Nando's

11-12 Friary Street, GU1 4EN. £7

Popular amongst the youth of today is eating chickens. And the best place to eat them alonside other like-minded gang members is, apparently, Nando's.

We untangle a folded menu to reveal a choice of food that must run to at least 10,000 options. There are wings and breasts, sauces and salads, wraps and corn and a mind-boggling array of potato based sides.

Equally confusing is the pointless hybridisation of fast-food and table service, whereby you order at a counter before your food is brought to you at an indiscriminate point in the future.

To stop my head exploding and make life a little easier I decided to focus on only a small part of the menu: the bit nearest me in the bottom left hand corner. This section was titled "Nandino's" and came with an age limit: "For under 10's".

Balls to that, I ordered the Nandino chicken breast stips, corn-on-the-cob, frozen banana yougurt and a beer (Sagres).

I've not come across adjectives suitably damning for what turned up. The chicken was a triumph of aesthetics over edibility. It did at least look a bit like chicken. The corn ran with this theme.

Sagres is Sagres: a relatively inoffesive way to consume a mild anaesthetic, and, as such, a perfect pairing for the food.

Dessert too finds new ways to undermine the traditional dining experience. Firstly it is self service, secondly the recepticle and hence portion size is entirely of your own choosing and lastly it seems to operate on a 1930s style honesty-box system, whereby if you tell them you've paid for dessert they'll let you have it.

We grabbed a couple of plastic coke cups, filled them with 'Frozen Banana Youghurt' and exited the premises. Utterly wonderful stuff. Packed full of that delicious, artificial pick'n'mix-banana-sweet flavour, and with consistency less fatty, coating and cloying than traditional ice cream. Strongly recommended when mixed half and half with rum.

This kind of gutter/stars food dichotomy is difficult to evaluate so all I shall say is that it remains the only restaurant I have visited to which I will only return to steal their ice cream.

Fonseca 1985

c. £55

General high spirits and the start of the Six Nations had put me in the mood for some scientific investigatin’.

Some time ago I had committed to a blind comparison of Cheap vs Expensive port, a wine style that I have drunk very little of and which has never tickled me. And my lunching companion's unashamed declaration of her preference for sticky-sweet wine seemed as good an excuse as any for a first foray into the world of double-decanting.

Up for review were a frankly weird-looking bottle of M&S "Special Reserve PORT DECANTER", which I reckoned at (a generous) £10, and one of my own 1985 Fonsecas.

'85 was very highly rated in its day with decent summer sun and no rain meaning that pretty well every major house declared a vintage. Tastings since then however have divided opinion.

My first discovery of the evening came with the confirmation of the much-debated hypothesis that scientific rigour has a strong inverse correlation to the amount of alcohol consumed. Which meant that this particular experiment ended up being conducted non-blind, blindfolded and blind drunk.

Still... I've often had fun in that kind of situation before...

Despite these impediments it was immediately apparent which was the quality product. The first wine tasted more like wine gums than many wine gums do. Brazenly jammy and no length- a neat trick in a Willy Wonker-ish way, but not worth worrying about.

Wine number two had more on the nose; liquorice, toasted wood and maybe blackberries. In the mouth there was noticeable structure and some drying tannins. Less sweet and better balanced, but the real giveaway was an astounding long warming damson finish. Lovely stuff. Continuing a well-established tradition of voicing opinion on matters that I know feck-all about; I'd say this was a little closed at the moment but not dying, a good thick fruit flavour and firm tannins hinting nicely at future potential.

Our Lady Friend also picked it without hesitation. 'Though the Russian, who though no wine snob normally has a reasonable palate, immediately declared the M&S number to be the superior wine. And needless to say we were happy enough for him to be the tick-eating bird in this particular symbiotic ménage.