S. Worthen | Weblog

If you have a standard atmospheric pressure the boiling point is 100C. If you add a handful of salt to a litre of water, the boiling point goes up to about 100.5C, but if you take your pan and take it off the stove and put it on the floor the boiling point will go up by about 0.3C because the pressure of the air above has increased.

From a Guardian article on The Fat Duck (via oursin), just named the "Best Restaurant in the World" by colleagues and critics in Restaurant magazine.

Britain still gets the occasional bad rap for food, but a quarter of the best fifty restaurants in this poll are British. The few times I've had a lousy meal at a British restaurant, I haven't been back. Additionally, London has the best-quality chain restaurants and takeout joints I've ever been in: Carluccio's, Prêt à Manger.

To be fair, the average cost of a meal is higher in the UK. For the price of a good Toronto meal, we can normally only find mediocre food in London, if we haven't planned ahead and read up on some tasty cheap location. Groceries, happily, are still competitively priced.