“I forgot to eat yesterday.” I’ve heard this said countless times, but it doesn’t mean I understand it. How on earth can someone forget to eat? I am 41, so even if I am lucky I have only got about 14,000
lunches and dinners left. That doesn’t seem very many to me. I’m not going to waste a single one, especially not through absent-mindedness.

So when they rang up and asked me to be the restaurant critic for a couple of weeks, I said yes very quickly before they could change their minds. Normally I write about things like the private finance initiative. This is great fun, as you can imagine, but when you finish nobody brings you a chocolate truffle, lightly dusted with cocoa powder.

Later I began to feel guilty. I should have come clean with them.

To start off with, I’ve got distinctly low-rent tastes in food. That doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a finely cooked meal. Of course I can. It’s just that I can appreciate a badly cooked meal, too. I really like those tinned steak pies you can buy in petrol
stations. Haute cuisine is wonderful, but the only thing I insist on is hot cuisine. I can’t be doing with sandwiches.

Then there is the wine. All I ever consume is Diet Coke. I remember telling a rather grand colleague that I hoped to drink so much Diet Coke it would be
seen as my trademark eccentricity. “Oh, my dear boy,” he said, “you’ll have to do better than that.”

Finally, there is my memory and descriptive ability. I dread being called as a witness. “You say you saw the murder, what did the murderer look like?” “Er,
I’m having difficulty remembering, your honour.” “Try.” “Well, he was sort of medium height and medium build with, that’s right, yes, brownish hair.” “Thank you. The witness may stand down.” If I would struggle to describe a man with a knife, how can they expect me to explain what the hake was like?

In the end, these problems resolved themselves. I’d actually dealt with the low- rent problem ten years ago by getting married. In When Harry Met Sally, Billy Crystal told Meg Ryan that there were two kind of women: high maintenance and low maintenance. “Which kind am I?” she asks. “The worst kind,” he replies, “high maintenance who thinks she’s low maintenance.” My wife is high maintenance and gleefully aware of it. She gave short shrift to my idea that it might be journalistically interesting to check out the restaurants in Hatch End. We were going, she declared, to Pied à Terre in central London. Much more journalistically interesting. She promised attentive assistance with the wine, too.

As for the issues of memory and description, I decided to take a pad of paper and avoid ordering hake.

There is one more thing you ought to know. Nicky and I have two small children. Our life is Bob the Builder and chicken nuggets. The same is true of Alexis and Simon, the couple we were meeting for dinner. For all of us, the best thing you can say about an evening out is that it was civilised, adult, a complete contrast with the day that had gone before.

And all these things, it transpired, were true of an evening at Pied à Terre. Things didn’t start perfectly. We arrived 20 minutes early and were told that there was nowhere to sit and wait. We were sent to a neighbouring bar. It was a hitch, but the last one of the night.

Having nowhere for diners to wait may not be a good thing, but the reason for it was undoubtedly good. Pied à Terre is very small. I counted just 16 tables with room for fewer than 50 people. The term
“intimate” is often a euphemism for pokey and overcrowded, but not here. The tables were comfortable and reasonably well-spaced, and the decor was modern without lapsing into absurdity. I can’t tell you what the other customers were like, because we were blissfully unaware of almost anybody else.

We weren’t really aware of the service, either. I am suspicious of restaurants where the service is described as excellent. The fact that you notice suggests too much interaction with the waiters. At Pied à Terre everything just arrived and it never proved necessary to catch anybody’s eye. When I asked, ludicrously I accept, for my Diet Coke to be served with only one lump of ice and no lemon, it was. This may not seem much to you, but to me it’s a minor miracle. It almost never happens.

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