JudyB

According to the BBC North-East Wales website her family moved to Wales from Italy.

It certainly sounded like they knew which menu was from the "classically trained" chef. It was interesting tonight to see the judges coming to blows for a change instead of the chefs!

I'm sure that the coincidence was completely accidental, but the episode of Masterchef Goes Large shown in the middle of Saturday Kitchen (with AWT) this morning contained some scathing comments about a contestant who was foolish enough to serve burnt food during a cookery competition...

Channel 5 (who now like to be called just "Five") is one of the commerical TV channels in the UK, which veers wildly from showing what has been described as soft-porn to flirting with showing decent SciFi shows, but then consigning the latter to the small hours of the morning because they don't get enough viewers... Presumably their shows with Keith Floyd were during a phase where they tried to do "culture"? For those in the UK, Sky Travel and Sky Three (on Freeview) also show the various Floyd programs from time to time.

I can't say that I would be sorry to see AWT lose, but I do agree that the sniping this week does seem to have moved beyond the playground level of the first week (from John Burton-Race) into subtler, and more biting, comments.

The Radio Times says Galton Blackiston for the rather bizarre "region" of either the "East and West Midlands" or "The Midlands and East Anglia" depending on which page you read. It also describes both chefs as "Michelin-starred" - can anyone tell me if this is correct?

And if you want a light lunch while you're there you could try the Miller Howe Cafe. For decent pub food another place not too far away is The Drunken Duck near Ambleside.

Yes, at first sight it is very similar, although in that John Burton Race didn't stoop to such playground sniping. Perhaps he really wants to win this one?

I was interested to see the comment in Jay's review about the comparative markup on Chateau Musar and Australian wines - if I've got it right it sounded like the markup is high on "old world" and low on "new world" wines? Our technical director had a working lunch at the Fat Duck last year. One of his comments was that he much preferred going to the Vineyard because the Fat Duck didn't have enough (any?) New World wines for his taste.

That's quite a wide area, but if you go to the Provence Beyond website there is a fairly extensive list of daily markets. If by "cooler" you mean what I would call a coolbox then you may find one in one of the larger supermarkets, but we've never tried to buy one in France, so I'm not certain.

i wouldn't draw that conclusion. many people simply dump it down the drain, never thinking of returning it to a store. ← I agree. We had a corked bottle recently which won't be returned since we live in England and bought it in France a couple of years ago. Fortunately the other bottles that we have opened from the same box have been OK so far so the taint was obviously only on some of the bottles for that vintage. We have taken at least one other bottle back to a supermarket in England, but we weren't really sure that the shop was going to do anything except pour it down the drain themselves. Our feeling was that it was treated as the customer being unhappy so they replaced it and they certainly made no attempt while we were there to inspect it.

Unlike the ViaMichelin website it doesn't look like you can search based on rosettes etc. The best I could see is to do a search for a location and you can then set "sort results by" to "Food quality".

Quick reminder for those who can still bear to watch this. On Thursday (16th) each of the 3 finalists will cook at a different 2-star Michelin restaurant. The three restaurants are: Le Manoir Aux Quat' Saisons, Midsummer House and Le Champignon Sauvage.

If you haven't actually shopped at Waitrose before then I would strongly recommend that you give it a go and compare the prices. When a colleague of mine broke his collarbone he and his wife did their shopping using a taxi at Waitrose instead of Tesco because the Waitrose was nearer and were pleased to discover that it was more or less the same total price. We see them in Waitrose most weeks, so they are clearly still convinced that it is good value. Obviously it will depend on what you buy, but it's most definitely worth investigating.

The wine section is working (for me) now, but it really just talks in general terms. When we were there in November(?) the sommelier (or head waiter - I'm not sure what his formal title is) was very good. We discussed what we wanted with him and ended up with a bottle of white plus (I think) a half-bottle of red to go with the menu gourmand (after a glass of fizz first). I think that the waiter/sommelier was also talking about trying to put together wine pairings during this year and from the discussion that we had this is clearly something that they have thought about. Have a good time, based on our one visit so far you should be in for treat!

