No gastrodandy

That respected arbiter of gastronomy, Fashion Week Daily, was thrilled recently to report that Sheraton hotels have introduced a 'Lo-Carb Lifestyle' concept for guests. This means an unrivalled range of low-carb food and drink, from room service to banquets. Even the booze you choose at the bar can be low carbohydrate.

'There are more Americans cutting carbs than the entire population of Canada,' says the hotel group's CEO, Barry S. Sternlicht. 'Our senior team are on a low-carb diet, and we feel better, look better, and perform better.'

Considering one side-effect alone - the doggy breath a high-protein diet causes - I suggest avoiding face time with the fun guys on Sheraton's board.

At the other end of the fashion food chain, yet more protein mayhem in the April issue of CAMRA's newspaper. A Marston's beer, Low C, which has been around since the Sixties for diabetic real-ale lovers, has been rebranded as an Atkins-friendly sup called Resolution. The fact that it contains a sixth of the carbs of ordinary draught is sure to tempt fashionable honky-breathed carbophobes to drink real ale.

Back in the land of bread and spuds, my long-lost lover and dining companion, The Dirty Blond, joined me at Swimmer and we both immediately liked the place. He is a left-footer with a revulsion of pretension, and he says Victorian pubs are like the high altar of Catholic churches.

Swimmer may have been done up, but it has retained the dignity of its Victorian aesthetic. It remains a proper pub, not a gastrodandy for metrosexuals and big girls - it has quiz nights and drinkers who run the gamut from media types to a couple of nonsensically growling, harmless alkies. We drank a fair few of their range of excellent and obscure Continental (mostly Czech) lagers on tap, including Litovel, which comes in two strengths and has a distinctive sour taste. There are Fullers and Adnams cask ales. The wines are well-chosen plonks between £10-13. All the staff were easygoing, efficient and friendly.

Holloway Road doesn't have many decent pubs until you get up to St John at Archway, which makes Swimmer seem even better. It used to be called The Grafton Arms, but is now called Swimmer At The Grafton Arms after the proprietor, Robert Thomas, who was a former Olympic swimmer. Which brings me to the food. I swim, partly because it makes eating, and relishing a huge plate of proper chips smothered in melted cheese at Swimmer possible, without resorting to Atkins lunacy.

In truth, nothing aroused us on the menu as much as this king combination of cheese and spud. However, the moules mariniere we shared to start used sweet, plump, fresh mussels and the juice was the sort of wellbalanced mix of wine and herbs that had us scooping it up to the last - really exceptional for £5. The main courses weren't so hot.

Bison, like ostrich, never hit the spot for me - it was chewy and not particularly flavourful. I had a chicken stuffed with asparagus, and the two ingredients didn't do much for each other - a port gravy that came with it was tasty, though, and had I not eaten so many chips I might have squished more of my new potatoes into it.

Swimmer is low-key in its gastro ambitions, with one young chef in the tiny open kitchen turning out standard stuff such as sausage and mash, steak, sea bass, as well as some really pleasing nibbles: cubes of cheese, garlic bread and olives.