I was in Scotland last week and thought I might surprise you all by reviewing a restaurant that isn’t in Chelsea. I found myself in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, at lunchtime. Huntly boasts a museum that is easily the most tragically pathetic in a nation that has more history than it can really cope with. A single room showed off an alderman’s dressing gown and a glass case with a complete set of chain mail sewn together out of press studs. And that was pretty much it. More a dressing-up box than an actual museum.

A local said that the finest food Huntly had to offer was at the Castle Hotel. So off we went. And . . . you know, I can’t bring myself to do it. Maybe I’ve lost my nerve. Maybe it’s the cancer of pity. But it would be like shooting kippers in a bucket. The brochure starts: “It takes a special kind of passion to seek out the rare, beautiful and extraordinary.” And it takes a rare sort of self-restraint not to wipe your bottom on the curtains of people who write about themselves with that kind of self-regard.

It was the end bit, though, that really cocked the pistol of loathing: a picture of mine hosts, him in tweed, cravat and a fulsome grin, her in fleece and cashmere, with the taut demeanour of the professionally hospitable. It was signed, “Haste ye back”, the paper motto of the English gentry in Scotland. No Scot has ever written that. Occasionally, they’ll offer, “Lang may your lum reek”, an Edwardian music-hall catch phrase that means, pointlessly, “Long may your chimney smoke.”

Ever since I hasted me back south, I’ve been considering the minefield of signing off, made so much more acute by e-mail, and I’ve come to realise that all trite expressions of insincere affection drive me to a puce distraction. “Missing you already”: no you’re not, but I wish I were. This should be used only by inept snipers. “LOL”: so much L, in fact, that you can’t even be bothered to spell it out. “Hugs’n’kisses”: anything with a connecting “n” is grounds for wiping your family name from the escutcheon of history. Smiley face: how utterly oxymoronic is smiley face? “Take care”: so you’re implying I’m a simple-minded invalid? “Keep it real”: as opposed to what? Keeping it fantastical? Mythological? Legendary? “Be careful out there”: no, you be careful, because you have no idea how many people want you dead. “Ciao”, “Auf Wiedersehen”, “A bientôt”: anything foreign is nauseating. As is Latin: “Ave!” or “Nil carborundum sodomiti” (“Don’t let the buggers grind you down”). Appeals to God — “Bless”, “Inshallah”, “Shalom” — are only ever written by the damnably apostate. There’s the cheerily Falstaffian “Keep your powder dry”, “Anchors away”, “Steady the buffs” — and the organic-hippie “Keep the faith” and “In with the anger, out with the love”, which are both what a girl I know calls “shag-busters”.

I realise that anyone who sends an e-mail with an attached cliché of even the mildest sentiment disgusts me beyond redemption — certainly beyond invitation. Which leaves us with a problem: how do you sign off? Do you just keep on and on and on writing? Shamefully, I must admit to use of the X key. I don’t mean multiple use, and never, ever, I swear, with an O. But I do do it to people I couldn’t be induced to kiss for cash. I know this is a concern that many of you will have answering suggestions for. Briefly, on an e-mail or a postcard. Cheers. Laters. AA. X

Don’t, whatever you do, try going to the Sanderson hotel for the first time. If you already know your way to Berners Street, in London’s West End, then fine, risk it. But I’ve never ventured into a one-way labyrinth of such sadistic complexity. After I had passed the same minotaur for the third time, I would have happily given up and gone home, if getting home had been any easier.

When the Sanderson opened, it was, briefly, the coolest place in London, until the circling, weeping traffic reminded everyone that they were actually north of Oxford Street. The hotel’s original restaurant was Spoon, invented by Alain Ducasse, the most absurd of all the international celebrity chefs. It was the first and most tiresome of the concept dining rooms that put the temporary into contemporary, and was all style over substance, except for one dish that has sadly been lost to London: bubble-gum-flavoured ice cream made with a particular French bubble gum. Remember the taste of Bazooka? It was a bit like that.

Anyway, Spoon has gone, and in its place is Suka, a new Malaysianish restaurant. Malay is the new Thai, as Thai was once the new Cantonese. Fusion is wandering round the Far East like a serial killer. We were walked through quite a pretty candlelit restaurant to be sat on the Siberian side of some curtains, on bar stools, at simple, refectory-style shared tables. My daughter pointed out that there was nowhere to put your feet, which is almost a disqualifying design fault.

The menu has a little concept, of course, which is that everybody orders three courses and everybody shares. The Blonde and the children had exotic cocktails sans alcohol — all tasted like the leakings from a fruit bat with prostate trouble. I’ve always thought that the alcohol in fruit cocktails is there as a consolation for having to swallow a fruit cocktail.

The starters are the best thing. They always are in eastern food. I think it’s because oriental flavours and textures are particularly intense and gratifying when you’re starving, and become less and less interesting as your hunger is sated. We liked the small squares of soft belly pork and fat spring rolls, and the duck served in what can be described only as sweet, soft panty-pads.

As we went on, it got less good. The beef rendang was just badly made and cooked in a hurry — it tasted like a stewed cowboy boot or, perhaps, a cowboy’s foot in a boot. A tranche of turbot in a butter sauce was pleasant, but unAsian. Nastiest, and most memorable, was the oyster omelette, like fried lung cookie in emphysema. Pudding — a fruit plate — was a Patpong ladyboy sex show: tasteless, underage, hard and not what it’s cracked up to be.

The bill was outrageously large — £255 for four people, with no alcohol and sitting at a shared table, which is not even within hailing distance of value. Oh, and there was the relentless numbing thud of techno-trance, according to my son.

But Suka isn’t really the point of the Sanderson. I was pleasantly astonished by the large, noisy bar. It’s a sure-thing rehearsal room for every lame pick-up line that doesn’t work on MySpace. It plainly will with these girls, who can only count up to eight, but whose bodies go right up to 16. It was a pout-practice workshop, and rather sweet. I’m glad they’ve all found each other, and that the one-way streets will stop them escaping into Soho, where they might damage the gene pool.

Chin-chin.

Suka

Rated 5/5

50 Berners Street, W1; 020 7300 1400.Lunch, noon-2.30pm. Dinner, Mon-Wed, 5.30pm-midnight, Thu-Sat, 5.30pm-12.30am, Sunday, 5.30pm-10.30pm

Ratings

5/5 All the best; 4/5 Kind regards; 3/5 Yours sincerely; 2/5 I must be going; 1/5 Over and out

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