At Onslow, a car parked at my elbow. It was on the other side of a pane of glass but it was the most striking element of the expansive vista afforded by our position on a little hillock of volcanic rock. ("I can see Nando's from here," the Professor said; she's such a wag).
The cars streaming by silently on Dominion Rd add a city buzz, but the echoing glass-box design of the building, which was home for 18 months to the chic, sort-of-Vietnamese Peasant, gave me an idea of what life is like for our pet frog and it seemed colder than it probably was.
We'd booked early but the maitre d' rang to ask if we could come earlier still. I assumed he wanted to head off, on our behalf, an expected rush, but the place was barely one-third full.
Perhaps he was allowing for the capacity of the kitchen, which was almost surrealistically slow. Nothing on our bill would have taken more than a few minutes to cook (except perhaps the lamb rump, but only because it was overcooked) and some dishes required nothing more than moving food from a container to a plate. Yet it took half an hour to get chargrilled squid, pan-fried chicken livers and deep-fried artichokes to the table and another 40 minutes for the rest. God alone knows what it must be like when it's busy, but I will say that if you've got tickets for the footy, Nando's may be the better bet if you want to be there for kickoff.
