Bobby Fitzpatrick, West Hampstead

Cheesier than Laughing Cow cubes and pineapple pieces on cocktail sticks served at Abigail’s Party, the new gaff from the guys at Coin Laundry is stuck in the same Formica and shag pile bad taste time-warp as Mike Leigh’s iconic play, the mid-70s. In a lurid lounge and downstairs living room furnished in the sort of curated kitsch Corrie’s Jack and Vera Duckworth coveted, or In a tacky full-scale kitchenette ripped out of a ghastly Grimsby granny flat circa Little Jimmy Osmond, rip into rum-laced rinses. Bobby’s first love is Alison Mahoney (a spicy Havana 3-y-o lime and ginger tease) and on a Tequila tip, we’re torn between tropical fruity Michelle Ma Belle or Caribbean carnival crush, Sexy Ting. Club together for gin and pisco puncheons to share, shooters and hoochy slushies from a tacky bar straight out of a Willesden working mens club from back when real men wore Brut and Bri-Nylon briefs. Snack on prawn cocktail, deep-fried garlic mushrooms, chicken nuggets or potato skins loaded with bacon and sour creams. More filling still, there’s pizza topped with lamb doner and garlic sauce,  chicken tikka, or ‘the full English’; Red Leicester cheeseburger, and rum baba or banana pie with a side of Barry White and The Bee Gees.

273 West End Lane NW6 1QS 7433 1989 www.bobbyf.co.uk

Leman Street Tavern, Aldgate

In what was once the colourful heart of the old Jewish East End, the pogrom continues unchecked. Championed by a megalomaniac Mayor who has the interests of Brexit Boris, not London or Britain, at the heart of his cold calculating heart; Goodman’s Fields is yet another shining example of the shiny boxy bland ghettoes to greed that are disfiguring our city, robbing it of all originality and charm. At the entrance to this new 'luxury' slum, Geronimo Inns has splashed out a tidy sum on its latest trough and watering hole, Leman Street Tavern. The same £1.5 million would just about buy a banker a pad here - although possibly not one with a view of the equine civic 'art' that announces it. This is a blessing in disguise: two bronze stallions frolicking in a stream are the sort of trashy 70s sculptures only Beverley from Abigail's Party or deranged deceased dictators, the Caesescus, would brook in their front yard's brook. Geronimo Inns' ('a group of proper pubs with an eye for the different and the delicious’) newbie is comfy, colourful and serviceable… but for ‘different’ read 'design-by-numbers after various punchier postmodern bar-brasserie-gastropubs.' ‘Delicious’? That'll be Macon-Lugny on a list that largely sits south of £30 and offers two dozen choices by the glass for sunny day stragglers drawn to a generic pavement terrace  onto a chronically congested A-road. Fill up on bar snacks of black pudding sausage roll, baked Camembert with buttered soldiers, and potato and leek hotpot. Dine on crab gratin followed by pork faggot, greens and mash, with fried milk and poached rhubarb for afters at  LST, the sort of mid-market one-size-fits-all gaff I imagine morning TV Haribore eye candy Susanna Reid might fancy. Me? I'm off to grittier gaffs on nearby polyglot Brick Lane...before the Curse of the Developer destroys it too. 

Goodman’s Fields, Leman Street, E1 8EY 3437 0001www.lemanstreettavern.co.uk