Strange. I'm dining fine in Australia, yet the menu isn't French, Italian or Mod-Oz. Some of the staff and chefs speak a cuisine-appropriate language, but are most likely home-grown. The cuisine is usually regarded as meat-heavy and conservative. George Calombaris's very modern food successfully marries cutting edge with Hellenic tradition at The Press Club. It's hard to imagine you could leave this restaurant without a serious dose of gustatory satisfaction.

An inconspicuous old redbrick building in the Berkshire village of Bray bears a sign of a webbed foot, a feather and a duck's bill, all with cutlery handles. This is The Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal's restaurant, closely associated with the molecular gastronomy movement. Join me for a description of the four-hour lunch you might experience. You'll need an open mind, a tolerance of theatre, and a good credit limit.

Beautiful. Maggie Beer, one of the three modern female icons of Australian food, has written a book to weigh down your lap as you browse, read and cook from its pages. A wonderfully presented work, with well crafted content perfectly suited to the current focus on seasons and local produce. A book about food and cooking which also captures the culinary spirit of Australia.

What do you do when you find dinner too enjoyable? How is an irritable, jinxed diner like me to cope with a meal which delivers no disappointments and offers barely a scrap to quibble about? I felt embarrassed at how effusive I was. I sat through the meal thinking of all the people I needed to tell. I was dining at one of Melbourne's most avant garde restaurants, Interlude.

The recently released Secrets of the Red Lantern is a beautiful book. The photography is warm, despite a muted palette. Decorative patterns add a great deal to the appeal of every recipe page. The recipes hold great promise. Despite all this, Secrets of the Red Lantern has some profound flaws which could greatly mar the experience for some readers, but I think the human interest focus will leave many readers reluctant to criticise it.

There are so many reasons to visit Paris; so many reasons to enjoy the city and – most pertinently – the food. Lacking the resources to hop from one name-restaurant to another, it seemed much better do markets, shops, and luscious pastries while staying in modest lodgings…

Just back from seeing the newish Pixar/Disney animated film Ratatouille. Quite a fun ride. The animation is fabulous

Greatly worth seeing, but by no means perfect, the film is nonetheless a must — as a food fanatic, a scene close to the end captured the essence of why we obsess, write and think about food.

Allegedly popular and probably good — a recent tip-off about a new fancy-cake-place in Melbourne. It was the sort of tip you might embrace with exuberant expectation, but which history has taught you to approach circumspectly for fear of desperate disappointment. The place will not be named. I'm not convinced it deserves publicity. […]

An impressive 'chef's book' by respected Melbourne chef Paul Wilson, Botanical is both a serious cookbook and a self-congratulatory piece about the restaurant (the Botanical). Intended for serious home cooks or other chefs, this is perhaps the first local heavy-duty chef's book Australia has seen, with recipes often encompassing many steps and long lists of ingredients.

Rarely does my heart skip a beat in the confectionery aisle of an Australian supermarket. In France or Germany I could happily fill a shopping trolley with a chocolatey smile on my face, but in Australia there are few thrills. So here's a new product: Coles supermarkets have launched a housebrand Belgian chocolate. Still no thrills.