At Gerry’s the sandwich is elevated to a noble art, so roll up your sleeves and get stuck in

Gerry’s Hot Sub Deli, 50 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QE. Sandwiches £8.25-£13.50, poutine £6.75-£10.70, dessert £4.25, wine £6.95 a glass, beer £3.95 a half pint

Happiness is a handful of lunch and dressing running down your forearms. Certainly, anything that demands to be eaten alongside a roll of kitchen paper deserves to be taken seriously. By these criteria, which I’ve just invented, but now cleave to like holy scripture, the food at Gerry’s Hot Subs on London’s Exmouth Market deserves to be taken very seriously indeed. Lunch there is messy. Prepare to wipe yourself down afterwards or even nip home for a shower. But my, it’s good. The fact is, everybody can make themselves a sandwich, but you don’t want just anybody to make one for you. The frame is so very tight: some form of bread as vehicle for everything else. It demands a compulsive interest in detail combined with a profound understanding of what will make for a single, multi-textured mouthful. Followed by another and another.

Massive, assertive flavours in a hulking football pitch of a restaurant

Roe in Canary Wharf is an absolute beast of a venue: 500 covers, with a terrace, private dining, a capacious main area split into three defined areas, and a sit-up counter. Mind you, there is room for a restaurant to spread its legs in London E14. The newish Hawksmoor just along the wharf is also enormous, while the nearby Dishoom is another behemoth with added bacon naan.

Roe is the second incarnation of the much-loved Fallow in St James’, which is known for its peculiar, yet ultimately delicious nose-to-tail, cheek-to-bumhole, low-intervention-style menu. Fallow, at least to begin with, had about it a rather worthy, Greta Thunberg with a Leith’s diploma vibe that sent a certain type of foodie giddy with joy. Fallow’s signature dish is a cod’s head doused in sriracha butter, and its beady eye glowers at you while you eat your kombu fries. In fact, I’ve felt a bit like Hamlet in high heels every time I’ve eaten there. Alas, poor Coddy, I knew him.

Ann and Bernard McDonagh from Port Talbot ‘cynically and brazenly’ defrauded restaurants, says judge

A couple have been jailed for carrying out a string of “dine and dash” offences, racking up large bills for food and drink before leaving without paying.

A judge at Swansea crown court said Ann McDonagh, 39, and Bernard McDonagh, 41, had “cynically and brazenly” defrauded restaurants and a takeaway in south Wales.

Done with small plates? Then you’ll miss the jazzy cooking at this cheery Cheltenham spot

Sam’s Montpellier, Montpellier Courtyard, Montpellier Street, Cheltenham GL50 1SR (01242 252752). Earth £7.50-£10.50, Land £11-£15.50, Sea £12-£13, Heaven £8, wines from £25

At the start, our delightful waiter announces that the menu here at Sam’s Montpellier is “a little bit different”. That’s a four-word phrase guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of, well, me. What in God’s name is going to happen in this sharp-edged restaurant in Cheltenham, where life is meant to be as unchallenging as an episode of Countryfile? Am I going to have to lick a black pudding espuma from a plaster cast of the chef’s lips? Will each dish be spoon fed to me while I’m forced to wear headphones and listen to a soundtrack of Jacob Collier telling me which key I’m masticating in? It’s the middle of the jazz festival. It could happen. Oh no. It’s worse than that, isn’t it? It’s going to be starters in a dog bowl and desserts off a trowel. I just know it.

Very possibly Glasgow’s best restaurant

Glasgow is far chicer that it ever wants to admit. It is a burly, noisy, brown-stone city with a rep for piercing the bubble of anything that is up itself, but there has always been a sleek underbelly of glam to these streets. Only quietly, mind.

Brett, for example, on a corner of Great Western Road, sets out its stall as the polar opposite of a lofty, intimidating restaurant. It’s just a wine bar that happens to throw down a little beef fillet with jersey royals. Pop by for a birthday cocktail, the website seems to say, we’ll cook you a bit of pasta or fish, all while pointing at a menu that includes the likes of fresh linguine tossed in XO-infused mushroom sauce and caramelised leek, and topped with plump Cantabrian anchovies. This is not remotely pub grub and more, “We mean business here – bring a bib!” See also Brett’s gildas, based on that rough-and-ready northern Spanish pintxo bar snack of chilli, olive and anchovy shoved on a cocktail stick; here, however, the gilda is served on a luxurious plinth of chicken fat-encrusted crouton, and the olive and anchovy come with a nerdily engineered hot sauce.

