It's true -- restaurants generally seem to be getting noisier. Today I had lunch at Tutti Matti on Adelaide St. W., where I eat often, and for some reason the music level had been cranked up. Why? Who knows? The result is that everyone talks louder to compensate.

Thuet's place on King Street West is another restaurant where the sound level is often disquieting.

But for sheer, unabashed, out-and-out human noise (caused solely by voices, as opposed to music-plus-voices, I'd have to nominate Amaya, the relatively new (and very good) Indian restaurant on Bayview Ave., in the site of the former JOV. Yikes!

Amanda Ursell, writing in today's Times of London, takes aim at well intentioned celebrity chefs' prescription for children's lunch boxes...

"This brings me back to celebrity chefs. I read a piece by an anonymous chef advising mothers to stop giving children sweets in their lunch boxes and instead pop in a packet of banana chips. These are slices of dried banana deep-fried in oil. A 100g packet contains 511 calories and 31g of fat.

You could give your offspring a real banana (virtually no fat and certainly no added sugars), a yoghurt (full of calcium and some protein) plus a two-bar KitKat (115 calories, 6g of fat) and they would still be 209 calories and an awful lot of extra nutrients better off.