Bites: Pierre-White for the chopping block

Having launched his small-screen career last September on ITV's Hell's Kitchen and used that exposure to leverage product-hawking opportunities (stock cubes), Marco Pierre White seems to have realised the really big bucks lie across the Atlantic. One-time protégé Gordon Ramsay already fronts the lucrative Hell's Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares franchises there, and White is set to star in The Chopping Block, which will see eight couples battle to run two Manhattan restaurants.

As one of our chefs goes over there, so one of America's exports is on its way back here. During its 1980s heyday, in a relatively limited London scene, The Chicago Rib Shack was an undeniable hit. Now, just shy of a decade after it closed, it is to return to Knightsbridge this May, just around the corner from the original Shack. It remains to be seen whether the concept has aged well, but it would be difficult to do worse than the previous tenants of the site, the woefully misguided Brazilian, Mocoto.