When I think about going out to eat in the abstract, I have no trouble at all imagining myself to be the bold provocative food-pioneer who will eagerly try the most forbidding thing on the menu: viz the legendary “fish lips and duck webs” on offer in one of the Chinese places in Lisle Street. Though obviously I’m only the “pioneer” here in a very subjective sense – they decided to prepare and cook it, and doubtless consider anyone who thinks it “forbidding” to be parochial in the extreme. Anyway, the sad fact is, these days, when I actually arrive at any given place, I invariably have something I already know I’ll enjoy – and the only time in my life when this wasn’t so was when I was still casting around trying to find what this was.