Over a decade and a bit, the Table Talk column in Style has evolved into being more or less about restaurants and food. It’s also more or less about whatever has settled on my retina that week. Here are answers to some of the questions that I’ve been asked over the years:

— I always book under a false name, but I never wear a disguise. Getting into a wig and a costume and talking in a funny voice to eat dinner is weird and way too self-obsessed – it’s the sort of thing they do in America. Yes, sometimes I am recognised and the first thing that happens is that everything gets worse. Particularly the service.

— I always pay – always. There is no such thing as a free lunch. I never eat with restaurant PRs, or go to restaurants on the advice of press releases. The choice is capricious and random. Sometimes I choose, sometimes my editor; mostly the Blonde chooses. I don’t have a favourite restaurant or secret restaurants that I don’t write about.

— And no, not anyone can do it. Reviewing isn’t complicated, but most people who think they can review can’t. Expertise isn’t always a help; it can make you talk down to your readers and distances you from their experience. But over the years, you do acquire it – I now know a lot about food. Except cheese, which, like grammar, I cannot retain a single piece of useful information about. I’ve also worked in kitchens as a cook, dishwasher, waiter and a maître d’. And I can cook.

The problem and the skill is not actually in the food, or in having an eye for decor, an ear for the staff, or a nose for the wine list (which I rarely mention, because I don’t drink). It’s in the language.

English, which is so gloriously verbose about so much of life’s gay tapestry, is summarily tongue-tied when it comes to describing food and eating. The reasons are partially cultural. It has never been considered polite to talk about food, partly as there hasn’t ever been much food that you could be polite about. Food and talking about food was something the French did. It’s often pointed out that while the words for farm animals are Anglo-Saxon, their names when they’re cooked are Norman – pork for swine, beef for cattle, mutton for sheep – distinguishing who did the herding and who did the eating.

But then, many of the words that we do have are swaggered in a Pooterish bourgeois snobbery. I can’t write “moist” or “succulent” or “luxuriant” without shivering. Writing about food and the sensation of eating can be as nauseating to read as watching someone eat with their mouth open. So you have to pick your way through the verbiage with care and imagination.

You do need to be pretty omnivorous – I’ve always said that I’d eat anything anyone else ate, as long as it didn’t involve a bet, a dare or an initiation ceremony. I’m often asked what the most disgusting thing I’ve ever eaten is. Buried shark in Iceland, jewel beetles in the Kalahari, fertilised duck eggs in Vietnam, seal blubber with the Eskimos in Greenland and warm blood with the Masai in Tanzania all pale into wholesome yumminess compared with the fast food available on every high street after 11pm, or the chilled, dehydrated and microwaved amuse-bouches lurking in petrol stations.

My particular interest in dinner really only begins with the food. I’m constantly fascinated by why and how we eat. The movement of ingredients and the history, anthropology, mythology, manners and rituals of food. Dinner is a defining human occasion. We are the only species that ever existed that offers hospitality.

Is my opinion worth any more than anyone else’s on the bus? With a modest blush I must say yes. It’s also worth more than that of most chefs and restaurateurs – I’m a professional, this is what I do; they’re big men, but they’re out of condition. Do I ever get bored, blasé, bilious? No, hand on heart, I’m always excited about dinner. I still get that frisson with a new menu. Do I ever eat or order badly on purpose, look for awful food to make good copy? Of course not. Despite what you think, it’s no easier to write a bad review than a good one; it’s just that you prefer reading the bad ones.

Finally, people often say: “Seeing as you know so much, why don’t you open a restaurant?” And I think of Brendan Behan’s famous quote: “Critics are like eunuchs in a harem – they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.” Like so much of Behan’s work, that’s smart, but not quite right. Critics may well be like eunuchs in a harem who know how it’s done – but having seen it done every day, they just don’t fancy having it done to them.

ORGANIC

Can we just get the organic thing clear? Organic does not mean additive-free; it means some additives and not others. Organic does not mean your food hasn’t been washed with chemicals, frozen or kept fresh with gas, or that it has not been flown around the world. Organic does not necessarily mean it is healthier, or will make you live longer; nor does it mean tastier, fresher, or in some way improved. Organically farmed fish is not necessarily better than wild fish. Organically reared animals didn’t necessarily live a happier life than nonorganic ones – and their death is no less traumatic.

More importantly, organic does not mean that the people who picked, packed, sowed and slaughtered were treated fairly, paid properly, or were free from artificial exploitation. The Chinese workers who drowned in Morecambe Bay were picking organic cockles for a pittance. If you really want to feed the hunger in your conscience, buy Fairtrade.

So what does organic actually mean? Buggered if I know. It usually means more expensive. Whatever the original good intentions of the organic movement, their good name has been hijacked by supermarkets, bijoux delicatessens and agri-processors as a value-added designer label. Organic comes with its own basket of aspiration, snobbery, vanity and fear that retailers on tight margins can exploit. And what I mind most about it is that it has reinvigorated the old class distinction in food. There is them that have chemical-rich, force-fed battery dinner and us that have decent, healthy, caring lunch. It is the belief that you can buy not only a clear conscience, but a colon that works like the log flume at Alton Towers.

In general, I applaud and agree with many of the aims of environmentally careful producers, but it is time we all admitted that the label “organic” has been polluted with cynicism, sentiment, sloppy practice and lies to the point where it is intellectually and practically bankrupt.

And it hasn’t made anyone a better cook.

