In remembrance of things repast

From pukkah to appalling, from Welsh rarebit to chocolate scorpions, 2002 has been a mouth-watering, if occasionally alarming experience for our restaurant reviewers Tracey MacLeod and Richard Johnson. Here are their highlights

Richard Johnson

Like RickStein, I travelled the world in 2002. I learnt two things. 1) All Mexican food is the same – they just give it different names depending on how they fold it. And 2) Fake a seizure rather than order the surstromming. It's illegal to eat this rotten herring in Swedish apartment blocks, and now I understand why. Only durian, the infamous tropical fruit, runs it close. Which explains why there are "no durians" signs all over Singapore's subway system.

Returning home to British cooking was a joy. So was Bonds – directly opposite the Stock Exchange in London. It's my favourite new restaurant of 2002. I loved it, even though I did need to negotiate favourable repayment terms to afford the prices. My favourite old restaurant was the Earl of Thomond in County Clare, where they have raised formal dining to an artform. They understand the choreography between diner and server like nowhere I've ever eaten.

This year, I'm pleased to see the "supermodel" restaurants have been struggling to stay open. "Fashion was made to go out of style," said Coco Chanel – and so it is with restaurants that dazzle us with their fabulousness. The sound system is always the most expensive item in their budget. And the bouncers are hired before the cooks. So the winner of my "Your table will be ready any day now ... oh, right this way, Ms Paltrow!" Award goes to Attica in London's West End.

I'm delighted to see the return of savouries at the end of a meal. In that regard, The Ivy in London has my favourite menu. They recommend a savoury to the diner who is still lingering over a bottle of red which would be spoiled by a pudding. Just don't show yourself up by ordering one (whether it's the Welsh rarebit, the herring roe, or the cheddar, crumpets and onion chutney) as a starter. So nouveau!

The best thing I ate this year was a Berkshire pork chop and confit belly, with a cassoulette of morteau sausage, at The Three Crowns Inn in Ullingswick in Herefordshire. Because 2002, with all the wranglings over foot-and-mouth and BSE, was the year I started to eat meat again. Go figure. But I believe that British meat is now the safest in the world. It's why my butcher, who proudly displays photos and ID certificates of the cows he carves up, is selling more meat than ever before. It's why I loved the rib of beef at the Vanilla Pod in Marlow in Buckinghamshire, while my niece's tomato risotto with nut butter also reminded me what I was missing.

At Morston Hall in Norfolk, the tomatoes for the consommé came from out the back and tasted insipid. Everything else was local, but not that local for one of the finest, belt-loosening dinners I've ever eaten. Think even more local for The Goods Shed, inside the Canterbury Farmers' Market. No store room, no walk-in chiller. And the smell of that rib of beef was up there with molten solder as one of my top four aromas.

There will be no 2002 award for my favourite dessert. Because it should, of course, be chocolate-based. But I've spent all year trying to kick the habit. Nobody knows the truffles I've seen. My mother loved chocolate. I was seven before I realised that chocolate Easter bunnies came with ears. And now scientists have discovered that chocolate produces the same reactions in the brain as marijuana. They have discovered other similarities, but can't, like, remember what they are. Maybe next year ...

Bonds, 5 Threadneedle Street, London EC2 (020-7657 8088).

Earl of Thomond, Dromoland Castle, Newmarket-on-Fergus, Co Clare, Ireland (00 353 61 368144).

The Ivy, West Street, London WC2 (020-7836 4751).

The Three Crowns Inn, Ullingswick, Herefordshire (01432 820279).

The Vanilla Pod, 31 West Street, Marlow, Buckinghamshire (01628 898101).

Morston Hall, Morston, Norfolk (01263 741041).

The Goods Shed, Canterbury Farmers' Market, Station Road West, Canterbury, Kent (01227 459153).

Tracey MacLeod

Another year spent eating on behalf of The Independent, and I'm still no nearer being able to answer the perennial dinner-party question, "What's your favourite restaurant?" If the definition of "favourite" is the place I've visited most often, then the honours would probably go to my local London branch of Zizzi, the pizza chain, but that isn't the kind of thing people really want to hear. So, Locanda Locatelli is the new restaurant I've returned to most eagerly, post-review, when I've been paying the bill myself; three meals there later and I've yet to sample a mediocre dish. And Jamie Oliver's Fifteen is the place I'm most looking forward to revisiting – always assuming it isn't booked solid in 2003, as it deserves to be.

Nor have I got much better at giving recommendations to my friends. In the last few weeks, I've had to suggest somewhere for great Chinese food in London's Chinatown, a lunch venue in Soho which seems expensive but isn't (for a cheese-paring boss taking his team out for their Christmas treat), and a chic country hotel within two hours of London that isn't Babington House. In all three cases, my recommendations flopped. The Ecapital's Shanghai cuisine was too unfamiliar (jellyfish and pressed pig's ear were involved) to diners raised on Cantonese food. The cheap but stylish Italian, Paolo in Percy Street, had just put up its prices after getting rave reviews for its great value for money. As for the chic country hotel – well, if anyone out there can think of one, do please let me know.

At the risk of sounding like an examination board, standards have been high this year, and I've reviewed some fantastic new places, in London and beyond. The giddying turnover of openings and closures doesn't seem to have slowed down, but at least this year none of the restaurants I've reviewed have immediately closed (it happened three times last year).

New eating experiences in 2002 included my first taste of brains at London's admirable Racine (not the first time I've had occasion to pick our food editor, Caroline Stacey's brains), and the taste-bombs unleashed by David Thompson at Nahm, where the silvery restraint of a hotel dining room is broken only by gasps of delight at the weird harmonics of sweet and savoury, salty and sour that Thompson evokes from ancestral Thai cuisine. Also very different, but not in a good way, was my meal at Empire. There's an old tradition of making a wish every time you eat something new, and after cobra risotto, flash-grilled zebra, ant rice and chocolate-covered scorpion, I was wishing away like mad – wishing I'd gone somewhere else for dinner.

I'll end with an ideal meal, compiled from some of my high points of 2002. It would start with Locanda Locatelli's bread, a selection so toothsome you could feast off it for a week, followed by, from Fifteen, Jamie Oliver's vibrant, lemon-dressed salad of pomegranate seeds, raw scallops and herb shoots. In the Italian style, I'll sneak in a pasta course – the Connaught's veal-and-beef stuffed anolini in chicken consommé – before an open-air feast of plaice and chips, eaten from paper in the garden of the Harbour Inn, Southwold. Finally, back to Locanda Locatelli for the sensational chocolate and banana beignets with jasmine ice-cream and violet jelly. Add Cru's user-friendly wine list, the view from McCoys at the Baltic in Gateshead, and super-helpful service from Seven Dials in Brighton, and you have my recipe for total dining satisfaction.

Locanda Locatelli, 8 Seymour Street, London W1 (020-7935 9088).

Fifteen, 15 Westland Place, London N1 (020-7251 1515).

Racine, 239 Brompton Road, London SW3 (020-7584 4477).

Nahm, The Halkin Hotel, Halkin Street, London SW1 (020-7333 1234).

The Connaught, 16 Carlos Place, London W1 (020-7499 7070).

The Harbour Inn, Black Shore Road, Southwold, Suffolk (01502 722381).

Cru, 2-4 Rufus Street, London N1 (020-7729 5252).

McCoys at the Baltic, South Shore Road, Gateshead (0191 4404949).

Seven Dials, 1 Buckingham Place, Brighton (01273 885555).