There’s nothing to beat the misery of a wet Saturday afternoon in a Croydon shopping centre where roads are congested with customers from nearby Ikea. Walking into Cosmo starts off promisingly enough – there’s a queue of people who make up the 25,000 weekly diners here and you’re taken in by smiley folk on walkie-talkies and the room is huge, well laid out and easy to navigate.

I went to the bar to grab some drinks and did what you do in buffets and stand behind the person in front of you. Only he was standing in the wrong place. “You come here, I don’t go there!” the bartender barked.

It reminded me of Wong Kei.

Except the food (and the price) at Wong Kei forgives all. Here the food is cold, dull and lifeless and is served by people who are cold, dull and lifeless to customers who are cold, dull and lifeless. The obese chavs in shell suits at our neighbouring table (mum, dad and son all Wayne Rooney look-a-likes) didn’t seem to mind and must have not just had seconds, but also thirds, fourths, fifths and sixths by the time we left, when the queue to get in was even bigger.

The eat-all-you-can-for-one-price principle is a dubious one, especially when so much of the food on offer is deep-fried and fatty. Imagine a bar offering to drink all you can for £16.99. It would be slapped down for being irresponsible. Watching the super-sized diners waddle from stand to stand pursuing the desire to eat until you’re sick filled me with dread, a horrible flash-forward. Obesity levels in Britain have tripled since 1980 and 11 million more people are expected to join that number over the next 20 years.

On so many levels, our biggest restaurant is also our worst.

In my head I don’t see the two as contradictory.

First and foremost, it’s important to the business that I am out and about seeing what other restaurants are doing, watching new trends and nicking any decent ideas – and sometimes people too. Secondly, I really enjoy what I do and shouldn’t need to make excuses for that.

Mrs Thatcher used to criticise Keynseian economists for thinking you could spend your way out of a recession. Maybe there’s a third reason which we could all follow on from; whether it’s at your local pub or in a fancy restaurant, we can eat and drink our way out of a recession. Buying two-for-one deals and half price beer from supermarkets may seem like a more frugal thing to do in seemingly uncertain times but the Asdas and the Tescos of the world are still raking in huge profits, whilst your local caff or curry house faces closure because you’re not going there as often.

After all, as the prime minister said, we’re all in this together.

A famous and glamorous New York chef once proudly told me she always keeps a bottle of Tabasco in her handbag.

All around us, we’re turning up the heat. My best Christmas present this year was a collection of chillies from around the world. We’re all becoming familiar with Scoville Scale and I keep reading articles about the health benefits of hot food.

And to bring it home, where do you think the world’s hottest chilli is grown? Mexico? India? Nope it’s south Devon. So it seems we’re progressing to becoming a nation of chilliholics.

It’s a myth (perpetuated by many immigrant communities as well as stalwarts of French cuisine) to say that developing a taste for hot food numbs the palate for more subtle western dishes but if you do find yourself in constant need of a spice kick, don’t let that put you off coming to Roast. Our new head chef Marcus has placed that most British of dishes on the menu – a curry.

I don’t share many of her political views (and quite what the politics of this Labour Party are seem hard to define, let alone challenge) but as a human being she is a decent person. Undeniably her famous Tweet was daft and unacceptable and Ed Miliband showed us for the first time his leadership skills by bringing her into line over it.

If he allows her to stay in the shadow cabinet, it will be his second act of good leadership.

Also yesterday, further down the headlines, was the news that Professor David “whites are the new blacks” Starkey (who taught me at university very well and is also a very nice person) has been asked to curate an exhibition in the neighbourhood where Stephen Lawrence was murdered. Just as there were calls for Diane’s resignation, there have been viral campaigns to boycott David’s show.

Rather than banning, sacking, boycotting shouldn’t we – the moderate mainstream majority- just recognise the right to be wrong?

This is heartening news. Contrary to common stereotype, Muslims are celebrating the birth of Jesus in traditional form. As Abrahamic faiths, this shouldn’t come as a surprise though of course Judaism falls under the category and moderate Jewish and Muslim leaders here in Britain are coming to together to tackle growing conflicts and tensions on university campuses, which isn’t where we should be.

We should use our food traditions as greater cultural levellers than we do. So let’s all eat latkes on Hannukah, Biryani at Eid, Gulab Jamun on Diwali. Celebrating each other’s cuisines helps us celebrate and respect each other’s cultures.

Let’s eat our way to a more tolerant 2012.

Less than a minute’s walk away The Wolseley serves more people than that and around the corner from there fashionistas climb over each other to get a table at Cecconi. Up the road from there the new Hakkasan is taking nearly twice the earnings of the first one less than half a mile away. Round the corner from that the newly re-jigged Dover Street Arts Club has apparently 2000 on its waiting list and is close to meltdown.

