There is something about this charming restaurant, stuck at the back of the old Blackrock Market, that is instantly likeable. From the moment you arrive there is a sense of warmth and hospitality. In this unassuming dining room, Chef James Sheridan, who runs the restaurant with with wife, is serving up food from a seasonal menu that changes regularly. 

The food we ate was quite good too and demonstrated some decent cookery. A simple dish of nicely cooked scallops with apple and endive was nicely balanced with the right acidity. The best dish was one of cod, hazelnut and Jerusalem artichoke. It was well textured, the cod was perfectly cooked, with an excellent flavour. The main was wigeon, a wild duck with a milder flavour than mallard, that you don't see a lot of on menus. The cooking of the bird was good, if a little bit inconsistent, but the red cabbage was a little bit strong for it. It came with parsley root, which can easily become flavourless and soggy in the wrong hands, but it was very nice. 

The dessert, despite being tasty, gave the feeling that it was a bit of an afterthought. A glass with clementine jelly in the bottom, with some segments of clementine and shortbread and an espuma of chocolate on top. It gave the sense of something concocted because it could be made in advance and easily put together during service. 

Value wise, €42 isn't bad for this food, but the small selection of wines are expensive for their quality.

The restaurant has a sort of supper club feel to it, with a real sense of community and 'dinner with friends' to it. It is nice to see a young couple open a restaurant where they run it together, can cook good, simple, seasonal food and there is a feeling of enjoyment coming from the tiny kitchen right through to the small dining room. In a city where restaurants are opening with a theme or a way to make money, Canteen @ Market is a breath of fresh air, for its humility, humbleness and simplicity. 

Here is a round up of some of the restaurant visits over the last few months.

Relae, Copenhagen
An excellent restaurant serving seasonal and local ingredients. The food in Relae marries big, unadulterated flavours and there are only ever a few components on the plate. The best dish of the night of trout, mushrooms and chicken skin demonstrates what this restaurant does best. The beautifully cooked trout was soft and perfectly cooked and went amazingly well with the raw earthy mushroom, with the chicken skin giving the dish a sort of seasoning and a bit of texture. The food is very pure, each ingredient tasting of what it is and the components combine well together. A dessert of chewy beets divided our opinion on otherwise very good meal that represented very good value in an expensive city.

BROR, Copenhagen
A restaurant from two Noma Alumni, Victor Wågman and Sam Nutter, this is a charming little restaurant serving interesting food. They have taken some of the Noma ethos of regionality, seasonality and experimentation, but have gone completely their own way with the interpretation. The food is simpler, much more rustic, stripped down to it's bare bones. Nose-to-tail cooking is utilised here and they commonly serve a whole head of animal for the whole table to carve. One of the snacks on our meal was a half a cod's head with rye crackers - soft, meaty and delicious. In a city that now has a lot of high end restaurants cooking experimental and challenging food, the food in BROR  offers something a bit different, something a bit more accessible and is worth a visit.


Amass, Copenhagen
Former Noma head chef Matthew Orlando has gone it alone with Amass. He has kept the same high standards of cooking too. The food in Amass really is excellent. This is evident straight away with the fermented potato bread, which is surprisingly light, but at the same time wholesome and moreish with a great earthy flavour. After one dish we moved from the 5 course to the extended menu which had an extra few courses, so we could sample more of the dishes. A parsnip roll, a sort of brandy snap, filled with liquorice and brown butter was perfectly spiced and had great flavours of the season. A serving of pumpkin was also a highlight.  The food was very well balanced, with each element on the plate standing by itself, but marrying well with the others. The dining room has a sort of old airport hanger or warehouse feel to it and there is a bit sterile and lacks warmth. Amass is less than two years old, so it will probably continue to get better and is a must on any stop to Copenhagen.

