Indian street food places such as Dishoom may be thriving but thousands of traditional restaurants have closed. Has the classic curry fallen out of favour?

Britain’s love affair with curry goes back centuries, long before the boom in the late 1970s saw restaurants popping up in every town and city. Well into the 90s and 00s, going for a curry, mopped up with naan bread and washed down with your drink of choice, was a Friday night staple.

But in recent years the traditional British curry house has been in decline, and the famous Balti Triangle in Birmingham, once home to dozens of Balti restaurants, has only four remaining .

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Decades of civil war and economic meltdowns left Lebanon’s people struggling for hope – and then three years ago came the devastating explosion in the capital’s port. But the country’s creatives are fighting back. Introduction by Joumana Haddad, interviews by Killian Fox

Can you imagine what it meant to grow up in Beirut during Lebanon’s civil war in the 1980s? If a shell didn’t kill you, hopelessness surely would. And death by despair is a thousand times worse, and more final, than death by a missile. But something kept me hopeful and alive, day after day, despite all the misery and desolation surrounding me. Something almighty, intensely transformative – something magical: it was literature.

I didn’t read to learn (the latter was a mere collateral benefit); I read to unlearn. To unlearn hate and fear and distress and despair. To unlearn closed doors and clipped wings and tunnels without a light at the end of them. I read to forget everything and everyone that was trying to kill me, outside as well as inside.

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The live-fire grilling at Parakeet is really exciting, but their dog-friendly policy is barking mad

The Parakeet, 256 Kentish Town Road, London NW5 2AA ( theparakeetpub.com ). Snacks £3.50-£8.50, small plates £10-£15, large plates £23-£42, wines from £25

There are many things that might improve a restaurant experience. Having a stranger’s chunky dog rub its hind quarters against you, then lick your companion’s hand is not one of them. The team at the Parakeet in London’s Kentish Town might well feel this is an unfair way to begin this column, given the plaudits they’ve received for their food. They’re about to get a few more of those plaudits. But I review restaurants, not just the food they serve. The first thing I mentioned to friends after eating there wasn’t the lovely lamb belly with courgette and anchovy or the terrific house pickles – we’ll come back to them – but the bloody dog. And the way various waiters told me they hated the pro-dog policy (guide dogs, excepted).

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Wolfgang Puck and Alain Ducasse join forces to create a one-off ‘last supper’ for diners willing to pay up to £1,000 with wine and service

For the super-rich, it appears, one world-famous Michelin-starred chef is no longer quite enough to make a memorable meal. Wealthy gastronomes are increasingly asking high-end restaurants and hotels to host so-called “four hands dinners” in which pairs of renowned chefs team up to create collaborative set-course meals.

Next Wednesday 60 diners will sit down to a “glorious four hands banquet” created by thepioneering French chef Alain Ducasse in partnership with Wolfgang Puck, an Austrian-American cook who has hosted the official Oscars after-party dinner for the past 29 years , at a five-star hotel on London’s Park Lane. Together, they hold 23 Michelin stars.

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Vibrant and nonconformist, this Mexican taqueria is the area’s most exciting new opening for a while

There is no cutlery at Homies on Donkeys , a taqueria in Leytonstone, east London, that is run by Sandra Bello and chef Erik “Smokey” Bautista. “No cutlery, no exceptions, we got napkins, get messy,” it says on the single-sheet menu, alongside descriptions of their abundantly stacked tacos filled with reverse-braised bavette or confit pork with dripping, wobbling amounts of jalapeño relish.

This fork-free zone will come as a relief to some informal diners, who find all those butter knives, dessert spoons, cheese scoops and grape shears a bit bamboozling. It may, however, dismay anyone wearing a non-wipeable fabric such as cashmere. Homies on Donkeys is more of a sou’wester kind of place, with added salsa verde and chipotle on your chin when you pay the bill. It’s also a place for people who like 1990s hip-hop, graffiti-strewn walls and the sensation of eating in a suburban skate park: Naughty By Nature, Main Source, Gang Starr and Grand Puba blare from the stereo as I sit at a table that is absolutely nowhere near big enough for all the tacos, large plates, sides and drinks that we’ve ordered; we’re also wedged in next to the till, where the servers are constantly ringing in orders. While the seating may not be ideal, the soundscape just about makes up for it. This isn’t a 90s-themed restaurant, but if you’re of a certain age, remember the Beastie Boys back when they were gobby kids , videoed Dance Energy with Normski on BBC Two or ever got grounded for tagging your neighbour’s garage, this place is like sensory whiplash with tacos on top.

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Just four balti houses remain in the area as customers have moved on to dessert parlours and burger bars

Back in its heyday, Birmingham’s famous Balti Triangle was home to more than 30 authentic balti houses, with an estimated 20,000 diners a week passing through during the boom years in the 90s and 00s.

But today just four remain, as economic pressures and changing culinary trends have led many to be replaced by takeaways and dessert shops.

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For truly sensational fresh seafood, head for a refurbished yacht club at Coleraine

Lir and Native Seafood & Scran , The Marina, Coleraine, Northern Ireland BT52 1EY. Meal for two, starters £7.50-£8.50, mains £16-£29, desserts £7.50, wines from £24

The restaurant stands by the river. The river runs down to the sea, where the fish swim deep. The fish are brought to the restaurant that stands by the river which runs down to the sea. Do excuse me, but there’s just something about the simplicity of Lir, hard by the River Bann in Northern Ireland, which brings out the terrible Ernest Hemingway parody act in me. I promise it won’t happen again. The Coleraine business was born out of a fascination with the sea, and a belief by owners Rebekah and Stevie McCarry that not enough of the fabulous seafood caught by the day boats working off the Northern Irish coast ends up being eaten by those who live on the shore.

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The rise of ‘invasivorism’ has introduced a range of unusual eating choices as diners strive for a more ethical diet

It can be grilled like asparagus, mixed into a sweet-sour ripple ice-cream or even turned into a beer. When guests arrive at Silo, a “zero-waste” restaurant in east London, next month they’ll be treated to a series of dishes from an unlikely source. It is more famous as the scourge of homeowners , but for some, the solution to the Japanese knotweed crisis is to serve it for dinner.

Eating invasive species – called “invasivorism” – is increasingly fashionable as people search for ethical diets. In London, at The Ninth in Fitzrovia, three-cornered leek, a milder version of wild garlic, has been whipped into aioli, while at Native in Mayfair it is used alongside asparagus. At Seasonality in Maidenhead you can tuck into muntjac deer tartare, while Edinburgh’s The Palmerston uses sika deer extensively.

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Food is a reflection of a society, says Michelin-starred chef whose African dishes with a twist are shaking up the fine-dining scene

In a small house on a quiet residential street in southern Paris, a tiny restaurant with only 28 covers has become the most sought-after eating experience in France.

When the redesigned MoSuke restaurant reopens next week, boasting unique west and central African dishes re-interpreted with a French and Japanese twist, it will already be fully booked for months – filling up less than two hours after reservations opened. Its clientele of all ages and backgrounds is more diverse than the classic Paris restaurant scene and it has been described as a fine-dining revolution in France.

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