If you get a donated kidney, because you’ve been bright yellow for 6 months and spend a lot of time in dialysis, it’s ‘life changing’. But if you’re football teams signs Lionel Messi or Jude Bellingham, that can be life changing too. Particularly as it would involve a move to Spain. Or, latterly, America.

But once in a while you go out to eat. And it is truly life-changing. Humans are very sensory creatures and for me, personally, an amazingly good and particularly an amazingly different, original eating experience ranks right up with my nob, for sensory good stuff. For want of a… much better analogy.

In 2009 we were in Israel. Someone said ‘go to a restaurant in Tel Aviv called ‘Abraxis North’. There was no ‘invite’, no ‘suggestion’, this was a command. And we did. And it changed my life. Forever!!! They baked cauliflower like no-one before or since. Yes, a vegetable, and I was excited and amazed. The other food was just wonderful. Different tastes, different flavours and a different experience altogether.

The tables were covered with brown paper. Food arrived in paper bags. Or dumped ceremoniously onto the brown paper. The whole ‘concept’ was explained by the most beautiful woman in the world who knelt next to us and begged me to take her away from all this and run away together. But I resisted and asked her if I could have dinner first. And the meal was different. Lots of different things, every one new, original, totally wonderful.

We returned subsequently, and every time the price hiked a bit more. A lot more. As happens when reputations, deserved or not, get around and bookings become harder. But wait!!! There’s a solution!!! The owner, Eyal Shani, opened a ‘fast food’ version just down the road, and called it ‘Miznon’. Which means a ‘counter’ where they serve the food. It was an open bar type place, sit where you can, few tables on the pavement outside, but no table ‘service’. You order, they shout your name above the really loud music and everything is wrapped to eat. Knives and forks not required. Other than for the cauliflowers, which they bake there too. And cheap. Quite amazing.

So amazing they opened one here a few years back, in Soho. (Also in Paris, New York, Dubai, Melbourne… there are lots). And they just opened the latest, in ‘Holland Park’. Which I put in ‘’quotes. Because when you think ‘Holland Park’, you think billionaires, mansions and the sort of super-rich who are absent because of recent tax rises, and the Park. Well this is ‘the Ladbroke Grove end of Holland Park’, to give it its full title. Touch more ‘Notting Hill borders’, type ‘Holland Park’. Not that I’m a snob. I’ll go anywhere for chicken livers in pitta bread.

Which weren’t on the menu. Oh. Nor the cauliflower. The defining items of Shani’s vast international chain and, ‘we don’t do that in the evenings, only at lunchtime’. Nor the pitta stuff. Evenings (called ‘erev’, the hebrew word meaning the same) is more ‘fine dining’ type experience. “Oh, you mean: ‘expensive’ then?”

It wasn’t that ‘expensive’ and it was all rather nice. But it wasn’t ‘Miznon’. Rather, a poncey brother. It’s a lovely place and the area is dead cool really, despite not being truly Holland Parkish. But I love the chaotic and loud brashness of the originals. And the whole ‘eat with your fingers’ ethos. I’ve always struggled with cutlery.

Happy Eating

A xxxx