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On my way home from a pleasant, cheap but ultimately disappointing meal at Kaosarn I texted a friend, sympathising with her similar experience a few weeks back. "Did you ask for authentic spicing?" she replied, and immediately a conversation we'd had around that time came flooding back - namely that Kaosarn will up the heat to face-burningly authentic levels if - and crucially only if - you ask. Naturally, I was annoyed I'd forgotten this bit of advice but annoyed not just with myself - why is getting more authentic (and by all accounts better) spicing incumbent upon the customer to happen to know to ask for it? Why didn't our waitress, when we'd made our selections, pro-actively offer at least the option of the hot stuff?Having to go through hoops to get better food from restaurants reluctant to serve the "authentic" dishes to anyone who looks Western (or otherwise) enough not to appreciate it is a depressing feature of dining out in London, and yet it doesn't need to be like this. Many decent Chinese restaurants for example, if they're really so sure that a good chunk of their customers wouldn't be able to cope with Sichuan peppercorns or crispy pig's intestines, have a section of the menu for timid gweilos

Anyway, we forgot to ask for authentic spicing, and so everything we ate at Kaosarn is in the context of being more Western-friendly than we would have otherwise liked. But even so, a small bowl of larb

Moo ping (grill pork skewers) had a decent sweet marinade and I liked the mix of lean meat and fat, but they needed more crisping up on the outside, perhaps over hotter coals; these were rather uniformly flabby. And a Som Tum Thai

And if not asking how spicy we'd like our food was a service issue, then the same is definitely true of how they allowed us to order two plates of exactly the same dish. Perhaps we should have guessed that Peek Gai Tod

Gai Tod

Is it technically still a press trip when it doesn't actually involve any press? There were six of us, amateur bloggers all, invited along to what was billed as a Shellfish Journey (with matching Twitter hashtag #shellfishjourney, 'natch

Fortunately, for us and more importantly the kind people of VisitSweden.com, the trip was an absolute blast. The weather, first of all, was incredibly good, and despite various PR-savvy Swedes informing us, tongue-in-cheek under bright sunshine, that it was "always like this" in mid-October, something about the rather more "broody" shots from previous trips tells me that isn't quite the case. But from a freakishly smooth SAS early morning flight from Heathrow (plus complimentary use of the Heathrow Star Alliance lounge, thankyouverymuch) to a boat trip on the last day which would have been a lot more... challenging

First stop on day one was a beautifully restored early 20th century mansion house, now a hotel, on a hill overlooking a lake in the town of Ljungskile. Oddly for the first meal on a "shellfish journey" our lunch was a dish of chicken and girolles mushrooms in an apple sauce (with some kind of alcohol too, perhaps cider) and a lovely sweet root vegetable cake thing. As an introduction to Nordic cuisine it all seemed a bit French, but the accompanying fresh bread rolls and crispbreads were fantastic, as was the butter, and apparently all the ingredients were very local/foraged.For our first taste of West Sweden's seafood bounty we boarded a small boat in Lysekil (pronounced something like "Lisse-shil" I think) harbour and headed out to where the mussels grow, attached to cross-hatched ropes under large floating tubes. This being quite early in the season, all there was to see on the ropes themselves were the odd tiny juvenile mussel amongst an alarming carpet of strange writhing tiny sea creatures of some kind, but it was all still fascinating stuff. At a wooden hut knocked up on a remote island near the mussel beds we were treated to a moules marinere cooked on a portable gas ring ("here's some we prepared earlier"), along with our first taste of an extraordinary delicacy, the powerfully metallic native oysters. Sat in our hilariously oversized survival suits, eating fresh oysters and sweet mussels and watching the sunset on a remote island miles away from civilisation, it was a magical introduction to the country.That evening, dinner was a seafood buffet at an atmospheric little restaurant in Lysekil old town called Ferdinand's. We were told it can generally only be booked by groups tied into a Sweden tour package, and mindful of the kind of "restaurants" you're lumbered with in the UK if you go for a hotel tie-in (50% off at next door's Harvester, or perhaps if you're very lucky a Groupon voucher for Pizza Express) it's fair to say my expectations weren't high. But the quality of the food and generosity of spirit was stunning. Huge trays of dill-softened gravadlax and fresh salads, hot rolls and more of that lovely salty crispbread, and - most importantly - as many fat langoustine and sweet crab claws as my freebie-loving face could fit. Bed that night was the eclectic Strandfickomo Hotel, clean and comfortable and good Wi-Fi coverage (gold dust to a Twitter-obsessed loser like me) but with an interesting approach to interior design. Some of our group shared their rooms with creepy dead sailors belongings and a disembodied Victorian nightgown; I think I got off lightly just having this staring at me as I tried to nod off:Wasting no time the next day we were bussed off to Stromstad and from there a short ferry ride to the Koster islands, home to (be still my beating heart) the Lobster Safari. No cars are allowed on Koster; instead, residents (of which there are a few hundred permanent) and tourists (hundreds of thousands in the summer months) get around either on pushbikes or these strange machines that look like the flat trolleys at Homebase welded to the back end of a scooter. They looked fun, and are just the right size for hauling around big boxes of lobster and crab - handy that. Before the lobster, though, a tour of the island by bike, and lunch at a rustic farm/cafe in the centre of the island called the Koster Gardens. The food here was obsessively local - every ingredient in our lunch was either grown on the farm itself or, in the case of a handful of edible flowers, an hours boat ride away. It was very interesting to see how fierce localism (horrible word but I can't think of a better one) isn't particular to middle-class Tom and Barbara types in the UK - indeed, the locavore (ugh) has their own temple in Scandinavia, just further south in Copenhagen in the form of Noma. Personally, I don't think you're betraying any very important foodie ideals by having a bit of Irish beef or Spanish anchovy every now and again but hey, each to their own.Due to a two-metre swell out in the open ocean where the lobster pots were, our hosts quite rightly concluded our weak city-dwelling stomachs couldn't deal with quite that much reality of a Saturday afternoon and after a pleasant pootle around calmer waters in a fishing boat came back to Koster to gawp at a few boxes of lobster braver people had caught earlier in the day. They were lively beasts, flicking and wriggling in a way you hardly ever see even from the freshest examples to reach London, and included a huge 50-year-old mammoth beast of about two kilos - not great for eating perhaps but fascinating to see.So what did they taste like? Back at the hotel, later that evening, we were treated to a lobster menu, beginning with a gorgeous silky lobster bisque and generously followed up with a whole beast each. They were, if perhaps not any better