Restaurante Lasarte, Barcelona
Martin Berasategui's Restaurante Lasarte in Barcelona is cooking ambitious food, much of which was excellent, but occasionally did not quite deliver on flavour. The menu was local, drawing on many ingredients from Catalonia, but with the odd surprise thrown in. The dishes showed a lot of cookery skill and technique and some were truly excellent, but on some the flavours were muddled and confusing on the palate. Some of best dishes were the most simple, which had a tried and tested combination, such as tempered beef, foie gras and mustard ice cream or a serving of snails with crayfish. The perfectly cooked pigeon with a pineapple compote was also extremely good. But other dishes did not live up to this standard, Red prawn 'on a sea bed' had an unpleasant texture . Yolk with toasted butter and black truffle toast lacked definition and was not great on the palate. The service was absolutely flawless, friendly, hospitable, attentive and extremely knowledgeable. Lasarte is an interesting restaurant and the best dishes are extremely good, but it is pricey and there may be better value to be had in Barcelona.

It isn't often that we go to a restaurant that we booked two calendar years previously. But this January we fulfilled our reservation in El Celler de Can Roca, Girona, that we booked in October 2013. A restaurant that is hard to get in to, as most of the world's best restaurants are, is already under pressure to be something special, an experience worth the effort of booking. Celler de Can Roca was certainly worth the wait.

Celler de Can Roca is run by three brothers: Jordi; the head pastry chef, Juan; the head chef and; Josep, front of house and sommelier. The restaurant is just down the road from their family's rustic and traditional restaurant, and this family feel is still evident. But the main sense you get from a meal in Celler de Can Roca is that it is a culinary playground where anything goes and they are not afraid to experiment with unusual ingredients, combinations and techniques. 

When looking for one of the worlds best restaurants you want food that you couldn't get somewhere else, food identifiable to that restaurant and most of all, food that isn't easily forgotten. Celler de Can Roca's has all that. The skill in the cookery is, at times, extraordinary, balancing many large flavours that in the wrong hands could so easily be a disaster. The flavours of Catalonia are big and the food in Celler de Can Roca is no exception. The number of elements in any one dish can be greater than a dozen, but more often than not they arrive on the palate harmoniously and this is what makes Celler de Can Roca unique. 

The small bouches at the start of the meal is where they stray from Catalonia produce by giving delicious tastes inspired by the brothers' travels earlier this year. The rest of the snacks and the meal is more rooted in the region, but not strictly as ingredients from further afield are still used.  Some of these snacks were among the best flavours of the day, such as olives eaten from an olive bonsai tree and a bon bon with vermouth. 

Many dishes were exquisite and will remain in our memory for some time to come. Three flavours of corn ice cream, which is served in the middle of the meal, was beautiful. With the current trend of making desserts less sweet it could easily have been served as a sweet course, but worked beautifully near the start of the meal. Chestnuts with smoked eel had an intense rich flavour, but the texture gets a bit chalky and cloying. Confit skate was served with four mustards, which although sounding a bit too much, worked very well when eaten in the correct order. The best dish was prawn with vinegar. The prawn legs were served crisp and the head juices dish gave it a deep, but still light, flavour of prawn. It was one of the simplest dishes, in terms of the number of ingredients, on the menu, but it was perfect.  A dish of pigeon may have been the most disappointing as the texture of the pigeon was a bit tough and not that appealing.

The desserts were really excellent. Orange and carrots was refreshing. 'Chocolate Anarchy' was a mix of many chocolates with different tastes and intensities which managed to all merge together and still deliver their own unique flavour. The best dessert was a delicate and moreish sour-dough ice cream with a vinegar meringue.

El Celler de Can Roca is extremely clever and the talent and skill to be able to concoct some of these dishes is extraordinary. While you are eating the food you get a sense of fun coming from the kitchen, a sort of puerile mentality, where nothing is off the table and experimenting with new ingredients, combinations and techniques is what they love to do. 

Whist many dishes are excellent however, the food at times can feel a little bit clinical. You can appreciate the skill, the cleverness, and even the flavours but it just lacks something else, maybe an ethos or a purpose to some dishes. There can be so many ingredients in one dish that, even though they are married together, they just can be a little bit nondescript.

El Celler de Can Roca is definitely worth the wait and it was fun gastronomic experience delivering great flavours, many of which of Catalonia, from an extremely talented avant-garde kitchen.