BILLS

Why don’t more people do runners? Given the quality and service offered by so many restaurants, combined with their prices, I’m astonished more people don’t refuse to pay. Tip: walk outside to answer your mobile and never return. (A lawyer writes: only try this at home.)

Years ago, a defrocked lawyer taught me how to do a legal runner – a meal in a restaurant is a private contract.

But attempting to avoid payment is fraud, and that’s criminal. So what you have to do is leave your real name and a bona fide address (your mother-in-law’s is best), then offer what you consider to be the actual value of the raw ingredients. In an expensive restaurant, this is about one-third of the menu price. For spag napolitana, it’s 20p. Minus service, of course. You don’t want to pay that. You must, though, pay the full price for wine, unless you reckon there was something wrong with it. Having done all that, they have to let you go or call the police. Plod will tell the maître d’ what I’ve just told you: it’s a civil matter.

Three words of warning. One: on the scale of bourgeois embarrassment, having a row about the bill comes just under having your phone ring the theme from Bonanza in the last act of King Lear. Two: the restaurant can sue you for the difference, and courts take a dim view if they think you’re trying it on. Three: don’t try this in the same restaurant twice.

The point of all this is that you’re not revolting enough. The modern, sophisticated packaging of restaurants makes customers feel that it’s uncool to complain, as if it showed you, like – duh! – cared. But a restaurant isn’t a teenage boyfriend, it’s a service. Shrugging and saying “Whatever” isn’t putting it in its place. If you don’t like it and if it’s not what was promised, don’t pay. Don’t be cool, be magnificent. And if they go to the mat, offer to return the goods there and then.

THE DURIAN

The durian is possibly the oddest of all God’s little gastronomic tests. Originally from Malaya, it’s now farmed all over the Far East, where it is not just loved, it’s adored. Durian stalls dot the roadside, yet it is illegal to carry them on public transport and many airlines refuse to take them as cargo.

You can tell you’re in the presence of a durian from 20ft. They smell. No, they stink. They have the most exotically complex and psychologically confused life cycle of any vegetable, and rely on fooling carnivores to spread their seed. So they give off the odour of rotting flesh. It’s the scent of corruption, a whiff of the charnel house, a gag from a hot grave. If Stephen King books smelt, they’d smell of durian.

Inside, the flesh is marmoreally slimy, some say silky. Personally, I think it’s like lost babies who have been drowned in baths of whey. The flesh clings to the stones like putrefying muscle. You have to suck and nibble. Few westerners manage that twice.

The actual flavour is one of the most complex and difficult I have ever come across. It’s one of those tastes that we consider grown-up, like truffles or anchovies, olives or oysters, tastes that teeter on the edge of disgusting and are rites of passage to acquire. For most Europeans, the durian is way over the edge, in the Vale of Vile. It has been likened by horrified travellers to civet cat, sewage, stale vomit, used surgical swabs, fruit-eating bat pee and brown sherry. The actual taste is a discordant descant of the smell.

It’s not sweet or savoury or acid or juicy, but it lingers for hours like the manifestation of avarice, corrupt indulgence and suppurating decadence.

Now, through true professional vanity, I hate not being able to understand the pleasure in things that others eat, and this was my third confrontation with the durian. I managed two mouthfuls before recoiling, and I’m getting a glimpse of the possibility of perhaps nearly, just about, enduring it. But to do so might mean stepping into a world I’m not spiritually equipped for. Filipinos, Malays and Indonesians happily turn durian into ice cream, sweets and cakes. They eat it with salt, or stewed with sugar, or pickled with vinegar. Nothing so marks the yawning gulf between hot East and cool West as this strange, misbegotten Caliban food – a vegetable that thinks it’s a cadaver.

COUNTRY PUBS

What is it with dirty jokes and country hostelries? I’m talking about those “fine dining” pubs, where “Dennis and Fiona welcome discerning travellers to relax, revive, savour and marvel in an atmosphere of timeless rustic elegance. No children, no smoking, no proles’ overalls. Dogs by prior arrangement”. In short, the sort of place that makes you fervently wish it were possible to order up bulldozers like minicabs.

Why is it that these places invariably have smutty cartoons in the men’s lavatory, involving badly drawn big breasts, a shooting double entendre and talking foxes? The prudish, leering hypocrisy of these men-only gags is an endearing staple of country hospitality, and I don’t want to be implicated in it when I’ve got my flies undone.

The last country pub I ate in featured a cartoon of a group of Welsh miners in the changing room after work. They’re all naked and all black with coal dust. All except one of them, who has a white willy. His mate’s saying, “I see Llewellyn went home for his lunch.” Geddit?

The Blonde and I were sat at a sticky round table that could have been a Braille menu. The place was full of whispering old folk, the itinerant retired who traipse the B roads of Britain because they have nothing else to do. The food is the sort of careless English fare that owes more to daytime television and women’s magazines than any particular county, and for which Gary Rhodes has much to answer.

It was replete with everything that makes eating out in the muddy bits of England such a hideous torment. It was pretentious, twee and run for the convenience of the management. The food we ate was risibly bad, the atmosphere was smilingly inhospitable, the decor a sordid cliché of rural nostalgia, puppy porn and green-welly fascism – and they charge you two quid to sit on the ground outside. It is not just everything I despise and loathe in lunch, but everything that embarrasses and depresses me about tweedy Albion.

Stick this up in the gents.

Table Talk: Sweet and Sour, Salt and Bitter, by AA Gill is published by Orion at £16.99. To buy it for £15.29 including p&p in the UK, call The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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