Even the English Breakfast Society has welcomed the ‘baozi’ as supermarket chains feed off interest in world food

The origin of bao buns, or baozi, goes back as far as third-century China. The legend goes that a military strategist used the wheat buns instead of human heads as a peace offering to a god for safe passage. The deity fell in love with the steamed buns so much that he parted the rough waters of the river to allow crossing.

It seems Britons have also fallen for the Asian treat. The English Breakfast Society, devoted to promoting the traditional English breakfast, this month encouraged the introduction of bao buns as part of a morning fry-up.

In this extract from her memoir, A Woman’s Place Is in the Kitchen, Sally Abé recalls the job she had to leave
• Read the interview with Sally Abé

‘You’ll never amount to anything, young lady.” These are words that no one, no matter what industry they are in, ever wants to hear. If you’re a chef, it’s likely someone will have screamed them in your face at least once. For me, it happened at a restaurant I don’t include on my CV. I have never admitted that I worked for this chef in interviews and rarely speak about my experience, even to friends and family. Because I don’t want to trash someone’s reputation for the sake of my own, I’m not going to use the real name of the restaurant or of anyone who worked there. However, people need to understand that places like this exist, and that the experience was formative, if awful. So, let’s call the restaurant “Jeff’s” after the chef patron, then let me tell you about the worst time of my career.

I wanted to work at the Ledbury, a restaurant in Notting Hill that everyone was talking about but after trying to arrange a trial a couple of times and not being able to make the dates work, I looked elsewhere as my notice period at Claridge’s was coming to an end and I needed to have money coming in. I settled on Jeff’s.

Whether the descriptions are long and verbose, or short and opaque, there’s a fair chance you’ve suffered from ‘menu overwhelm’. What lies behind the changing language?

You will have seen the advert on TV. The scene: a fancy restaurant dining room where a panicked young man scans a menu full of baffling words – melange, deconstructed, micro agretti – while all the time being scrutinised by his girlfriend’s hard-to-impress parents and a comically imperious waiter. Rescued by a surreptitious web search on his phone, he now knows what gravlax is and can order with confidence. Embarrassment is swerved, lunch is saved.

We’ve all been there. Hands up, who knew what agretti is? No? Had the samphire-like marsh grass appeared as monk’s beard, the name chefs prefer, would that have helped? Thought not.

Ghofran Hamza is on a solo mission to bring glorious Syrian cuisine to lucky mid-Wales

Arabic Flavour, 4 Northgate Street, Aberystwyth SY23 2JS (01970 228 078). Starters and meze £4.75-£8.25, mains £14.50-£18.95, desserts £2.95-£7.75, wines from £21

Occasionally, during the wait for our starters at Arabic Flavour, one of us would pop off to the loo; a moment of magical thinking perhaps, in which a sudden absence from the table could somehow make the food arrive. They would stop by the kitchen door to sneak a look in through the window, willing there to be more people in there. Perhaps the rest of the brigade had simply popped out when last we looked. But no, there really was just one person in that kitchen doing everything: the compact, completely focused and utterly poised figure of Ghofran Hamza, the young Syrian refugee by way of Lebanon, who is determined to tell her 21st-century story at the stove. The lack of kitchen personnel means a dinner at Arabic Flavour is unlikely to be quick. Do not go ravenously hungry. Prepare a few conversational gambits. Perhaps do not go in a large group. But really, do go.

The novelist on the continuing relevance of Ibsen, the joyful quilt art of Faith Ringgold and where to find British scotch eggs in New York

Born in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1966, author Claire Messud studied at Yale University and the University of Cambridge. Her first novel, 1995’s When the World Was Steady, and her book of novellas, The Hunters, were finalists for the PEN/Faulkner award; her 2006 novel The Emperor’s Children was longlisted for the Booker prize. Messud is a senior lecturer on fiction at Harvard University and has been awarded Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, literary critic James Wood; they have two children. Her latest novel, This Strange Eventful History, is published on 23 May by Fleet.

There was more business than usual and some bemused regulars after El Califa de León was rewarded for its ‘exceptional’ offering

El Califa de León, an unassuming taco joint in Mexico City, measures just 3 metres by 3 metres and has space for only about six people to stand at a squeeze. Locals usually wait for 5 minutes between ordering and picking up their food.

All that changed on Wednesday, however, when it became the first Mexican taco stand ever to win a Michelin star, putting it in the exalted company of fine dining restaurants around the world, and drawing crowds like it has never seen.