The first couple were definitely new shows, and I have a feeling that the Radio Times is showing these as "1/4", "2/4", or some other similar small number, which suggests that there may not be any re-visits.

I would certainly second Christian Etienne in Avignon. (unfortunately we haven't been to the other places menton1 has listed). In Avignon another good place is Hiely Lucullus. Another place within range is Les Abeilles in Sablet - this is a little way north of Gigondas and we had an excellent meal there last September. (The chef there used to run a restaurant in Gigondas which previously had good reports on eGullet).

They haven't got a clue and are desperate to find out - her audience is huge and she is genuinely influencial in London. All the other critics just think they are. ← This morning's Guardian has an article all about The unknown food critic, although in typical Grauniad style they can't even decide how to spell her surname!

As postcode said above there will be those, such as some disabled people, whose cards will contain a marker that tells the merchant that the user must sign and not enter a PIN. So, yes, the merchants will have to be able to handle cards that are not chip & PIN. When we were in France last year we found that their new machines have both a PIN slot and a place to swipe the magnetic stripe. Some places expected that non-French cards were not Chip&Pin, but the machines mostly told them to use the PIN slot when they swiped our cards. (There were still some French machines last year that were not compatible with UK cards). I would expect that the UK machines will work in a similar way to the French ones and tell the merchant to use the correct slot if they get it wrong.

Traditionally, on Boxing Day the tradesmen were given their Christmas "box" (gift). There is a reasonable description of some of the traditions here. What do people eat on Boxing Day and Christmas Eve? I'm sure this varies quite a lot. In my parents house we often had a baked ham on Christmas Eve since this, combined with turkey left-overs, helps to reduce the amount and complexity of cooking for several days after Christmas.

From the Fat Duck website today. Front page: Menu\Du Jour Menu: Whilst we all know that many websites are never absoutely up to date, the combination of the first assertion with the second statement is rather surprising. Although we probably wouldn't have seriously considered the Du Jour for ourselves on another visit, we have taken Duncan's parents there for the Menu Du Jour before now and they enjoyed it. If this no longer exists in any form I would now be very reluctant to consider taking them, or my father, there again because I'm not sure they could handle the more expensive (and elaborate) menus. Does anyone know for certain if "no longer available" means that they will henceforth only have the choice of A La Carte and Tasting? Or does this perhaps mean that a new cheaper menu of some sort may be added?

I'm seeing pretty much the same on Windows XP with IE6. This looks like a character encoding problem to me, but I can't get it to display correctly no matter what I try with the Encoding settings (which usually fixes dodgy foreign characters). I tried looking at the source, but I don't know enough about HTML and character codes to understand what is wrong.

I know this is too late now for this particular visit (we only just got back from France) but for future reference you can get a very good meal at the Mole Inn which is in Toot Baldon, about 5 miles from Oxford. The food is excellent here (it received a "Bib Gourmand" from Michelin this year) and I would say that it is well worth a visit. The only thing to watch is that all courses come in generous portions so you may need to be careful with the early courses if you want a desert! The website has what looks to be fairly up to date menus for anyone who may want to go. Ideally you should book in advance as it can be very busy.

I think in his printed recipes Heston does suggest blowtorch or a large pan. The problem is whether or not you actually have a large enough pan - I know that we don't. The other option that Duncan has used when cooking beef this way is to use the "Turbo Grill" setting of our oven to brown the meat. Otherwise it takes a long time to do a good job with a normal "kitchen" blowtorch...

If you're going to Avignon I would most definitely recommend going to Restaurant Christian Etienne. We have had the excellent "Menu Tomates" a couple of times now. See Duncan's Christian Etienne write up from a couple of years ago, or the restaurant's own website.