Chocolate Unwrapped & Richard Corrigan and Sat Bains at Bentley's Oyster Bar and Grill

I've just spent an interesting afternoon at Chocolate Unwrapped next to borough market at

London Bridge, and was reminded of my fantastic meal at Bentley's Oyster Bar and Grill. Richard Corrigan, the chef at Bentley's teamed up with Sat Bains to produce a fantastic lunch as part of a stunt called 10-10-10 by American Express to pair up some of the UK's best chefs, and see them work together to invent fantastic menus.

The dessert that I had was amazing. It was made with Original

Beans by John Freeman of Restaurant Sat Bains (http://www.restaurantsatbains.com/),

and was an amazingly oriental chocolate dessert. He used coriander and yoghurt with crumbled chocolate shortbread, which was surprisingly complimentary to the deeply intense, velvety chocolate and gave an incredible earthy flavour. I think that this earth taste was in fact reflected in the whole meal, especially the starter, an oyster soup, something which I'd never tried before. Having not been too keen on oysters before, I was pleasantly surprised with the deliciousness of this. The frothy soup was like spooning up the sea, and the oyster was actually quite tasty!

The highlight of the meal for me, though, was Sat's salmon dish. It looked like it could have just

come out of an alien flying saucer, with the dark green bobbles spotted around the fish. But the fish was stunning, a match even for my grandma's salmon. I'm not sure what Sat did, but I seem to remember that it was poached for a long long time at 40 degrees, but it tasted so fresh, it was almost like eating sashimi, and the pickled ginger added to my suspicions... there was just something indescribably fantastic about it. The texture was phenomenal, because each flake would just peel away. It was just the sort of dish that made me smile :)

Chocolate Week's event was very busy, especially the talks, and I

think it's great that people are becoming more interested in chocolate. There were a few tacky stalls, with flashing lights and gold flowers, but also some charming sculptures, including the gorilla that I'd seen a few weeks ago at the experimental food fair. There was also a rather beautiful chocolate treble clef, which I liked. I tried a rather unusual Marmite chocolate from Paul Young, which was really tasty, with

a very subtle umami flavour just breaking through. His Marmite bar was greatly superior to Marmite's own brand, which I must say was absolutely sickly. Paul had also done a strange chocolate wall, for people to sign and write messages on, which was very fun, and got loads of attention!