze has become a chevalier (knight) in the French Legion of Honour.

The French chef, who runs her eponymous restaurant at the Connaught in London as well as a restaurant in Paris, has been awarded the honour by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The award, with its five different levels, was created in 1802 by Napoleon as an order of merit to recognise outstanding services rendered to France or a feat befitting humanity.

She is one of several chefs to have been recognised, with others including Paul Bocuse, Thomas Keller and Alice Waters.

Commenting on the award Darroze said: "I am so proud to have been given this special award. I feel honoured to join such a distinguished group of people and this recognition for chefs shows what an important role food plays in today's world.

"I could not have achieved this without such a dedicated team around me both in London and Paris."

34 , the latest restaurant from the Caprice Holdings stable, was the focus for Jay Rayner this week who found perfect steaks, incredible desserts and a scattering of phone-hackerati...

Writing in the Observer, Rayner said that while early publicity had billed 34 as a meaty version of its sister fish restaurant Scott's, he wasn't sure that that was true. "The menu is broader than that," he says. "But certainly a list of very good steaks is at its core, including Australian Wagyu at fearsome prices and Scottish cuts which are both more affordable and leave less of a whacking carbon footprint, with American steaks in between. My rib eye was simply a great piece of meat, cooked with care and precision."

"Three weeks from signing the contracts, the Punch Bowl was again open with staff in place, menus written and a major refurbishment undertaken. I was tempted to hotfoot it over there the first day, but with respect, I waited for a week and found the place heaving on a Thursday night in November, a bit of a rarity these days."

The Times's Tom Chesshyre, meanwhile, found Jolyon's at No 10, a new 21-bedroom independent hotel in Cardiff as "a breath of fresh air" in a city full of "big, boring, corporate chain" properties.

"The bed was wide and there was a tiny bathroom with a "Japanese bath" -- a deep, square trough. Some of the rooms are quite tight, but with suites such as mine from £80, you can hardly complain."

However, the Daily Telegraph's Matthew Norman wishes to forget his visit to Massimo, London, adding "the first and last thing to be said in Massimo's defence is that it is a prisoner of one of those hotels, The Corinthia off Whitehall, that suck the life out of restaurants like dehumidifiers. Such paeans to marble-sanitised vulgarity may be perfect for lobbyists to entertain their prey, and well suited to very young and blonde Bulgarian women seeking quality time with a new uncle or godfather from Moscow. But it is hard for any restaurant within them to create an atmosphere, and despite its lavish decor Massimo did not come close."

The Artichoke Restaurant in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, impressed John Lanchester this weekend, who says chef-proprietor Laurie Gear's cooking is on fire.

The Guardian's food critic says the restaurant, which reopened after a devastating blaze two years ago, "is a neighbourhood restaurant that's on top of contemporary trends and executing them with command, precision and a degree of relaxedness".

"The place is still on fire, but now it's in the happy, metaphorical way," Lanchester says.

Meanwhile Italian restaurant Casa Batavia in west London fails to hit the spot with AA Gill, who complains about both the food and service.

"Most of the dishes, which came in silly plates, had temperature issues. They were either worryingly chilly or tepid in parts. Which might have been trendy, or it might just have been forgetfulness and boredom" he moans.

The Daily Telegraph's Matthew Norman enjoys the excellent food served at the Greek in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, while the Metro's Marina O'Loughlin says she'd cheerfully go back to the 10 Cases, in London's West End, every week.

Both the London Evening Standard's Fay Maschler and Time Out's Guy Dimond review Aurelia, the latest venture by high-end London restaurateur Arjun Waney and Giuliano Lotto, where a menu of small markedly expensive Mediterranean dishes is served.

Andrew Fairlie has become the latest addition in the UK to the ranks of Grand Chefs recognised by luxury hotel consortium Relais & Chateaux.

The prestigious accolade is held by only a select number of 160 chefs around the world, including 70 independent operators, in recognition for leading the way through innovation and excellence.

Fairlie, who runs his eponymous restaurant at Gleneagles hotel in Perthshire and is the only chef in Scotland to hold two Michelin stars, joins an elite group of just seven chefs to have been awarded the title in the UK.

The others are: Alain Roux at the Waterside Inn; Heston Blumenthal at the Fat Duck; Michel Roux Jr at Le Gavroche; Michael Caines at Gidleigh Park; Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons; and Martin Burge at Whatley Manor. Fairlie is only the third independent UK operator to have been named a Relais & Chateaux Grand Chef.

Fairlie said he felt extremely honoured and proud. "Receiving my award in front of 500 Relais & Chateaux proprietors including Michel Guérard, Michel Troisgros and Olivier Roellinger was a very special moment," he said.

"Being accepted into Relais & Chateaux has been an ambition of mine for many years. I first heard of Relais & Chateaux in 1985 when I was working at the Waterside Inn just before I was due to start my scholarship with Michel Guérard. The guide was full of the greatest chefs in the world and as a young 20-year-old I dreamt that one day I would be included."

Fairlie won the first Roux Scholarship in 1984, offering him the opportunity to train with Guérard at Les Prés d'Eugénie in Gascony, during a period when the UK's food reputation on the world stage was poor and a foreigner working in a French kitchen almost unheard of.

He opened his restaurant within Gleneagles hotel in 2001 and achieved a Michelin star in 2002 as well as the Newcomer of the Year Catey. His second star followed in 2006 and he remains the only chef in Scotland with two stars. He was named Scottish Chef of the Year in 2008.

The 2012 Relais & Chateaux guide features 31 properties in the UK, including newcomers Restaurant Andrew Fairlie, Greywalls Hotel and Isle of Eriska, all in Scotland.