Ladbroke Road, W11; 020 7221 1373. Lunch, daily, noon-3pm. Dinner, Monday-Saturday, 6.30pm-11pm; Sunday, 6.30pm-10.30pm

5 stars The best thing since sliced bread; 4 stars Upper crust; 3 stars Bread of life; 2 stars Mouldy old dough;
1 star Brown bread

The letters, e-mails and Twitters that find their way to me, like house martins to some venerable vicarage (I like to think of myself as, architecturally, an ivory tower, a whited sepulchre, a bridge of sighs, a tower of Babel, a brothel of raddled, world-weary and overused trollops who are anyone’s for a couple of quid). They roost in two categories: half the flying missives want to stay and bring up their young in the shelter of my sturdy eaves, the other half want to make a mess down the stucco.

The homely letters are nice, but it’s the cloacal diarrhoea diatribes that entertain. They fall into a further two categories. “Who do you think you are?”, which is an interesting metaphysical question, and one that might keep me in a locked German sanatorium for life, but thankfully has been answered on behalf of all gourmands by the great Brillat-Savarin: “We are what we eat”. And then there’s the grammar Stasi. “All right-thinking Englishmen would dearly wish to shove your aberrant participle up your puckered jacksy, you semiliterate waste of protein. Just to think that the sperm that made you could have been used for a perfectly nice grammar-school boy.”

I love the rabid grammarians. You are the Jehovah’s Witnesses of grocery labels. For them, the written and the spoken language are a constant torment of misplaced commas, swallowed vowels, and “uns” usurping “ins”. Oh, the bliss of them. They are utterly redundant. The grammarians’ ire and fury count for naught. They make not the slightest scintilla of difference to the flow of the great torrent of language; they can’t change a single syllable in anyone’s mouth, or reunite the simplest infinitive. I love them, because they so utterly miss the point, comma, semicolon, exclamation mark.

But occasionally, a YOY letter arrives and strikes a vocal cord. Someone whose name is now covered in baby vom wrote and complained that not for the first time, I had incorrectly used the term “begging the question”. Now I know I do this, but to begin with, Mr Toddler Sick, there is no incorrect way of using the term. One meaning has been replaced by another. “Begging the question” is currently taken to be an answer that implies or demands a further question or explanation. However, its original meaning, the one you’re complaining about, was very different. To beg the question is to set up a falsely self-justifying argument. For instance, we know that God created the world in six days, because the Bible says so, and the Bible is the word of God. A more current example is the official argument given by the Bush government for denying Guantanamo detainees jury trials. They plainly couldn’t be given a fair trial because they were some of the most dangerous terrorists on earth. I now only use “beg the question” in the first meaning because, despite the insistence of grammarians, there is no right or wrong way to speak or write. There is only one rule, that of intelligibility and understanding. So as most people assume the first meaning, to use it in the less well-known original sense would be less intelligible and confusing.

In most circumstances, that would be fine. Words and expressions change their context and meaning all the time, often reversing themselves: “terribly funny”, “awfully good”, “terrifically interesting”. But in this case, I do feel a twinge of loss. The original definition was fine and subtle and profound and there is no other easily coined phrase to stand in its place. But it has gone, and we can’t get it back. We can’t make people say what they don’t think. “Beg the question” no longer means begging the question, because it’s begging the question. Which is perhaps the first time any expression has been made extinct by its own definition.

So I’d like to set a test to the word bores, who spend their lives scouring my columns to find fault, and write acid, smug reprimands. Why don’t you come up with a new and useful replacement? Stop treating the language like a museum: put your pen where your mouth is and coin something original. I’ll use the best entry, we’ll get Liddle and Mr Lawson and Clarkson — he could really do with it — to use it and we’ll see if we can seed the language, and perhaps you’ll stop bothering me with your embarrassing apostrophe anxiety.

“Why don’t you just sod off back to chavvy Chelsea, you epicurean luddite,” a dear friend shouted at me in Notting Hill last week. Apparently, the locals are getting fed up with my giving their restaurants bad reviews. Except they’re never fed up in Notting Hill. It’s one of those outré places that live in self-imposed famine with vanity hunger. They order pudding for the pleasure of leaving it, have surgical fat-trimming and competitive muffin-calorie guessing. It’s not that my reviews make any difference to the restaurants. Most of their customers come from Romford and Billericay anyway, and don’t care what they eat, as long as it’s impressively expensive and they’ve seen it on Channel 4. “We don’t like eating in places that have had bad reviews. It implies we don’t know our focaccia from our finocchi, so please go and terrorise Camden or Clerkenwell. Anyway, you only give out no stars because you’re jealous of the style we call life.”

Portobello Pizza is, as you’d imagine, a pizza restaurant near Portobello. Pizzas are a difficult thing to review. They are essentially gay welsh rarebit, with variations on a toasty theme. But, for some reason, they’ve gained a mystique or reputation for subtlety and complexity that is wholly denied by their structure, taste and the state of your face after eating one. Nobody knows where the first pizza was made; there is a reference to something like it in Virgil’s Aeneid, and earlier than that, Persians ate baked flatbread with cheese and figs, which sounds rather good. Italians in Italy find the global obsession with pizza inexplicable. Italians abroad complain that nothing can compare with the mysterious and magical pizzas of home, and they’re probably right. Pizza is immensely simple. The only secret is the temperature of the oven, which has to be at glass-blowing intensity. As with pasta, the sauce and condiments added on top should be accompaniments and not the main event. Less is not more, but it is enough.

The Blonde and I took the journalist Alice BB — in this heat, DD — and her fiancé, the cockney Sam Peckinpah, Nick Love. We started with sardines that tasted muddy and exhausted, and some seafood pasta that was made in the English way, as a stew with spaghetti in it. Much too much business. It was like eating Nemo. The main event, the pizza, is very good, served by the yard, a wodge of unleavened bread with chewy, sticky, napalm stuff on top. The oven is hot, the pizzas filling. What more do you want? If you have one of those “nothing but pizza will do” cravings that seem to afflict most of the world once a week, this is the place to have it.

The service is jolly, and the room noisy and crowded with people who aren’t intrusively appearing in their own private romcom or stalking themselves with skinny self-love. So. Portobello Pizza: probably the best pizza in Notting Hill.

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