As all agree, a huge improvement has come over the top end of British cuisine in recent years but I have found myself wondering how things had been progressing in two notoriously ungastronomic areas: the food offered on trains and aeroplanes.
This posed a bit of a problem at first, as I was not planning any long distance trips, which made it difficult to eat airline food in the discomfort for which it is designed, but then I had an inspiration.
The Seafood Bar and Grill in the edifice commonly known as the Walkie-Talkie at 20 Fenchurch Street, London is not, as its name might suggest, an aquatic eatery but is located right at the top of the building on the 37th floor.
That’s 160 metres high, which is 25 metres above the top of the London Eye.
That must, I decided, qualify as airline food, so I booked a table and I must say from the flight up in the lift to the warm chocolate tart with honeycomb, caramelised banana and yogurt sorbet, it soared above expectations.
Between those two, I feasted on scallops with pork cheeks, followed by loin of venison, and my only complaint was that the view was so stunning, it threatened to distract from the food. Though how they got the scallops and the deer up all that way, is still a mystery to me.
This is a seriously good restaurant and well worth taking to the air to sample. After gorging on such high-class, high altitude nosh, I felt the need to take a few days off to digest it before submitting my stomach enzymes to another such treat, so it was almost a week later that I found at Paddington myself settling into a seat on our only high-speed, fine dining Pullman railway carriage to sample the new menu designed by the splendid Mitch Tonks.
I have had a soft spot for Mr Tonks since he showed me, some years ago, how to make a smoked salmon crumble with which I have impressed countless visitors to Beachcomber Towers ever since.
You just stir spinach and salmon into a white sauce, empty it into a dish, cover the top with breadcrumbs, dot it with butter and leave in the oven for half an hour. Very tasty and extremely easy, it scores higher than any dish I know on my standard measure of Impressiveness divided by Effort.
His train menu, however, showed that Mitch, justly famed for his fish cookery, is pretty good with meat too. The ox cheek braised in red wine which I had as a main course was as tender and full flavoured as any hunk of meat I have ever scoffed.
The South Devon Crab with which I started the meal was, until I had the ox cheek, by far the best dish I had ever eaten on a train, and the West Country Cheese Selection rounded off the meal perfectly.
Except that nobody had told the serving staff that I was alighting at Exeter, so there was no time for coffee. For the first time in my life, I regretted that a train I was travelling on had arrived on ti
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