Ok, so you need a vegan and gluten free restaurant in Brighton. Food For Friends has got to be a good bet, right?

Just coming from a brass monkeys walk along the beach, I needed something to warm me up. Reading down the menu... Ah, soup - perfect. "Combine chef's inspiration with seasonal influence and you get today’s soup sensation served with fresh bread". Wow! Inspirational, seasonal AND sensational? What could this be? Maybe a warming Moroccan-spiced lentil soup or is it a chunky bean and kale? Jerusalem artichokes are good right now, huh?

Drum roll please...TA DA: Leek and Potato. Leek and Potato? You what! Where be the chef's inspiration today? In the soup aisle of Tesco? Which is where this soup may as well have come from. The only thing I could taste in this slop was the heavy-handed salt.

My lovely vegan friends had the "Flash in the Pan" stir-fry which didn't really inspire and the first comments were that it was tasteless but got better when you got to the sheet of seaweed at the bottom. Yummy.

Food for friends is a bit of a Brighton institution, being there since 1981 and I've always remembered it as a laid back place for a wallet-friendly good bite to eat (even for us non-vegans). So what's with the change to low lighting, inflated prices and swanky wallpaper? The restaurant was busy but the atmosphere was stale as a dried up piece of tofu. And Jamiroquai as background music?

I have no idea what has happened to this restaurant but what I do know is that this is not the sort of food I would serve to my friends.