A man's got to have lunch. I usually go to the new noodle place down the road which is called, helpfully, Eatzone. After years of searching for the best Singapore Laksa in England (a search well chronicled in this column) I found, like Dorothy, that the answer lay much closer to home than I'd ever have thought.

Here at Eatzone (properly: eatzone..*, though I've no idea why) it is enormous: a rich tan soup of coconut and crustacea with a spicy slick of chilli oil washing the surface, three or four split king prawns, fish balls and sliced fish cake, the scent of the mighty laksa leaf, spongy tofu, crunchy beansprouts and whispering vermicelli. You have to ask them to hold the chicken, though. You don't want chicken in a laksa. But when you do ask them, they might offer you some barbecued pork in there. Unconventional. A spit in the eye of tradition. But the extra fattiness and redness it lends to the soup are miraculous.

I generally go with my friend Roger. He works even less than I do. I called him on Tuesday and said:

"Lunch?"
"Noodles?" he said.
"Why not. Or Gordon Ramsay."
"Yeah. Either or. We did have noodles yesterday."
"And the day before."
"Bit of a schlep over to Chelsea, though."
"What if I pay for your Tube ticket?"

To be on the safe side I called Gordon Ramsay on Royal Hospital Road and asked if they had had any failures to confirm for lunch. They had (I love table fascism), and after giving the usual security (Roger's name, my credit card number, an ex-girlfriend's mobile and the address of a crackhouse in Muswell Hill) we had a table for two at 1.15.

It seemed a good time to go to the original Ramsay. His newest protectorate, the Connaught (which is to be governed by the highly-rated Angela Hartnett) launches the week after next, and I hadn't been in ages. Roger hadn't been at all. He likes a spot of top-flight grub, and has an interesting theory about it: "You can trip on great food," he told me once when he came back from a family celebration at Marco Pierre White's Oak Room. "The side of my head tingled." He later claimed to have danced all night on a spoonful of truffled scrambled egg at Le Manoir Aux Quat' Saisons.

Now it was Ramsay for the aceeed test. I won't bore you with descriptions. It's still the old Tante Claire space with the peculiar glassware display and the awed atmosphere. The great places all have it: no matter how self-confident and world-weary you think you are, you always feel slightly humbled, slightly clumsy, like a moose in a tree-house.

We ordered the menu prestige and various drinks from assorted members of the splendid, shimmering staff. I fiddled with my knife until it hit an empty glass and went: "Clonggggg!" and Roger's first mouthful of fizzy water went down the wrong way. He tried to pretend he wasn't choking a couple of times and then coughed loudly and wiped the fizz that trickled from his nose.

The waiter brought a small pot of birdy broth with tiny heads of asparagus and spring onion jostling on top, to amuse our bouches. He might as well have been a crack dealer at the school gates.

"AaarghhhI" moaned Roger, his tongue out, like Homer Simpson dreaming of donuts. "It's happening already." And he pressed his fingers to his head and ommed yogicly.

I was as baffled as a teenager with his first joint. "What's it like?" I asked. "I'm not feeling anything." Good soup, though. The best roast chicken dinner your mother ever made, distilled into a teacupful of liquid. The highlight of the meal, surprisingly.

"Are you getting anything?" said Roger as I dived into my foie gras.

"Still only food," I said. The foie gras was refined almost to the point of innocuousness but layered thinly with confit and smoked goose and served with a slice of very salty toast, which helped to bring it to life, almost. But there was only half a slice of toast each. Restaurants are always tight with the toast. Maybe because you should pile the liver up high on each bit in the manner of a duke who has a goose farm in the family. But if you want to make it last it's a bit tricky. The menu is £88 a head (there's also a kwiklunch for £35), so I can't believe the profit is all in the bread. They could make a lot of cheap friends by going a little crazy with the toast. If they want cheap friends.

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