The hops were picked yesterday and by the week of 7 September the Harvest Ale will

The hops were picked yesterday and by the week of 7 September, the Harvest Ale will be available in local pubs, to be followed by a bottled version at Oddbins later in the month.. Enter the cool monochromatic dining-room of Le Caprice and you are likely to be greeted by Angelo Sanchez-Pino, thought by some to be the most consummate maitre d'hotel in London. It is he who decides who sits where; he who guides you to a pristine table, having scanned his table plan; and he will soothe or joke according to your needs For many, Le Caprice is Angelo. "You have to have a vocation," he explains, "although I was born in Bolivia and studied economics in La Paz, I would probably have been a bad economist." His studies ended with the closure of his university after a conflict between the students and the government In 1971, he came to England with his wife. His first job was through a friend, working in the kitchens of a boy's school in Berkhamsted. Soon, he was offered part-time work as a waiter in a French restaurant.

He had discovered his metier. Seventeen years ago, shortly after Christopher Corbin and Jeremy King bought Le Caprice, Angelo applied for a job as a waiter His day's trial was an ordeal. He was too large to fit any of the crisp black staff jackets. His discomfort was further increased by the fact that, as a restaurant manager, he hadn't worked as a waiter for years. "I didn't think they would give me the job," he smiles wistfully. But within two years he was made maitre d'."He's wonderful," enthuses Nick Smallwood, joint owner of Kensington Place, and a regular at Le Caprice "He's an encyclopedia. As soon as you walk into the restaurant, he knows who you are, where you like to sit, everything."Every day, Angelo scans the papers to keep abreast of the arts, politics and social news, carefully matching names with faces. "You have to be very sensitive with customers, making sure no one sits near to someone they might wish to avoid." Once dressed and ready for his evening shift, he exudes a quiet authority reminiscent of a Latin Jeeves.

"I try to assess who wants to be left alone and who would like to chat," he says with a winning smile "And, of course, we respect the privacy of every customer". Having long been associated with the Christmas pickle jar or Russians consuming borscht in sub-zero temperatures, the once-humble beetroot can be now seen on the plates of trendy restaurants from Cornwall to Kensington. Darren Simpson, head chef of Sartoria (Terence Conran's stylish restaurant on London's Savile Row) is an avid enthusiast: "Organic beetroot, red stripey, golden, earthy and sweet. I love it simply served as an antipasti dish, alternatively, it's delicious with fish or meat." He serves it with salmon baked in sea salt, horseradish creme fraiche and dill, and with spring lamb, borlotti beans and salsa verde.

Reputedly Rasputin's favourite vegetable, beetroot is also one of the sweetest - it is from the same family as the sugar beet, and it is generously endowed with vitamins and calcium However, it may be advisable to exercise caution. According to an old Ukrainian proverb: "A tale that begins with a beet, will end with the devil." Aoife O' Riordain. There's a game where you take the name of your first pet and add your mother's maiden name to create your own nom de drag artiste Sometimes the fusion works, sometimes it doesn't. Not many people play parlour games any more, but with fufu, sesame-shiso and wokked lotus root on the menu, Kiki Krowska, Goldie Campbell, and me, Trudie Bridgeman, didn't sound out of place among the latest twists in fashionable food at The Bali Sugar. In its previous incarnation as The Sugar Club, opened by New Zealand restaurateurs with chef Peter Gordon, it established itself as one of the best exponents of, for want of a better description, fusion cooking. It took outsiders to do it well: innocent enough to open a serious restaurant in what had been the epicentre of the 1981 Notting Hill riots; experienced enough to get the service and wines right; knowledgeable enough about European and Asian food to put them together on the menu, though not necessarily on the plate.

And as an Antipodean, Gordon even had an excuse for cooking with kangaroo. Actually, he's talented enough to be excused almost anything. His menus may test your patience, but his dishes don't stretch credulity; there's a compatibility and clarity of flavours on the plate. And whatever the critics of the Pacific Rim thing say, enough customers agree for Gordon's The Sugar Club to have moved into a stark Soho site almost double the size of its original home.Gordon's move created a vacancy in the Notting Hill kitchen. Enter Claudio Aprile, straight from Toronto, a new face at The Bali Sugar, the name now on the facia of the otherwise unchanged restaurant.He, too, is in the vanguard of the round-the-world freestyle. But with Japanese and Mexican as his favourite sources, there's little that's familiar to fall back on when you order. As Goldie said of the adobo chicken with fufu, cumin beans and mole: "It sounds as if it will take up a lot of energy digestively." And that's after the effort expended reading, translating and choosing from the menu.