So you’re on holiday and get the chance to hook up with some really good friends for dinner as they’re staying fairly nearby. And it happens to be your wedding anniversary too! So when they send the restaurant booking over, you google it to find the address and it comes up as “Restaurant Bla Bla: FINE DINING!!!…” you know you’re in trouble. You know it’ll cost more than a Big Mac and chips, probably even with a nuclear-heated apple pie too. And you also know there’s a fair chance that you will leave your ‘fine dining experience’ still hungry and possibly in need of a Big Mac and chips. But you also know it will be, or should be, ‘an experience’. A wonder of service and charm and delightful surroundings, amazing tastes, possibly see Elvis there, Elton John or any A-listers, probably not the ones who’ve boycotted Israel like Roger Walters and tossers like him. And you know there’s a cost attached. But heh, you’re only 66-th-next-day once and its holiday when budgetary considerations become a bit more Labour with high expenditure and low income.

The following evening we walked to our local ‘Turkish’. Ok, our local ‘Israeli’ because the Turks didn’t invent grilled meat. As a statement of solidarity against Vegans and Vegetarians. Yeah, you can get hummus there, and aubergines, they even give you a salad, but basically, its carnivore-central and unashamedly so. We’ve been to the same place for about 15 years and it is truly wonderful. Abundant. Amazing. All the chilli you need. And cost about a quarter of the Fine Dining.

I get that there are vast differences in restaurants that any intelligent person would appreciate and thus render comparisons both meaningless and pointless. But I never claimed to be intelligent. And I also appreciate that to ‘create’ a sautéed chicken pieces, deeply marinated and basted in the jus of crushed olives whilst hand-turned by Shlomo the chef, is different from ‘shish kebab’. Because they have to employ someone to write all those words. And I know that the kebab shop won’t offer a fillet of sea bass lovingly drizzled in the essence of aardvark snout, covered with cheese made from hamster milk and sprinkled with green-tea leaves picked from the remotest forest in Madagascar. And that taste will either blow me away with WOW!!! or leave me thinking ‘we’ll that was a waste of effort for a starter’.

Fine dining is a gamble. The often quite ridiculous combinations they put together either stun you with wonder and you give the Jew who made the jus his due. Or they leave you craving something substantial that comes wrapped in pitta and drips chilli sauce all over your shirt.

I make no judgments. The quest for something ‘different’ or the desire for guaranteed satisfaction? The Fine Dining had a staff (cast? Maybe) of hundreds, all beautiful. The kebab place has just one waitress. But possibly the most stunning of them all. That’s gotta be worth the price of indigestion tablets, surely.

Happy Eating

A xxxx