Tomorrow I’m going to 34, Richard Caring’s new place off Grosvenor Square doing steaks just like Maze Grill on the square itself and just like the new Wolfgang Puck Cut restaurant round the corner on Park Lane. With the exception of The Wolseley (I haven’t been as a paying customer yet to Novikov) they are all crazily priced and yet we all go and pay those crazy prices. I hear there are more restaurants due to open in the neighbourhood soon in the new year too.

If they’re not cannibalising each other – and they don’t appear to be – we must conclude that in these precarious times more of us are dining out more often. This is not just good news for us restaurateur folk but also for diners being given more choices and in particular for London’s economy. More restaurants means more jobs, more taxes being paid, less people on benefit. So go out, dine and help London buck the national trend.

So you have probably heard that Chicken Tikka Masala (CTM as it’s known in the trade) was created in a restaurant up north in the 70s when a customer ordered tikka and found it had no sauce so the chef took it back into the kitchen, whirled it about in a pan with some Campbells tomato soup and cream and hey presto, our national dish was created. I made it up and I love the fact that people to this day quote this story back to me as if they’ve unearthed some great revelation. It’s a gift that keeps on giving.

Recently I have been roped in to advise government on the establishment of an academy for Asian cuisine to build local skills to establish more interest in the curry restaurant sector rather than rely on talent being recruited from abroad. It’s being dubbed the curry college and everyone’s jumping on board because, of course, we all love a curry.

But do we love making unsubstantiated claims?

Over the weekend The Independent’s online version ran a video clip about the project in which our very own Mayor Boris appeared and cited the “fact” that there are more Indian restaurants in London than in Delhi and Bombay combined. It put a smile on my face but won’t on his when I tell him (which I will take pleasure in doing) that I made that one up too. I am the chair of his Mayor’s Fund Business Club – or at least I am until he finds this out.

When a few of us decided to visit a restaurant just opened by someone we knew for a casual Saturday lunch, it was suggested we call the owner to secure a table. I said we should just take our chances and we shouldn’t bother him on what may well be his day off and in any case there’s only a handful of places in London that are rammed for Saturday lunch. A new place just off Wigmore Street wasn’t likely to be one of them.

So I turn up at 12.30 to Meatliquor and yes, there’s already a queue and carnage. Their website states their location, opening times and their queuing policy, which is basically a re-interpretation of the Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest – if you see a table become free, go for it. Once you get inside you can’t help get into this den of iniquity; the windows are blacked out and interior design is largely by way of graffiti. At Novikov in Mayfair, where I was invited for a preview lunch earlier in the week, no expense has been spared. Here, no expense has been made. There are no napkins but each table has a roll of kitchen paper.

Yanni the owner was busy running around and even had time to berate a neighbouring group for hogging a bigger table while waiting for their friends to arrive because “it was against our stated democratic principles and unfair to the other people waiting”. These genteel Mayfair folk were clearly taken aback by the rebuke, but good on you Yanni for sticking to your guns.

Wine and water are served in jam jars and in the spirit of sustainability the lids are numbered and used as tab tickets. The food is wings, burgers and chilli cheese fries – very New York and as they say there, what’s not to like.

By the time we left there must have been close onto 100 people queuing outside. There’s the old political adage “give the people bread and circuses and they won’t turn against you”. Meatliquor shows that if you give people chilli cheese fries with urban sub-culture panache, the people will find you.

The sixth poorest borough in Britain had until recently the highest paid council chief executive in the country and spent £111 million on its new glitzy waterside offices is clearly a place of many contradictions. Its residents have some of the highest levels of obesity, heart disease and diabetes in the country yet it closes down the kind of place that would help detonate the time bomb the health service faces in the future when the fried chicken kids of today become the long term patients of tomorrow.

You would have thought that with all the big businesses coming into the area like Westfield, with Excel building a new hotel and with Siemens taking a landmark presence the council leaders would have extracted cash out of them to fill holes created by government cuts. This is the same council that recently offered to lend £40 million to West Ham football club to take over the stadium after the games, so there’s clearly something not stacking up here.

You have to wonder what kinds of games are really being played over there.

When the first dish to arrive was a plate of crispy fried duck’s tongues, I knew this was no fish cake and green chicken curry kind of place. Utterly delicious salads and stir-fries came and went, spiked with every kind of chilli imaginable rendering each of us at some stage gasping, choking or crying yet curiously, we carried on devouring the stuff.

The place was full of young Thai customers and on the walls were screens showing what I presume is Bangkok’s version of MTV with their pop songs being subtitled and I soon found out why. Unlike your Japanese variety, Thai karaoke doesn’t require you to get on a stage. Here, they bring a microphone to your table and you sing in your seat. So much more civilised.

Driven by what I must presume be a chilli—spiked endorphin rush, I decided to have a go and I was so completely, utterly rubbish that the manager stepped in and changed the Thai song to one by Adele, which I coped with marginally better though I was ashamed that the brash authenticity of the place had been compromised by my performance. Thai folk are too polite – they should have laughed me out of there.

I hope they don’t compromise on karaoke again because next it will be mild dishes and then, heaven forbid, cutlery.