I’ve been banging on about Indian Zing since I first popped its roasted gram flour and cumin poppadoms into my greedy mouth three years ago. This is contemporary Indian cuisine at its very best – stylish but unpretentious, high class but reasonably priced and served with friendly warmth and knowledge.

I have never been to the Caribbean, I have never eaten Caribbean food. With my narrow appreciation of island cuisine all I knew to expect from the recently reborn, tropically themed bar and restaurant Mustik was perhaps some rice and peas, possibly a goat curry and a half decent mojito. The only clue from the outside that this is a Caribbean concept is the thatched straw canopies over the windows and main entrance.

If you like your pizzas about the same size as those spare wheels you see on the back of 4×4’s ostentatiously daubed with the credentials of an upmarket car showroom, then Basilico is for you. Their pizza, much like a small planet, is large enough to have its own moon.

Sheba has done well in Brick Lane, even being winner of the 2006 / 2007 Chef of the Year Brick Lane Curry Festival. Fading clippings in their window testify that local papers like it and that one day, the Evening Standard even popped in. I didn’t see a clipping of Ken Livingstone shaking the owner’s hand but it must have been there somewhere, every curry house had to have one of those back in the 1980s, it was a GLC by-law.

Eight over Eight closed down in 2009 as a result of a fire which, given the restaurant’s clientele, was possibly started by a member of the working classes with a chip on his shoulder. It’s no good looking at me though guv, I’ve got a cast-iron alibi.

On a foodie stretch of Old Brompton Road Thali is up against the long standing and well loved Star of India and relative newbie Kare Kare, but Thali is in a different class. This is modern (but not mucked-about) north Indian cooking based on family recipes brought bang up to date – exactly the formula London foodies search for.

Allt-yr-Afon really is heaven on earth for diners with a yearning for delicious food, robust flavours and tradition with a big T.

Why are some cash machines located lower than others? In any row one will always be a couple of feet nearer the pavement than the rest. Is it like the special urinal in the gents, the one that allows small boys to relieve themselves without having to jump up and down, a procedure that tends to get a bit messy?

Trinity is the second Clapham restaurant of chef patron Adam Byatt, with the first being the now defunct Thyme, and it works very hard to amalgamate fine dining with its friendly neighbourhood restaurant ethos. Soft lighting gently framed the windows with only a small discreet plaque revealing the restaurant within, Trinity.

If anyone gives you lip about South London being a cultural wasteland and tells you the only food we specialise in is fried chicken, I suggest you take them down to The Cambria where it’s so good they’ll feel very much at home, wherever they’re from.