The next day, early but not so bright thanks to spending until midnight in the hotel bar the night before drinking £7 beers and watching a middle-aged 3-piece work their way through a repertoire of Bryan Adams and Wham!, we set off for Grebbestad. This is where the Oyster Experience was to take place, which sounded very intriguing, but getting there involved an hour long boat ride over waters that, if they had been any choppier, may have meant a premature end to the gastronomic experience for a few of our party. For whatever reason, and I'm not trying to sound smug here, just stating the facts - I've never had too much of a problem with sea travel, and so I think I probably enjoyed bouncing around in the back of a small boat a bit more than some of my friends. Before long, though, we had arrived at an achingly picturesque seaside shack and were watching our host dredging up fresh oysters from the beds right underneath the building. Following a short demonstration we were even let loose with a shucking knife ourselves, to discover first-hand how opening oysters really isn't as easy as it looks. Having opened a few rocks in Spain a few years back I had nearly convinced myself I might repeat my success, only to "expertly" slice one of the precious, delicious natives almost entirely in half in an effort to get it open. Still tasted nice though, as did the 2nd massive seafood buffet of the trip served in the same shack, consisting of more huge langoustine and fresh brown crab.A fantastic experience then, from start to end, and one I'm equally flattered and delighted to have been invited on. But let me try for a moment to be objective. There are some things that are irrefutable - West Sweden is a breathtakingly beautiful part of the world, clean and fresh and easy, populated by friendly, helpful (and helpfully English-speaking) people and where, at least from our PR-cossetted experience, the food is fantastic. And I would have no problem recommending anyone go there if - and it's a big if - it wasn't all quite so expensive. Firstly, the biggest problem for a boozehound like me (and if I know anything about my readership, most of the rest of you too) is that alcohol is astonishingly wallet draining. A beer in the hotel bar - ONE BEER, and not even quite a pint (500ml), was 70 Kroner - about £7 at current exchange rates. Wine was worse, even the cheapest on the list in the lobster restaurant on Sunday being a Jacob's Creek Semillon Chardonnay for £36 - yes, the same as the ones you see in Tescos. And lastly, spirits - a double of something even quite ordinary like Jack Daniels or Beefeater gin will set you back at least £10, and in fact in many places is even more. Alcohol tax rates are set by the Swedish government of course, and are nobody's fault that we met over the weekend, but having to worry quite so much about how much you're spending on everyday holiday activities like eating and drinking really does become an issue. At least, I imagine it would.Also, the hotel we stayed at in Lysekil, pleasant and clean if ever so slightly Haunted House is currently available on Expedia "from" £181 a night in October. I think there are better deals if you book in advance, but still, not cheap. Better value perhaps is a 3-day lobster experience (a more extended version of the mini preview we had) on South Koster which is £359 per person based on two sharing a room, which includes all meals including the final day's lobster feast. And for £24 the oyster class and tasting at Grebbestad is well worth the money - watching your live lunch being dredged out of the sea and then opening them up yourself with a glass of local porter is unforgettable.So, blame the Swedish tax system, blame our pathetic currency or simply blame sheer cosmic injustice that this idyllic place is just slightly out of the average-earning Brit's reach. But for die-hard seafood fanatics I can't imagine there are many better places in the world to indulge yourself - the whole trip was almost worth it for a taste of those stunning native oysters, and after all this was always going to be a shellfish journey, not a steak-and-wine journey. It's worth repeating, too, just how

Photos, apart from Bjorn the Evil Pheasant, courtesy of Food Stories.

London will never be the kind of city where you can simply wander into the nearest restaurant and be reasonably assured of a good meal; it is not Tokyo, it is not Madrid, and New York too probably has us beat on the Tourist Trap Test. But only the most stubborn nostalgist would argue that things haven't massively improved here recently. Think about it - how many restaurants that have closed over the last few years do you still mourn? Perhaps Eastside Inn, maybe Kastoori. And over the same period, how many new ones could you now not live without? It's impossible to imagine Soho without Spuntino, Hackney without Brawn, Bermondsey without José. While the flashy big-name openings get the international headlines (and yes, the odd blog post), it's too easy to overlook the change happening across the board. Witness, in particular, the revolution that street food vans have brought to budget dining - a few years ago the notion that a world-class West Coast style burger could be purchased from a pub in Peckham for £6 would have been laughable. Now, we're so spoiled that the news of the Meatwagon's first permanent bricks-and-mortar outlet was greeted with something approaching nonchalance.It's almost as if we've happened upon a culinary identity by completely abandoning any attempts to find one. There isn't, probably never will be, any such thing as a Typical London Restaurant. London doesn't have an equivalent of New York's delis, Madrid's tapas bars, Tokyo's ramen joints. But what it does have is

Mercado San Miguel

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