Paul Thomas: At least the peas were all the same size

The first restaurant - as opposed to milk bar or tea-room - I ever went to was The Coffee Pot in Christchurch, circa 1960. I remember being tremendously impressed by the fact that all the peas were the same size.

The peas from our garden lacked this pleasing uniformity. Taste didn't enter into the equation since it was taken for granted that restaurant fare was on an altogether different plane to what was served up at home.

My mother was - and is - a fine cook but the way her children carried on that day you'd have sworn we lived on stale bread and water.

She probably felt a bit like King Lear: "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child."

My first Auckland restaurant experience came a few years later at Waipuna Lodge in Mt Wellington. Dad and I shared a chateaubriand. It was carved at the table, we were allocated a few slices and the waiter withdrew with the remnants.

When I asked for a second helping of what my parents were, after all, paying for, I was told that what was left over had been thrown out.

Perhaps my slight cynicism about the restaurant trade stems from that disappointment.

I no longer take it for granted that eating out will be better than eating in and I strongly suspect that finishing off a customer's meal is one of the milder atrocities perpetrated from time to time behind the kitchen door.

Food and restaurants are subjective areas with enormous scope for pretension and one-upmanship.

When self-styled gourmets swap memorable meal anecdotes, you can be sure the local cafe won't get much of a plug - unless someone practises that form of reverse snobbery which champions no-frills tucker served in unprepossessing surroundings.

Typically, the accent is on exotic dishes consumed in faraway places: Sebastian's monkey brains scooped from a freshly-cleaved skull in a smoky backstreet Hong Kong gambling den will be smirkingly trumped by Miranda's braised gorilla, eaten with fingers under a rain tree somewhere in the Cameroon highlands.

Last year during a writers' tour of the deep south, one of our group boasted of sampling goat's head soup in a tiny village in the badlands of Iran.

Luckily I've dined on braised gorilla in Cameroon so I was able to put this upstart in his place.

At least that's what our hosts said it was but they were drunk and might have been having a joke at our expense.

If it was gorilla, then there's work to be done - perhaps starting with a bolder marinade - before this dish becomes the focus of foodie pilgrimages.

If it wasn't - and this was a matter of some concern to my travelling companions - then what the hell was it?

The other fundamental of these debates is that food and travel are inextricably linked.

Why is it that a simple pasta dish with a glass or two of Sangiovese under the Tuscan sun or steak and kidney pudding with a pint of Old Peculiar in an English village pub are something to write home about, whereas at home they simply fill a gap?

I'm not a fearless eater and usually need to be cajoled into venturing into the unknown but put me in a pole-house on a Malaysian island with a gallon of ice-cold beer and I'll eat stuff that I'd run a mile from on home turf.

Getting to these places and their fabulous food obviously involves air travel.

Perhaps travellers make a song and dance about airline food because they're thinking ahead and have food on their minds.

Perhaps airlines recognise this and feel they have to enter into the spirit of things. Perhaps - and this is a troubling thought - airlines actually believe their food is worth making a song and dance about.

In my London-based travel writing days I did my time in the first-class cabin.

While a bit of luxury never hurt anyone, once you strip away the silver service and the vintage champagne and the XO cognac, the food itself is seldom remarkable. Just as you do down the back in sardine class, you eat to fill in time.

So what's the best meal I've ever had? Predictable as it may be, it was at the legendary Paul Bocuse restaurant just outside Lyon.

My enduring memories are of sublime cheese, a heart-stopping price-tag and the antics of the couple at the next table.

Having ploughed through four courses, this pair proceeded - with a certain amount of self-conscious giggling - to sample every dish on the stupendous dessert trolley.

I half-expected them to explode in a shower of lumpy, pink viscera, like the gluttonous Mr Creosote in Monty Python's Meaning of Life.

It dispelled the notion that, despite being obsessed with food, the French always err on the side of moderation.

I wasn't surprised to read the other day that French film star Gerard Depardieu has been known to knock back five bottles of red in a day and devour four roast chickens at a sitting. Instead of dieting savagely for two weeks every year, he should try Waipuna Lodge.

And the worst? Well, I spent four years at boarding school, so take your pick.

* Paul Thomas is a Wellington writer.