Belfast, for all its little virtues, never really did it for me as a culinary city. There were a few nice restaurants, to be sure, but none that really set my soul alight. So I often preferred eating in pubs and getting by on their simple fare, rather than attempting to be wowed and leaving underwhelmed.

London, on t’other hand, is fully stocked with fine dining places. We’ve only sampled a few, but I doubt that Belfast has anywhere to rival a branch of Gaucho, and I know that it has nowhere that can compare with the Ritz. And when I lived there, there was nowhere that excited my group of friends as much as Mother Mash has.

The idea of the place is simple: you choose which type of mashed potato you want, what kind of meat goes with it, and was gravy goes over it. They then provide you with it, and remove less than a tenner from you. Simple, yet delicious.

Where I think our table went wrong was on desserts. Some of us, me and TLW included, did this properly; we had things like sticky toffee pudding and chocolate cake. Others were so enamoured of the mash that their dessert was, in fact, more mash and gravy.

This is wrong on so many levels. And the restaurant didn’t even try to make it right by putting a flake in said mash, to make it look like a dessert. Their only flaw…