Yotam Ottolenghi is pretty much the man in London town, or so they tell me. His knack of fusing vegetables and fruit injected with the sweet syrup of Middle Eastern sunshine with blobs of improbably creamy cheese is a rare, possibly unique, skill. But the sharing thing? I need more practice. The sharing-restaurant model goes something like this: you turn up, sit down and are duly handed a range of platters, in no apparent order, and are then expected to divvy them up between your guests. As it turns out, NOPI - the W1 branch of the great chef's burgeoning empire - makes this simpler than it ought to be. Each plate is divisible exactly by two - you and your immediate neighbour. This elegant equation, however, remained unknown to me and I spent much of our luncheon swirling around an etiquette black hole, worried that I would appear on the one hand greedy or, on the other, reluctant. My pathetic miscalculation led to a series of lonely dishes sat in my catchment area as virginal and unsullied as the moment they left the kitchen.
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