As if I didn’t eat out enough already, I have come now to a part of my life in which I shall be compelled to eat in restaurants three times a day, every day, for at least the next four to six weeks. Not because The Times Magazine is to become a seven-day-a-week publication (more’s the pity), but because they have taken away my kitchen.

Literally, taken it away. In bits. First the fridge (into the telly room to hold emergency beer, wine and milk for tea) and then the cooker and the freezer, on to the skip with a gut-wrenching clatter, and all the cupboard doors and then the shelves and shells, the worktops, double sink, taps, radiators, light fittings, lino and floorboards. And now, for the first time, my kitchen looks pretty big and bright. The floor is lower, albeit with central heating and water pipes snaking dangerously across it, and the ceiling is higher, with electric cables dangling like grey lianas. And pretty soon the windows will go.

And then, one day, things will start to come back. First, pipes for underfloor heating (my kitchen faces north, and just going for a glass of water in bare feet on a winter’s night can leave you with toes like Ranulph Fiennes) and then French doors, new floorboards and tiles, then my lovely island, Corian-topped and with concealed chutes for recyclable waste and compost of every hue, then the big chunky range cooker, black and shiny as a prewar Ford, book shelves, game sink and plate racks, and, best of all, my larder, newly built on the northeast wall, green tiled, slate-shelved – finally, somewhere to keep cheese, cured meat, vegetables, stone jars of home-made goose confit sealed with fat (in my dreams) and a lifetime supply of Heinz baked beans.

But until then, no kitchen. Very weird.

I can’t have a slice of toast without calling a waiter (most of the rest of the house is also under reconstruction and every cooking utensil I own, barring a single corkscrew, is boxed and sealed and stacked in the cellar). So I shall have to eat out. And if I keep the venues changing I shall be able to do all the reviews that I would have done over the next few years in one go.

Six weeks (if they finish on time); 42 days; three meals a day; that’s, what, 126 restaurants? Three years’ worth of reviews, counting holidays. And I can do them all before May is out (eat, write, eat, write, eat, write, sleep; eat, write, eat, write…) and send them into the mag and then they can run them in whatever order they please.

For all I know, you could be reading this one in August 2010 (tell me, did we win the World Cup? Has Obama been assassinated yet? Did interest rates really rocket back up to 10 per cent and screw everybody?) or even April 2012 (ooh, isn’t it exciting with the Olympics now only weeks away – do tell me, is the stadium even half built?).

For my lunch today, you will be glad to know, I had sushi in a former Irish pub. Not something I would necessarily do if I had a kitchen, but in the present circs, perfectly agreeable. It has been converted with a lot of blond wood, so that it looks rather like a Seventies Swedish sauna, but also a bit like a bona fide Tokyo izakaya, which is, after all, nothing more than a pub with a bit of food.

As a temple to the death of Britain’s cancerous old fags-and-booze culture and the all but total irrelevance now, at least in major cities, of the traditional beer-and-fights-and-pissing-on-the-toilet-floor-because-you’re-too-drunk-to-get-to-the-urinal public house, this place is even more emphatic than the more familiar gastropubs and yuppie-flat conversions. Today, there was the relaxed atmosphere of springtime office lunching in the early part of the week: lots of fizzy water and girls in pastel blouses sharing bowls of edamame beans, and then quiet, gay media men chowing down on monster platters of sashimi while peering at industry magazines through comedy spectacles.

The Japanese staff are terribly friendly, the boys are all rather tall and handsome and the girls wear long, full skirts and stout, heeled boots like anime versions of Victorian match girls.

I was there with an old pal who, despite being a vegetarian, has been going to Soho Japan since it first opened (I’m not sure when that was, and I didn’t like to phone and ask because they’d think I wanted to know when it opened for lunch and I’d never be able to make them understand my rather intrusive question). Melissa is not a fish-eating vegetarian, either – no half-arsed pescivore she – but one of those vegetarians who are even more grossed out by fish than by meat.

She is also very small (as vegetarians can often be) and when I arrived was tucking into a small dish of edamame beans and already looking rather full.

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• Jane MacQuitty’s party wine
• Oliver Peyton's Christmas pavlova
• Blood orange cosmopolitan