Andrew Ferrier

If you’re in the Fulham area and fancy a good breakfast, you could do a lot worse than the Fulham Cafe on Fulham Road. Full English Breakfast including coffee for about 5 pounds. Can’t say fairer than that in London.

(head out of Fulham Broadway station, turn right onto Fulham Road, and it’s on the left-hand-side of the road after two corners and about 300m).

Disclaimer: I have no connection with this cafe apart from being a client.

Let’s say you’re setting up a restaurant. How large should the menu be to encourage potential clientele to believe in your food?

Put another way: is there any correlation (real or perceived) between the size of a restaurant menu (measured in number of dishes) and the quality of the food that restaurant sells? For some time I was under the impression that there was an inverse relationship: for the best food, avoid those with large menus. This was based on the premise of combining: the kitchen can cheaply combine a number of pre-prepared meal components (meat, sauce, vegetables, carbohydrate) at the last minute to give the potential for a large number of dishes: but the components are not made freshly: and so the quality suffers.

Recently, though, I’ve started to question this assumption. I’ve eaten at a number of excellent restaurants with huge menus and poor ones with small, promising menus. In both cases, some were cheap, some not so. I don’t know if something has changed in the restaurant industry or if there never was much of a correlation anyway. A Google search doesn’t turn up much research in this area. Is there any hard evidence or empirical data on this?

Is is just me, or is this the most revolting sandwich title ever? Compass should be ashamed of themselves.

After cycling round part of the Isle of Wight with Rachel last weekend, and foolishly using little-to-no sun cream, I ended up looking like a lobster in places. Accordingly, I went and refreshed my stock of years-old sun cream this week. However, even though I get a bit pompous about this issue, I didn’t realise just quite how acute the dangers were. Did you know that over a million cases of skin cancer occur every year in the US? In a country with 300 million people, that’s a pretty high hit rate. This article in the New York Times has more information.