Hakkasan, London

The chatter of conversation travels up dark mahogany trellises, latticeworks through which light interweaves in Chinese patterns. A woman stands feet apart, stony-faced, freeze-framed and heavily made up. Behind her is what looks like a panel, which she occasionally beats back with her palm like a gong, to reveal a passageway to the bathrooms.

The tables are dark like the latticework, divided by darkness. The diners see and are recognised by waves of light that come from unobtrusive ceiling spotlights above each table, creating a pool of intimacy, enclosing each group's table with dark space, so that they feel they are the only diners being waited on. Diners are encircled in dishes of light as waiters place dishes of food between them.

Alan and I have a marvellous time here. This restaurant is popular and time is tightly kept, each diner only allowed a limited slot in this enchanted space of dark wood and stylish lighting. Mysterious glimmers of smiles and snippets of conversation flit like fireflies across the lake of marble floor. After being served small dishes of food as potent as potions and as bewitching, we are asked to move to the bar. Here the last of our white wine tingles in our glasses as we talk of literature, Proust, cubism, whether Braques beats Picasso, the purpose of words...

I step into the cab, utterly bewitched, and gabble words into my mobile phone as though under a spell. Entranced.

Guardian review, Hakkasan's

Nuremberg, Germany

This place is beautiful only if you can call concrete jungles beautiful. Expensive shops, complicated fretwork, buildings rise like sculptures from concrete plinths. Humans walk around like living miniatures. The tall buildings shade most of the ground from the sun, dip it in semi-darkness - a perfect light for preserving expensive artworks.

But we are not miniatures or models or sculptures, we are people. We are breathing, living beings - and there is something beautiful about life that this city with its grey squares and fancy pavement patterns iscrushing, withholding, failing to acknowledge. Art that is truly beautiful, or arresting, often contains a glimmer of life, of emotion or muscle or colour or something, some vivacity, which Nuremberg totally lacks.